Timeline for How is synthetic knowledge produced in fictionalism?
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18 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Dec 2 at 12:43 | answer | added | Mikhail Katz | timeline score: 1 | |
| Nov 29 at 9:10 | history | bumped | CommunityBot | This question has answers that may be good or bad; the system has marked it active so that they can be reviewed. | |
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| Apr 3 at 8:07 | history | bumped | CommunityBot | This question has answers that may be good or bad; the system has marked it active so that they can be reviewed. | |
| Dec 19, 2023 at 18:23 | comment | added | J Kusin | For some fresh context with some added philosophical lingo, I think I am wondering if implicit fictional content (paraphrased from Dr. Kenny Boyce as, "we know explicitly in the MCU fiction Tony Stark married Pepper Potts, but it's implicitly true that Tony also has a liver), is knowledge. As in, the sparsest denotation of the authored creation is knowledge, and nothing can be epistemically implied from it without itself being wholly explicit. (youtu.be/FURzRlptmi4?t=4933). One could then define math as explicit fictional content/knowledge... | |
| Dec 5, 2023 at 8:07 | history | bumped | CommunityBot | This question has answers that may be good or bad; the system has marked it active so that they can be reviewed. | |
| Aug 7, 2023 at 7:07 | history | bumped | CommunityBot | This question has answers that may be good or bad; the system has marked it active so that they can be reviewed. | |
| Jul 8, 2023 at 6:25 | comment | added | J Kusin | Maybe someone can come up with a fictional riddle/puzzle without leaning on math/logic? There’s puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/236/… but isn’t that just math/logic at the end of day (mathematical induction)? “ I've talked the problem over with many logic/math professors” | |
| Jul 8, 2023 at 6:07 | review | Close votes | |||
| Jul 23, 2023 at 3:07 | |||||
| Jul 8, 2023 at 5:25 | answer | added | Kristian Berry | timeline score: 2 | |
| Jul 8, 2023 at 4:32 | comment | added | Kristian Berry | Some lessons of model theory, the search for new axioms, etc. have been the possibility of nonstandard models of arithmetic (with natural numbers that aren't any of 0, 1, 2, 3... as we know those) and the resurrection of infinitesimals (of different flavors, e.g. hyperreals vs. surreals). Even something as simple as 0 to the power of 0 admits of two accepted evaluations (a model where it's undefined and a model where it equals 1). Re: fantasy fiction, again, Sanderson places himself under many constraints, incl. a strong pre-release reader community, so he's not so sovereign, ultimately. | |
| Jul 8, 2023 at 3:52 | comment | added | J Kusin | @KristianBerry So a full compendium for a single deduction :) I'm not sure I buy "deduction" fully either...if Gandalf betrayed the fellowship, people would just dislike the stories, the knowledge derivable still seems simply up to the author. I dare think an author of fiction always has freedom. The religious example is pretty compelling to me (I don't know much about the other examples). I still don't get how we can set out to do fictional work and create such a factory for knowledge where everyone can get the same synthetic answers independently, unless its math in fictionalism. | |
| Jul 8, 2023 at 3:25 | comment | added | Kristian Berry | I should note that readers of one subset of Cosmere books deduced an until-then hidden element of local lore, purely by extrapolation from the "premises" Sanderson gave them in the until-then published texts. And the ability to identify the killer in a good mystery tale can be styled derivative in the intended way, maybe. | |
| Jul 8, 2023 at 3:22 | comment | added | Kristian Berry | I suppose for narrative fictions, synthetically rich franchises will have to be bulky and with good safeguards for consistency/continuity in place. Tolkien's legendarium comes to mind, but a vastly stronger case would be Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere stories. Modal fictionalists can help themselves to the diversity of possible/impossible-worlds talk, moral fictionalists can trace the consequences of utility functions or categorical imperatives. Aquinas could be taken as an unwitting example of how far religious fictionalism can tread (as far as angels fear not to tread, then). | |
| Jul 8, 2023 at 3:18 | history | edited | J Kusin | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 8, 2023 at 3:16 | comment | added | J Kusin | @KristianBerry I think you've found a good example with those two axioms, but they are mostly math leaning even in a game theory setting I dare say. (Here's a link I found to get get loosely acquainted with the AD blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2018/11/12/…). I was hoping to find cases without such explicit use of math, but maybe you've shown math is kind of unique in fictionalism, and anything else has an authorship problem when going beyond the stipulations. If that's the case so be it, I couldn't come up with non-math cases | |
| Jul 8, 2023 at 2:51 | comment | added | Kristian Berry | You are on to the answer with your consideration about games. Suppose there was a Form of Games (AKA the "Intendo" of theories of intentional/practical reasoning), which can take any game (including itself) for an input, and output some or another game in turn. (There is a fantasy series, the Second Apocalypse books, with a game like this.) And consider, then, the difference between the choice and determinacy axioms, where the latter is defined game-theoretically. Another way to consider this is second-order fictionalism, or fictions about other fictions (or even about themselves). | |
| Jul 8, 2023 at 2:00 | history | asked | J Kusin | CC BY-SA 4.0 |