Imaginative Resistance and Modal Knowledge

Readers of fictions sometimes resist taking certain kinds of claims to be true according to those fictions, even when they appear explicitly or follow from applying ordinary principles of interpretation. This “imaginative resistance” is often taken to be significant for a range of philosophical projects outside aesthetics, including giving us evidence about what is possible and what is impossible, as well as the limits of conceivability or readers’ normative commitments. I will argue that this phenomenon cannot do the theoretical work that has been asked of it. Resistance to taking things to be fictional is often best explained by unfamiliarity with kinds of fictions than any representational, normative, or cognitive limits. With training and experience, any understandable proposition can be made fictional and be taken to be fictional by readers. This requires a new understanding both of imaginative resistance and what it might be able to tell us about topics like conceivability or the bounds of possibility. An undeniable feature of our imaginative life is that we do not always successfully imagine things we try to imagine, and an equally familiar feature of our imagination is that some attempts to imagine are more challenging than others. Related to these phenomena is a phenomenon involving the uptake of fiction. When consuming fiction we are often willing to take a text’s say-so as definitive about what is going on in a story. Sometimes, however, when something is presented as being true according to a story, some people balk at treating it as in fact being true according to the relevant story. Again, this phenomenon comes in degrees: as well as the phenomenon of just not taking something to be true according to a fiction, sometimes we will in the end accept that something is true according to a story but find it hard to make sense of; or be reluctant to incorporate it in our understanding of the story; and so on.