Learning from Fiction?

Brian Boyd

doi:10.26613/esic.5.1.210

Article

Learning from Fiction?

Brian Boyd

Published/Copyright: June 15, 2021

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From the journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture Volume 5 Issue 1

Abstract

Storytellers and their audiences over many millennia have thought that we can learn from fiction. Philosopher Gregory Currie challenges that supposition. He doubts knowing can be founded on imagining, and claims that what we think we learn from fiction is not reliable in the way science or philosophy is, because not tested through peerreview, experiment, and argument. He underrates the role of the imagination in understanding all human language, in fictionality outside formal fictions, and in science. Science is not “reliabilist” as Currie assumes: it aims at bold imaginative discoveries that often overturn what had previously been thought secure and may well be displaced by still newer discoveries. Fiction may not have peer review, but it is tested on the highly developed intuitions of audiences, on the expertise of critics, and through the corrective competition and innovations of other storytellers, as Joyce challenges Homer, or David Sloan Wilson’s recent Atlas Hugged challenges Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. There are strong reasons for predicting that fiction has a prosocial bias from which humans over many millennia have learned to expand their sociality. That does not mean that all exposure to fiction is beneficial.

Keywords: fiction; fictionality; imagination; intuition; science; psychology; philosophy; prosociality

Published Online: 2021-06-15

Published in Print: 2021-06-01

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.26613/esic.5.1.210

Keywords for this article

fiction; fictionality; imagination; intuition; science; psychology; philosophy; prosociality