Alex Fisher (Tilburg University), “In defence of fictional examples”

Forthcoming in The Philosophical Quarterly

By Alex Fisher

When you choose to give an example in philosophy – a case study, counterexample, or illustration of a complicated concept – you have various options. You could choose a real case – a set of events that actually happened. You could create your own thought experiment, coming up with a hypothetical scenario to suit your purposes. Or you could choose a fictional example – an example drawn from works of literature (or other fictional media like film, a TV series, or even a videogame).

My paper, “In defence of fictional examples” (forthcoming in The Philosophical Quarterly), argues that using fictional examples in philosophy can, in certain circumstances, offer benefits over these rival forms of example.

I begin by arguing that fictional examples can establish that some specified phenomenon occurs in the world – something we might think that only real cases can do. I argue that fictional examples can perform a similar role when they are relevantly constrained – for instance reflecting various background social and historical conditions which really obtain, even if characters and events are fabricated.

A case in point is Miranda Fricker’s introduction of two forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. Fricker introduces the former with fictional examples (from To Kill a Mockingbird and The Talented Mr. Ripley) and the latter with real cases (from Susan Brownmiller’s (1999) memoir of the US women’s liberation movement). Both types of example illustrate that these forms of injustice exist and are prevalent in our actual social world. Fricker’s merely fictional examples can do this since they are relevantly constrained, reflecting actual gender and race dynamics that we recognise lead to similar cases of epistemic injustice in many real circumstances. When we have reason to believe fictional examples are relevantly accurate in this way, they can play an analogous role to real cases in establishing the existence (and prevalence) of social phenomena.

Next, I argue that fictional examples can sometimes even contain philosophical advantages over real cases. In affording greater access to characters’ mental lives, examples drawn from literature can avoid objections about interpreting the mental states of actual people, as has been alleged against Fricker’s use of the real case of Carmita Wood as an example of hermeneutical injustice. Rebecca Mason (2011: 297) questions whether the best interpretation of Wood’s case is that she suffered hermeneutical injustice – failing to understand her experience without the concept of ‘sexual harassment’ – given that she subsequently sought out and shared her experiences at a feminist consciousness-raising group. Mason (2011: 304) alleges that Wood suffered a distinct wrong due to ethically blameworthy ignorance on the part of her harasser. How best to interpret Wood’s mental life therefore becomes philosophically significant for characterising the harm she suffered.

Examples drawn from literature, which often contain greater insight into characters’ mental lives that are described on the page in detail, can avoid the above disagreement. In fact, I suggest that this internal insight renders fictional examples especially suitable and explains their prevalence within areas such as ethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of emotion, where a more precise characterization of someone’s mental states is a philosophical advantage of an example.[1]

Finally, I consider one issue for the use of thought experiments, raised in a recent paper by Katherine Furman (2021) – they can be overly simplified so as to exclude philosophically significant factors, thereby misleading us.[2] I argue that fictional examples are often better placed than thought experiments to avoid this issue, and consequently Furman’s argument against thought experiments in favour of using more real cases in philosophy does not tell against the use of fictional examples.

There is no single form of example we ought to universally employ in philosophy. A real case, fictional example, or thought experiment may prove most suitable depending on our needs. But I hope to show that, subject to certain constraints, fictional examples have an important (and arguably underappreciated) role to play in philosophical inquiry.

[1] For instance, Peter Goldie (2000), Martha Nussbaum (2001: ch. 9–16), and Robert C. Roberts (2003) each write books on the philosophy of emotion featuring a wide array of examples from literature. Cora Diamond (1982) and Alice Crary (2016: ch. 6) similarly employ fictional examples as an apt medium for conveying ethical attitudes we can take towards other people and creatures, while Peter Winch (1972) relies on a slew of fictional examples where the attitudes of those within them are significant to the morality of their actions.

[2] As a paradigmatic example, Furman discusses the thought experiment Ticking Bomb, where the only way to save many from an impending terrorist attack is by torturing a suspect, through which we would obtain information to prevent the attack (Walzer 1973: 173; Dershowitz 2004). This is meant to establish that torture is permissible, at least in principle. As Furman highlights, the trouble with Ticking Bomb is that it stipulates away that torture in fact proves a highly ineffective way of acquiring true information, since subjects often provide false testimony to end their suffering (Bufacchi and Arrigo 2006: 361–6). From Ticking Bomb, we conclude that torture is in principle permissible, yet the situation we are given is unlike any actual, likely ineffective, case of torture. When we consider accurate cases of (likely ineffective) torture, our moral judgments change, and we no longer judge torture permissible (Bufacchi and Arrigo 2006: 359).

References

Brownmiller, Susan. 1999. In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. New York: Dial Press.

Bufacchi, Vittorio, and Jean Maria Arrigo. 2006. ‘Torture, Terrorism and the State: A Refutation of the Ticking-Bomb Argument’. Journal of Applied Philosophy 23 (3): 355–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5930.2006.00355.x.

Crary, Alice. 2016. Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Dershowitz, Alan. 2004. ‘Tortured Reasoning’. In Torture: A Collection, edited by S Levinson, 257–80. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Diamond, Cora. 1982. ‘Anything but Argument?’ Philosophical Investigations 5 (1): 23–41. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9205.1982.tb00532.x.

Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198237907.001.0001.

Furman, Katherine. 2021. ‘What Use Are Real-World Cases for Philosophers?’ Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 7. https://doi.org/10.3998/ergo.1113.

Goldie, Peter. 2000. The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mason, Rebecca. 2011. ‘Two Kinds of Unknowing’. Hypatia 26 (2): 294–307. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01175.x.

Nussbaum, Martha C. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Roberts, Robert C. 2003. Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Walzer, Michael. 1973. ‘Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands’. Philosophy & Public Affairs 2 (2): 160–80.

Winch, Peter. 1972. Ethics and Action. Oxford: Routledge and Kegan Paul.