Being Fictional: The Nature of Fiction and Fictionality

• Applicant: Dr. Richard Woodward
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 448610384

Fiction offers each of us an enjoyable means of escaping the stresses of everyday life and helps us understand the world around us and our place within it. But it also raises a series of difficult philosophical challenges and the central aim of the presently project is to develop and defend a unified account of two of the central features of fiction that have typically been the focus of attention for aestheticians working in the analytic tradition. When analytic aestheticians engage with philosophical questions about fiction, they tend to have one of two contrasts in mind. The first contrast arises at the level of works, i.e. the contrast between those works that we classify as being works of fiction (such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov) and those we instead classify as being works of nonfiction (such as Barack Obama’s presentation of his life story in The Dreams of My Father and Naomi Klein’s examination of the negative effects of globalisation in No Logo). And the central question that subsequently emerges is this: what is it for a work to be one of fiction rather than one of nonfiction? The second contrast arises at the level of propositions, i.e. the contrast between those propositions that are fictional (such as the proposition that Hamlet is a prince, which is true according to Hamlet) and those that are not fictional (such as the proposition that Hamlet is a pauper, which is not true according to Hamlet). And the central question that emerges is this: what is it for a proposition to be fictional, i.e. what is it for something to be true “according to” a fiction?These two topics — hereafter, the nature of fiction and the nature of fictionality — are multi-faceted and interrelated, but have all-too-often been investigated in relative isolation from one another. In contrast, this project aims to give an account is sympathetic not only to the specific issues that arise with respect to each topic but also to the ways in which our views about the one impact upon our views about the other. And in keeping with the approach of my previous work in this area, I aim further to provide an account that integrates with cutting edge research in the wider philosophical literature on topics such as the nature of communicative acts, the psychology of imagining, and the normative role of belief. In this way, my central aim is to provide accounts of fiction and fictionality that are embedded within independently motivated accounts of connected phenomena and thereby accounts that cohere with leading views in the wider philosophical context.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants