“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”
Jessamyn West.
I.
I have not been shy in the past about criticizing Richard Rorty’s positions on some issues, so it seemed only right that I should acknowledge my debt to him in commenting on a controversy that touches on several areas in the contested field of academic “analytic” philosophy, including linguistic philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, logic and probably other areas too.
In addition to Professor Rorty, of course, other important contemporary thinkers have examined the issue: Umberto Eco, Simon Blackburn and John Searle among them. Needless to say, the controversy is far from “resolved,” and I am sure that we may expect many more contributions to this discussion in the years ahead.
I have borrowed my title from Richard Rorty’s essay published in the collection entitled, “Consequences of Pragmatism.” I have also learned a great deal from Colin Radford’s classic paper dealing with the “reality” of fictional characters found in “Driving to California.” Others I have read on this issue include Colin McGinn and the novelist John Fowles.
Professor Rorty formulates the issue as follows: “What must be said about truth such that the sentences ‘Gladstone was born in England’ and ‘Sherlock Holmes was born in England’ can both be true?”
How we answer this question will have a great deal to do with whether we have adopted a correspondence, a coherence or a pragmatist theory of truth. To be sure, absolute skeptics might say that “neither statement is true” because “there is no such thing as truth.” However, they could not say, logically and at the same time, that it is “true” that “the statement is neither true nor false,” unless they intend to contradict themselves, which they often do.
In what follows, I will disregard all such self-contradictory views.
My discussion of this topic is not exactly unrelated to the vexed question of whether there is some objectivity to ethical judgments or whether our statements of value “refer” to something real. Yet I will leave it for readers to make the necessary connections for themselves between metaethics and logic. In terms of the relations between words and things, or how our sentences hook up with the world, it is for the reader to decide whether he or she is a realist, a conceptualist or a nominalist. I am probably best thought of as a realist, except when I am not.
I begin my discussion with Bertrand Russell’s once dominant “logical empiricist” or “reference” view of meaning and his version of a correspondence theory of truth, which is associated also with the early Wittgenstein’s “picture theory” of language. And then, “for something entirely different,” as the Monty Python troupe might say, I shall discuss some recent purported resolutions of this controversy that I find interesting and attractive. Finally, I offer some opinions about literature in general by way of conclusion.
II.
Bertrand Russell suggests that the statement “Sherlock Holmes was born in England” has no referent – though this does not make it meaningless – because no such person ever existed in fact. This common sense view depends upon an understanding of the word “exists” that confines its scope to the empirical world.
But surely the word may have broader connotations and we may use it in other ways – for example, when we ask precisely such puzzling questions as: “Was Sherlock Holmes born in England?” Russell says that this question should be understood to mean only: “Was the character in Arthur Conan-Doyle’s stories called ‘Sherlock Holmes’ said in those stories to have been born in England?”
Yet it is unclear whether this is what we “really” mean when we ponder the “reality” or the “histories” of fictional characters or entities, like Sherlock Holmes.
For Russell, the “object” of a statement had to “exist in fact” in order for it to be “knowable by aquaintance,” so that the linguistic reference to it might be “completed.” Hence, the (linguistic and ontological) question of what object is referred to, could not be kept apart from the (epistemological) question of whether that object of reference could be known.
Subsequent philosophers have doubted whether this rigid “coupling” is tenable, speculating on whether it is time for a divorce between these two sets of issues.
As Wittgenstein’s theory of language and truth evolved from the early “picture” to the later “game” theory, it became clear that the young Wittgenstein’s understanding of a necessary “empirical link” between word and thing was inadequate. The objectivity of language and successful communication did NOT have to be connected to this simple reference model of meaning and/or a correspondence theory of truth.
Meaning can depend or “emanate from” how words are used in particular “language games” that will themselves determine the truth or success of the communication independently of empirical reality.
John Searle and the pragmatists have picked up on this point to argue that language may be seen as a kind of “behavior” governed by the conventions of the particular settings in which it is used or “deployed.” Each setting or language game will determine what purpose must be fulfilled for the transaction to be successfully completed.
In other words, what constitutes “playing,” or “winning and losing,” depends on just what game you are playing with language. It follows from this that whether a form of discourse is “true” will depend on the purpose to be served by it. The game of physics will be different from the literature game, so that success, or even meaningfulness in each enterprise, will also be different.
