The CEU Department of Philosophy cordially invites you to a talk
(as part of its Departmental Colloquium series)
by
Manuel García-Carpintero (LOGOS, University of Barcelona)
on
Norms of Fiction-Making: the Fictionality of Films
Thursday, 12 March!!!! 2015, 5.30 PM, Zrinyi 14, Room 412
ABSTRACT
Under the influence of Walton (1990), several writers including Currie (1990), Lamarque
& Olsen (1994), Davies (2007, ch. 3, 2012) and Stock (2011, ms) have proposed accounts
of the distinction between fiction and non-fiction on which the former essentially
involves an invited response of imagining or make-believe. Forcefully contesting these
views in a recent series of papers, Stacie Friend (2008, 2011, 2012) argues for the claim
that “there is no conception of ‘imagining’ or ‘make-believe’ that distinguishes a
response specific to fiction as opposed to non-fiction” (2012, 182-3), recommending “that
we give up the quest for necessary and sufficient conditions for fictionality” (2008,
166). Instead, Friend advances an account of fiction and non-fiction as genres –
super-genres encompassing species such as the historical novel on the one hand or literary
biography on the other. Following here another influential work by Walton (1970), she
proposes a relational, historical, context-sensitive account of such genres. Friend (2012,
188) appeals to Walton’s distinction between standard, non-standard and variable
properties; in particular, she counts prescriptions to imagine as a standard property of
fiction. In thus relying on some relatively intrinsic properties, over and above the
purely relational ones, her account is an impure version of genealogical-institutional
accounts of kinds, thereby differing from the infamous account ofart as a category
conferred without constraints by “the Artworld” (2012, 193).
In recent work (García-Carpintero 2013), I have defended a version of the prescriptions to
imagine account of fiction from Friend’s criticisms. Like Currie and the other writers, I
suggest to think of fictions as (results of) speech acts; unlike them, however, I take the
normative characterization literally, assuming an Austinian account of such acts in
contrast to the Gricean account in terms of communicative intentions that these authors
rely on. Independently of the present dispute, a normative account fares better relative
to the intentionalism/conventionalism debate about the interpretation of fictions. More to
the present point, by separating the constitutive nature of fiction from the vagaries of
context-sensitive genre classification, it allows us to grant the forceful points that
Friend makes, while rejecting her main claim. On the suggested view, prescriptions to
imagine are not mere Waltonian standard properties of fictions, but are constitutive of
them, and thus imagining does distinguish a response specific to fiction as opposed to
non-fiction. The historically changing, contextual features that Friend relies on have an
important role to play; not in the determination of the fiction/non-fiction normative
kinds, but rather of their applications to particular cases – i.e., in establishing when a
work is to be evaluated as one or the other of those kinds, if this is a determinate
matter at all.
Debates about fictionality like the one just rehearsed are typically held with literary
works as illustrative paradigm cases. In my contribution, I aim to re-evaluate the debate
by focusing instead on film. I will examine the extent to which the outlined proposal can
distinguish paradigm cases of fictional films from paradigm cases of non-fictional
(documentary) films, and how it can handle both the intrusion of reality in fictional
film-works and that of imagination in purportedly veridical film-works. I will also
examine how the account can handle controversial cases, such as some of Herzog’s (alleged)
documentaries. I will argue that the proposal improves on alternative speech-account
accounts that assume the Gricean paradigm by Carroll (1997), Currie (1999), Plantinga
(2005) or Ponech (1997).
Krisztina Biber
Department of Philosophy
Coordinator
------------------------------------------
Central European University
Nador u. 9. | 1051 Budapest, Hungary
Office: + 36.1.327.3806 | biberk(a)ceu.hu |
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