Moves in the Games of Make-Believe. Moral Responses they (May) Evoke and Moral Obstacles They (May) Face

0564513 - FLÚ 2023 eng A3 - Přednáška/prezentace nepublikovaná
Koťátko, Petr
Moves in the Games of Make-Believe. Moral Responses they (May) Evoke and Moral Obstacles They (May) Face.
[Art & Ethics Prague Conference /1./: What Future for the Ethical Criticism of Art? Contemporary Debates, Arguments, and Ideas. Prague, 25.04.2022-26.04.2022]
Způsob prezentace: Přednáška
Pořadatel akce: Filosofický ústav AV ČR
URL akce: https://www.flu.cas.cz/images/akce/konference_workshopy/2022/ArtEthics_2022_FINAL.pdf 
Grant ostatní: AV ČR(CZ) StrategieAV21/24
Program: StrategieAV
Institucionální podpora: RVO:67985955
Klíčová slova: narrative fiction * narration type * games of make-believe * imaginative resistence
Obor OECD: Philosophy, History and Philosophy of science and technology

We will go through some moves in the games of make-believe, prescribed by texts of narrative fiction to their readers, and ask whether they provide space for the readers’ moral engagement or, alternatively, can be blocked by the readers’ moral attitudes. (1) The discussion will start with the requirements imposed on the reader by various ways of construing the narrator and the world in which her narrative performance is supposedAI (= supposed in the as if mode) to be located. Here we will focus on (possible) moral dimension of the contrast between narration presenting the world as an ordered whole and narration presenting the world as a universal chaos (narrative performance being part and product of this mess). Samuel Beckett’s account of the conditions of serious and responsible approach to writing and related criticism of „naturalism“ in literature will be examined. (2) Some of the assumptionsAI licensed and required by literary functions of a text of narrative fiction can be blocked by the reader’s moral attitudes. Then she may be able to specify the relevant portion of pretence, but unable to participate in it, so that the piece of fiction will not work for her. I will offer some examples meant as polemics with Francois Recanati’s claim that “The only way to access the internal content of a fiction is to actually imagine what the fiction prescribes its practitioners to imagine.” (3) Some attention will be payed to Martínez-Bonati’s application of Husserl’s concept of “fulfilment” (“Erfüllung”) to propositions expressed by sentences used in texts of narrative fiction. He insists that they will play their role for the reader only if they are filled with images of the relevant states of affairs (specified in these propositions). I will suggest that the notion of fulfilment should be extended so as to include experiences of various kinds, among them moral responses to the assumedAI states of affairs. Further, I will argue (against Gregory Currie) that while these responses react to certain assumptionsAI, they are not to be approached as as if-responses (approvalsAI, condemnationsAI etc.). (4) Finally, we will discuss the relations and differences between moral attitudes to the assumedAI flesh and blood referents of fictional names and to fictional characters, taken as elements of the construction of a work of narrative fiction.
Trvalý link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0336472