Ebook: Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection

Imagined contexts can be a source of knowledge, a source of conceptual clarification, and a source of insight. Literature can thus provide both an occasion for, and the constitutive material of, philosophical
reflection. Philosophical thinking is undertaken, after all, in words, and
the heightened sensitivity to the exact usages of our words—particularly philosophically central words such as truth, reality, perception, knowledge, verification, certainty, illusion, understanding, falsehood—
can bring a clarity and a refreshed sense of the life that our words take on in fully-described contexts of usage. And in these imagined contexts we can also see more acutely and deeply into the meaning of words
about words—metaphor and figurative tropes, verbal coherence, intelligibility, implication, sense, reference, and indeed the word “meaning” itself. Moving from a philosophical issue into a literary world in which
the central concepts of that issue are in play can enrich our comprehension of those concepts and, in the strongest cases, substantively change the way we see them. And with that change, we will see the philosophical
problem itself differently as well.