Jacques Derrida and some others have taken things a step further by suggesting that “there is nothing outside the text,” that is, nothing beyond the game-player’s self-definition of success within the context of his or her game. Few wish to go this far, since games are shared and acquire objective traditions or conventions or a kind of “logic of play” that determines success over time, as in chess, which cannot simply be set aside at whim, at least not if one wishes to continue to play that particular game.
Terence Parsons and other literary theorists contend that “whatever is referred to must be an object,” within the terms of that context of reference in which it arose. This is to discover what amounts to a coherence theory of truth, or to arrive at the point when Kant becomes Hegel: “If you have enough or sufficient representations, then you can forget about the thing-in-itself.” The ultimate reality of the linguistic structure comes from WITHIN its own terms, then, so that it is imminent and not transcendent to a communicative practice.
Notice that this still involves affirming the distinction between being an object of reference (which Sherlock Holmes is) and being an empirical object (which Sherlock Holmes is not), while making empirical reference indeterminate on the issue of existence at the same time.
III.
This brings me to the question: If we can confidently assert that it is, in some sense, “true” that Sherlock Holmes “exists” and “was born in England” – at least to the extent that YOU, as a reader, enter into the language game of literature with Conan-Doyle, or with the tradition itself, perhaps merely by absorbing and being absorbed by the English language, then is it appropriate to be moved by the plight of such fictional characters?
I think that it is appropriate to be so moved and that we all are anyway.
We have all been moved by literature. Yet we know that the stories that we read as novels or novellas are just that: stories. They are works of fiction, dealing with persons who never lived.
But then, how much of what we call history or science, for that matter, is also fiction? This is unclear, but much of that history and science stuff is moving too, regardless of how imaginary it may be. Perhaps that is the point. This is to say nothing of religion or idelogies.
We all have had the experience of being deeply moved by an actor’s performance on stage. Yet we know that such performances, too, are just that, mere performances. The setting in which a dramatic performance takes place is as artificial as possible: lights, darkened theater, audience; nevertheless, the powerful effect created by the meaning of the experience is undeniable. We feel Romeo’s and Juliet’s pain and joy, as if they were real people.
To clarify why this may be so, ironically enough, I will tell you a story borrowed from Gregory Bateson.
A man wanted to know about mind, so he consulted his private super-computer. He asked it, “Do you compute that you will ever think like a human being?” The machine then set to work to analyze its own computational habits. Finally, the machine printed its answer on a piece of paper, as such machines do. The man ran to get the answer and found, neatly typed, the words: “THAT REMINDS ME OF A STORY.”
Human beings think in terms of stories and protagonists. This is true whether we are “thinking” in terms of quasars or such fictional entities as “corporations”; and it is certainly true when we tell ourselves stories about the past or the persons who lived in it.
We identify to a greater or lesser extent with those protagonists, possibly less with quasars than with Sherlock Holmes. We seek the emotional truths in those fictional stories – often finding our greatest meanings, including moral and political meanings and truths, in stories like Hamlet, Anna Karenina, Moby Dick, or the stories in the Bible.
With regard to the things that matter most in life, we need to feel their truth and not simply to know it. In order to feel a truth in this way, it must have a place in a larger setting or story that makes it cogent.
Part of the paradox of communication and of all literature is the mystery of how it is that lies convey truths.
Carlos Fuentes suggests that literature and maybe all myth was invented by the first of our earliest ancestors with the power of speech, who realized that it was possible to lie, to say something other than what was the case, for this was the power to remake the world or to create another by means of language.
What makes the plight of Sherlock Holmes or King Lear “real” and “true” is the emotions they “experience” and it is with these emotions that we identify – an identification that is less a matter of versimilitude than of authenticity.
Sherlock Holmes was indeed born in England. He continues to generate millions for the national treasury in the UK, and his stories have even led to the creation of a museum at 221B Baker Street in London, an address that did not exist and that Conan-Doyle invented, that replicates Mr. Holmes living arrangements and habits perfectly, down to the violin in the corner of the room and the bullet holes on the wall.
Arthur Conan-Doyle, on the other hand, gets a small plaque somewhere in London, wherever it is that he lived. Few visitors make the journey to his former dwelling.
The importance of literature and of the dreaming faculty in human beings must not be underestimated, especially by those great dreamers the philosophers, for as the critic and philosopher Richard Hughes reminds us: “All that non-fiction can do is to answer questions. It is fiction’s business to ask them.”