Silly answers
Brian Weatherson has an interesting post taking off from Kendal Walton’s analysis of fiction. Walton’s theory of ‘mimesis as make believe’ suggests that we should understand works of representative art as making various truth claims, which happen to be about a fictional world rather than the real world. Weatherson raises a problem to do with situations where the work seems to be making a claim which isn’t supposed to be true of the fictional world (for example, Othello is written in blank verse, but Othello does not speak in blank verse, or indeed in English). Weatherson’s solution is to propose that the blank verse is not, in fact, supposed to make any claim about the fictional world of Othello, but instead to be understood as a convention of the representation chosen by Shakespeare.
I’m sure Weatherson’s solution is right. Indeed, it was precisely these kinds of cases, and the (to me) obviousness of this kind of solution, that made me less than impressed with Walton’s book when I first read it. If you’re going to appeal to a theory of conventional representations to explain artworks, what work is the theory of fictions actually doing? The more work our theory of representations is doing, the less determinate our fictional world is going to be (what is true of the fictional world of Macbeth given all the diverse performances; how does this change depending on whether or not we consider Throne of blood as an adaptation or not?). The interesting thing about mimesis, it seems to me, is the specific way the representation is accomplished, not what is being represented. I seem to recall Derek Matravers having written something about this – the internet suggests that it might be ‘Truth in Fiction: A Reply to New’ in The journal of aesthetics and art criticism, vol. 55.
This general popularity of Walton’s theory among analytic aestheticians always struck me as a symptomatic of a problem in that field, in that most of it’s practitioners seem to have little or no interest in actual art or art criticism (another example would be Noel Carroll’s curious misreadings of contemporary films – his piece on the immorality of Pulp Fiction is a case in point). There are honourable exceptions of course, including the aforementioned Derek Matravers, Arthur Danto, or Roger Scruton. However, the current state of analytic aesthetics reminds me a lot of the technically excellent, highly abstract, and ultimately largely irrelevant philosophy of science done before Kuhn.
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