learning things from fictions, part two

part one

I guess I didn't state this clearly, but the reason I thought there was sort of a problem in understanding how we learn things from fictions is because - perhaps - there's nothing particularly interesting to be learned from fictions if all they do is come out and make a claim. Atlas Shrugged is a good example. That novel is littered with lengthy speeches that lay out Rand's philosophy. The problem is that if this is the model of how we're supposed to learn from fictions, it starts to look like the point of the fiction is just to convince us, for non-rational reasons, to buy whatever it's selling. That is, Rand has a lot of devices meant to make John Galt seem like the coolest dude ever, but this hardly means that his ethics is correct. It is this sort of thing that has made people since Plato suspicious of learning things from fictions.

It was therefore for this reason that I discussed how the point of fictions is not to tell us the truth by advancing substantive claims, but instead to open up new ways of seeing the world, but to around with our concepts. If we then come to make judgments (i.e. hold some substantive claim) it is because the world prompts us to (i.e. we see something in the world that prompts us to apply this concept we've just learned or had messed with).

The problem, of course, is that there can be bad concepts and bad ways of looking at the world. Consider an adjective like "bosche,"* which is defined as follows: If you're French, then you're bosche. And if you're bosche, then you're cowardly. This sort of concept, like perhaps many, would have the implication that all French are cowardly (we need only admit the concept into our language for this to follow).

* I'm stealing this example from a philosopher, but I can't remember who. GAH.