Brian Weatherson’s lecture to a small crowd Wednesday night, entitled “Morality in Fiction and Consciousness in Imagination,” focused on the interdependence of concepts in fiction and philosophical thought experiments. Drawing upon examples from Douglas Adams, J.K. Rowling, M.C. Escher, baseball, zombie movies, and the writing of Graham Priest, Weatherson attempted to explain the limits of moral imagination, which, he says, often have underlying evasions and implausibilities.
“You can’t claim obviously a priori truths and not have a problem. But you can create a priori impossibilities and not justify them. An author can’t make compound impossibilities true. But if an author wants something obviously false—like the idea of the completeness of arithmetic—to be true in a story, she gets it to be so.”
Weatherson argued that the imaginative kind of cognition required was a determinant factor in deciding the conceivability of a more-or-less unimaginable thing, such as Priest’s “empty box with a small statue of an elephant in side of it,” Adams’ restaurant at the end of the universe, the “train that’s not a train” in the Harry Potter series, and the moral rectitude of throwing a pie in the face of a philosopher without provocation. He connected moral and literary imagination as equivalent fictions.
“For semantic externalists, what goes wrong in the Hogwarts case is what goes wrong for Kantians in the pie example,” Weatherson explained.
The philosophy professors in the room proceeded to have a brief, and from their perspective apparently hilarious, interlude, during question and answer exchange about the possible moral requirement of throwing pie in the face of zombies.
The reaction to the lecture, then, among students and faculty in attendance was varied.
“I can’t say that I was disappointed with the content because I can’t say I understood the content,” said Yaron Aronowicz ’05, echoing the opinions of most students in attendance. “But as an English major, I think listening to philosophy professors talk expands my mind. It’s like listening to a foreign language.”
Stephanie Kuduk, Assistant Professor of Emglish, shared a degree of Aronowicz’s confusion. “I found the lecture quite difficult, as I am not an analytic philosopher; [the lecture was] stimulating but at some fundamental level frankly incomprehensible.”
Although the framing of the lecture was strictly philosophical, Kuduk added that the framing of the argument was salient in her line of work.
“How do we know we can apply moral concepts from the ‘real world’ to the world of fiction? How does the fact that we imagin—n a philosophical sense, I gathered, this means conceiving of mentall—he world of fiction impact on this applicability?” Kuduk asked.
Professor of Philosophy Joseph Rouse explained Weatherson’s lack of concern with literary theory.
“Weatherson was interested in metaphysics, specifically, concepts and the grounds for the necessity or possibility of certain applications of them, especially the role of imagination in assessing what is possible, and what is necessary. The issue involving fiction concerned whether moral concepts can be concretely imagined to apply in different ways than they actually do apply—as in, what would it be to imagine a world with a different morality, as opposed to one in which people had a different conception of morality? There is no specific attention to the literary character of fiction, except to the extent that it provides stylistic devices that affect what is imaginable conceptually.”
Aronowicz, however, was disappointed by the lack of attention to the qualities of literature which he feels separate it from philosophy.
“He lacked a theoretical definition of what a story was, or else I didn’t understand his explanation; in any case, I didn’t find it particularly useful. I guess I thought he radically ignored aesthetic theory and ideas of genre, and I was hoping the lecture would be more interdisciplinary.”
Rouse disagreed, noting that Weatherson’s use of “analytic metaphysics” was a specifically philosophical one, widely practiced contemporarily.
“The principal basis for doing this kind of philosophy is to attempt careful analyses of relevant concepts, and then test them out by posing thought-experiments that might serve as counter-examples to the analysis.”
“It is not a way of doing philosophy that I find attractive,” admitted Rouse, adding, “I disagree with some of the most basic assumptions underlying it, assumptions that are often not questioned seriously by its practitioners. But Weatherson does it well and often interestingly.”
Weatherson himself speculated that some of the ideas involved in his work are embedded in the work of David Hume.
“You’d think someone would have learned about it between 1757 and 1994,” he joked.
Weatherson is a Professor of Philosophy at Brown University, and an Adjunct Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences. This fall, he will be moving to Cornell University’s Sage School of Philosophy.
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