Fiction as Thought Experiment

Perspectives on Science 22 (2):221-241 (2014)
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Abstract

Jonathan Bennett (1974) maintains that Huckleberry Finn’s deliberations about whether to return Jim to slavery afford insight into the tension between sympathy and moral judgment; Miranda Fricker (2007) argues that the trial scene in To Kill a Mockingbird affords insight into the nature of testimonial injustice. Neither claims merely that the works prompt an attentive reader to think something new or to change her mind. Rather, they consider the reader cognitively better off for her encounters with the novels. Nor is her cognitive improvement restricted to acquiring new justified true beliefs about the works themselves. What the reader gleans is supposed to enhance her knowledge or understanding of the ..

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Catherine Elgin
Harvard University

Citations of this work

Thought Experiments.Yiftach J. H. Fehige & James R. Brown - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 25 (1):135-142.
Thought Experiments: State of the Art.Michael T. Stuart, Yiftach Fehige & James R. Brown - 2018 - In Michael T. Stuart, Yiftach Fehige & James Robert Brown (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments. London, UK: Routledge. pp. 1-28.
Literature and Thought Experiments.David Egan - 2016 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74 (2):139-150.

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References found in this work

Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing.Miranda Fricker - 2007 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
Languages of Art.Nelson Goodman - 1970 - Philosophy and Rhetoric 3 (1):62-63.
Considered Judgment.Catherine Z. Elgin - 1999 - Princeton University Press.
Considered Judgment.Catherine Z. Elgin - 1996 - Princeton: New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

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