Personification has received little philosophical attention, but Daniel Nolan has recently argued that it has important ramifications for the relationship between fictional representation and possibility. Nolan argues that personification involves the representation of metaphysically impossible identities, which is problematic for anyone who denies that fictions can have (non-trivial) impossible content. We develop an account of personification which illuminates how personification enhances engagement with fiction, without need of impossible content. Rather than representing an identity, personification is something that is done with representations-a matter of use rather than content-and involves only a comparison of possibilities. We illustrate our account using the personification of death in the film Meet Joe Black, and show that there are no grounds for taking it to be fictionally true that there is a metaphysically impossible identity between Death and death. Daniel Nolan 1 puts forward a novel argument in presenting personification as a problem for anybody who wants to deny that fictions can have (non-trivial) impossible content. In personification, Nolan argues, an abstract object is represented as being a person. The character Death personifies death as, for instance, someone with a cloak and scythe who comes to visit at the end of one's life. Likewise, fictions may contain personifications of war, duty, love, and so on. Nolan argues that these different personifications represent different metaphysical impossibilities. Wordsworth's Ode to Duty represents an impossible state of affairs 'where one and the same entity is an important moral abstraction and is also a woman with eyes, various facial expressions, and arms'. 2 Another example
In his contribution to the second part of this special issue, Storrs McCall criticizes the solution to his puzzle that we put forward in the first part of the issue. In this paper, we expand on our solution and defend it from his objections. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________In discussing (in Bourne and Caddick Bourne (2016)) McCall's puzzle of the artist who copies his paintings from their reproductions, and before proposing four responses to this particular puzzle, we raise the example of a different, more familiar puzzle, involving a causal loop where a time traveller builds a time machine based on plans they deliver, using the time machine, to their younger self. McCall (2017) focusses on this example, and his response to our paper falls into two parts: an objection to the construction of the case involving plans for a time machine, and a restatement of his assertion that the case of the paintings introduces a special puzzle concerning artistic creativity which has not been solved.
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We argue that some fictional truths are fictionally true by default. We also argue that these fictional truths are subject to being undermined. We propose that the context within which we are to evaluate what is fictionally true changes when a possibility which was previously ignorable is brought to attention. We argue that these cases support a model of fictional truth which makes the conversational dynamics of determining truth in fiction structurally akin to the conversational dynamics of knowledge-ascription, as this is understood by David Lewis’s contextualist approach to knowledge. We show how a number of the rules which Lewis proposes for the case of knowledge-ascription can be employed to develop a novel and powerful framework for the case of truth in fiction.
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