This week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Greg Currie’s recent book: Imagining and Knowing: The Shape of Fiction. Today we begin with an introduction from Greg. Commentaries and replies will appear Tuesday through Thursday.

Common opinion connects fiction and the mind in two ways: via our capacity to imagine, and via our capacity to know things. Imagining and Knowing argues that the value of the imagination for explaining what fiction is and how it works is sometimes underestimated, and that the capacity of fiction to provide learning is often exaggerated.

A post by Greg Currie.

When their nests are threatened, plovers and lapwings behave in ways suggesting wing damage and consequent inability to fly, thereby distracting predators from the nest. People, experts even, describe this as “pretending that the bird has a broken wing that hinders flight”. Anscombe objected: “you cannot ascribe real pretence to anything unless you can ascribe to it (a) a purpose and (b) the idea ‘can be got by seeming to--‘”. Broken wing displays fail (b); the most one could say is that the bird has the idea that the predator can be distracted by having one wing drag on the ground.

Anscombe contrasts this purposive pretence with unpurposive pretending, when we pretend “just for fun” or “to tease”. Unpurposive pretending requires neither (a) nor (b), so is not ruled out as a description of distraction behaviour. Perhaps Anscombe assumes that non-humans don’t pretend for fun. She also distinguishes plain and non-plain pretending. The plain pretender “unreflectively knows that he is pretending” (292). A “great deal of unpurposive or only very vaguely and diffusely purposive pretending is non-plain“.

A post by Greg Currie.

I have argued for a certain view about what goes on when, while sitting in the theatre, we “want Desdemona to be saved” as we might unguardedly put it. On my view, this is a case of what is called desire in imagination or sometimes i-desire. And on that view i-desire is not desire. I-desires stand to desires as imaginings stand to beliefs.