Only Imagine offers a new theory of fictional content. Kathleen Stock argues for a controversial view known as 'extreme intentionalism'; the idea that the content of a particular work of fiction is equivalent to exactly what the author of the work intended the reader to imagine.
Cover
Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation, and Imagination
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1: Extreme Intentionalism about Fictional Content
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Extreme Intentionalism Introduced
1.3 What is an Intention?
1.4 What is a Reflexive Intention?
1.5 What is F-imagining?
A. F-imagining is propositional
B. F-imagining is potentially conjunctive
1.6 Extreme Intentionalism and Intended Readership
1.7 Grice on Conversational Utterance
1.8 Fiction Versus Conversation 1.9 What Is the Relation Between Understanding Fictional Content and Imagining?1.10 Four Challenges to Extreme Intentionalism
1.11 Speaker Meaning and Sentence Meaning
1.12 Extreme Intentionalism and Miswriting
1.13 Summary
2: Intentionalist Strategies of Interpretation
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Conventions of Sentence Meaning
2.3 Implied Fictional Truths
2.4 Fiction Treated as Ordinary Conversation
2.5 Treating Fiction as a Counterfactual
A. Lewis's account
B. Lewis's view and the reader's experience
C. Extreme intentionalism again
D. Partial application of the Lewisian analyses? 2.6 A Sparsely Populated Fictional Scenario?2.7 'Explicit' and 'Implied' Fictional Content and Unreliable Narration
2.8 Treating Fiction as a Fictional Conversation
2.9 Treating Fiction as Subject to Genre Conventions
2.10 Fictional Content and Hidden Meaning
2.11 Fictional Content and Authorial Purposes
A. Wider purposes and more local intentions
B. Evidence of authorial purpose
2.12 Summary
3: Extreme Intentionalism and its Rivals
3.1 The Problem of 'Unsuccessful' Intentions
3.2 The Structure of Unsuccessful Intentions 3.3 Intentionally Controlled Ambiguity or Selective Communication3.4 Inadvertently Unsuccessful Intentions
3.5 Unsuccessful Intentions, Hypothetical Intentionalism, and Aesthetic Criticism
3.6 Hypothetical Intentionalism and Fiction as 'Public'
3.7 Extreme Intentionalism versus Value-maximizing Approaches
3.8 Extreme Intentionalism and Post Hoc Meanings
3.9 Extreme Intentionalism and 'Layers' of Meaning
3.10 Hypothetical Intentionalism, Value-maximizing, and Justified Belief
3.11 Summary
4: Fiction, Belief, and 'Imaginative Resistance'
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Testimony-in-fiction A. Might the reader easily have done something different?B. Might the author easily have done something different?
4.3 The Phenomenon of 'Imaginative Resistance'
4.4 'Counterfactual' Explanations
4.5 An Explanation From the Invitation To Believe
4.6 Comparison to Other Views
A. Nanay's pragmatic approach
B. Gendler's approach
4.7 Imagining and the Impossible
4.8 Summary
5: The Nature of Fiction
5.1 Introduction
5.2 F-imagining and One's Belief Set
5.3 Fiction as a Set of Instructions
5.4 Fiction, Belief, and Truth
5.5 Non-fiction
5.6 Fictions as Normatively Constituted
