Abstracts

Could imagining make possible the impossible?

Marion Renauld Archives Henri Poincaré, University of Lorraine

The recent development of fictionalist theses in many areas of philosophical researches, from philosophy of art to philosophy of language as well as of science or religion, seems to blur the boundaries that should indeed be done between different kinds of fiction, regarding their objects and aims.

So the first task for the theorist is to clarify the very concept of fiction, taken as a predicative judgment which is applied to various phenomena. A contextualist analysis of such qualifications highlights the fact that, in our ordinary or technical uses of the term, we may not have the same motivations when we judge a work of literature, a mathematical abstraction or a theological claim as being fictional: one is to block ontological commitments of an affirmative sentence, another is to forbid its literal meaning or disengage from epistemic gains, a last one is to deny any ethical consequences, because we make-believe or pretend to do something when we play a game, without really doing it.

The problem is obvious: some motivations are contradictory. For example, we judge that a story is fictional in order not to take it as granted or true, nor to import (all of) its views into the real world, but it appears that we would be willing to employ fictions in sciences as efficient tools for truly understand the reality. Then, proceeding to a classification of the different kinds of judgments, according to which domains they appear, for what reasons and to what they apply, helps us to reveal the differences at stake in the ambiguous links we draw between fiction and truth, reality, or imagination.

Then, the second task consists of going further into such a conceptual study, in order to know whether or not fictionalism in general is of some theoretical benefits for the comprehension of the nature and functioning of artworks, scientific models, games or even metaphors. What about the distinction, defended by Prado, Lamarque or Schaeffer among others, between “stories we employ” and these whimsical “stories we only enjoy”? Does it coincide with the difference between “imagining as an activity” and “imagining as an attitude”? And should we not mark an opposition between imagining what is possible and imagining the impossible?

We could reasonably think that the imagination of a scientist is not the same as the one of an artist, considering that the first is submitted to procedures of verification, experimentation and improvement, whereas the second doesn’t have any limits to what is allowed to be created. Nonetheless, the last idea we would like to question here is that, contrary to hypotheses or suppositions, maybe the freedom of imagination, because it is linked to desires more than beliefs, could start to make possible what seems to be, at first glance, out of order in reality. In this case, imagining could be the way of inventing ideals for actions, rather than a piece of our vast interpretative engineering.