Philosophy Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2799
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Item The Experience of Fiction(2013) Picciuto, Elizabeth Rose; Carruthers, Peter; Levinson, Jerrold; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation focuses on some of the philosophical puzzles that are associated with the experience of engaging in fictions. Some of these puzzles are longstanding in the philosophical tradition, viz., the paradox of fiction, the paradox of tragedy, and the phenomenon of imaginative resistance. Another has received surprisingly little philosophical attention: the puzzle of why we engage with fictions at all. I argue against what I will call the Simple Story of fictional engagement. Previous discussions have (to greater or lesser degrees) described engaging in fictions as a matter of entertaining the events described at a fictional world. In the Simple Story, the content of the fiction is decisively determinative of our motivations to engage in fiction and responses to fictions. That is not, however, our experience of fiction. I de-emphasize the role of the content of the fiction in our motivations and responses to fictions. Too little attention has been paid to the role of factors extrinsic to the fiction in explaining the nature of our experiences of and responses to fictions. In general, I stress that the role of the content of the fiction as determinative of our responses is far less important than has been assumed. Some aestheticians have long been interested in psychological data and I am, too. Many, however, are wary of in evolutionary psychology. They are rightfully worried that to explain the beauty of Anna Karenina in terms of hunting on the savannah would be to miss something deep. There is, however, a useful role for evolutionary psychology to play in explaining why we might have motivations and emotional responses to fictions. I explore this idea.Item It's Just Semantics: What Fiction Reveals About Proper Names(2008-04-18) Tiedke, Heidi; Pietroski, Paul M; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Sentences like the following entail puzzles for standard systematic theories about language: (1) Bertrand Russell smoked a pipe. (2) Sherlock Holmes smoked a pipe. Prima facie, these sentences have the same semantic structure and contain expressions of the same semantic type; the only difference between them is that they contain different proper names. Intuitively, (1) and (2) are true, but they are made true and false, respectively, in different ways. Presumably (1) is true because the individual, Bertrand Russell, has or had the property of being a pipe smoker. In contrast, (2) is true for a reason something like this: the sentence 'Holmes smokes a pipe' or an equivalent thereof, or a sentence entailing this sentence, was inscribed in the Holmes novels by Arthur Conan Doyle (2002). I show that the existence of fictional names, and the truths uttered using them, are not adequately explained by any extant account of fictional discourse. A proper explanation involves giving a semantics for names that can account for both referential and fictional uses of proper names. To this end, I argue that names should not be understood as expressions that immediately refer to objects. Rather, names should be understood as expressions that encode information about a speaker's act of introducing novel uses for them. Names are not linked to objects, but to what I call "contexts of introduction". I explain how this allows room for an explanation of fictional names, and how it also accommodates Kripkean uses of proper names.