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  • Empty Revelations: An Essay on Talk about, and Attitudes toward, Fiction by Peter Alward
  • John E. MacKinnon (bio)
Peter Alward. Empty Revelations: An Essay on Talk about, and Attitudes toward, Fiction. McGill-Queen’s University Press. x, 206. $95.00

According to Peter Alward, “fiction remains deeply puzzling,” primarily because, as a result of our encounters with it, “we think and talk about people, places and events that do not exist.” Accounts of authorial speech acts, he notes, tend to ignore the vital distinction between storytelling and composition. Whereas storytelling involves engaging in assertive or, more generally, illocutionary pretense, compositional speech acts lack illocutionary force, while the authors who make them refrain from any illocutionary commitment. After all, authors of fiction “rarely intend readers to believe the contents of the declarative sentences they produce, nor are they under any sincerity obligations to believe them themselves.” Lack of illocutionary commitment does not entail that authorial composition is a kind of pretense. Nor, however, is it enough to account for the nature of fiction-making. We require something further. Although composition shares certain features with communication, it is better regarded as a kind of artmaking, a process of constructing fictional artifacts, a kind of “word-sculpture” that is appropriate to some word-sculpture practice or other. Instances of fictional word-sculptures are designed to produce or facilitate, through the engagement of the reader or listener, “certain sorts of appreciative experiences.” [End Page 578]

Any credible account of reader/listener engagement must provide a satisfactory solution to the paradox of fiction, the problem of how readers can respond emotionally to characters and situations that do not exist. Alward asks whether engagement is a trans-world or intra-world relation and whether it counts as a doxastic or imaginative attitude. He also identifies three basic types of imaginative activity: de dicto, which involves imagining propositions about fictional characters and events; de re, which involves imagining objects that have particular characteristics; and de se, which involves imagining or otherwise doing something. Given the insuperable difficulties associated with efforts to construe reader/listener engagement as a doxastic relation, and given confused intra-world assumptions about engagement involving de se imagining, he defends a “trans-world imaginative” approach, according to which appreciators remain “outsiders looking in” who imagine, rather than believe, the events described in fictional stories. Although de se imagining can occur, readers and listeners need not undertake any such activity in order to properly appreciate the fictional works with which they are engaged.

The central problem of fictional names and other referring expressions is that of “reconciling their emptiness with their substantial contributions.” Whereas current analyses involve an appeal to the beliefs of the fictional author or the assertions of a reliable fictional fact-teller, Alward’s refers to the revelations of a narrative informant. The content of narrative informants’ reports includes both the propositions expressed by the sentences that constitute fictional works as well as the propositions pragmatically imparted by them. Unlike fictional authors, narrative informants can be unreliable. As a result, what a narrative informant reveals, and what engaged appreciators imagine, is a product of the theory that best fits what the informant has said and implied, the evidence concerning her sincerity and expertise, and relevant background information. The notion of revelation, Alward insists, is normative, since fictional truth cannot simply be identified with what appreciators happen to imagine but, rather, with “what they ought to imagine.” This picture yields an account of fictional truth in terms of the narrative informant’s acts and attitudes that manages to reconcile the meaningfulness of fictional claims with the non-existence of fictional entities.

At the core of Alward’s account of fictional discourse is the notion of cognitive relations, which include the experiential, reputational, conceptual, and memory relations in which a thinking subject stands to objects of thought and talk. That such relations need not be actually instantiated confirms that the relatum can be fictional. Indeed, the content of fictional names consists in collections of precisely such relations, which count not as sets but as “teams,” since they can “regularly survive changes in membership.” These “C-teams” can be intersubjective or, when “conversationally...

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