Alward, Peter. Empty Revelations: An Essay on Talk about, and Attitudes toward, Fiction. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2012, x + 206 pp., $95.00 cloth.

Peter Alward has written an excellent essay on the nature of literary fiction. One goal of primary importance in Empty Revelations is to defend the “theatrical model” of fiction in which storytellers are like actors onstage and readers are like the audience. Fictive composition, on this model, is distinguished from fictive storytelling, and the failure to appreciate this distinction has led to a host of inadequate theories in the past, thinks Alward. The theatrical model is thus put to use to provide a robust account of the central types of fictional discourse and how readers and listeners engage with works of fiction. His view is motivated by a fundamental desire to explain substantive, meaningful discourse about the nonexistent. (One finds in the introduction the briefest of motivations for Alward's antirealist approach regarding fictional individuals. He does, I think, say enough here to get the project off the ground, but in the end, I am not sure that he is left with a view that is overall better off in virtue of eschewing realism; more on this later.) The essay is divided into three parts, the first part negative, the latter two positive. He begins by presenting arguments against prominent “act/attitude” analyses of fictional composition and reader engagement with fiction before developing his own positive accounts of these activities as well as a novel account of truth in fiction. He ends the essay with a defense of a neo Fregean theory of fictional proper names and a discussion of some of the broader applications of his views. The topic Alward first addresses is this: What sort of speech acts do authors of fiction perform when composing a fiction? His main claim is that previous answers to this question are inadequate, and the diagnosis is that the accounts on offer are guilty of running together the compositional activities of an author with the activity of storytelling. John R. Searle (“The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse,” New Literary History 6 [1975]: 319–332) (who takes authors to be pretending to perform illocutionary speech acts when composing fictions), Gregory Currie (The Nature of Fiction [Cambridge University Press, 1990]) (who holds that authors perform sui generis fictive illocutionary acts), and Monroe C. Beardsley (“Fiction as Representation,” Synthese 46 [1981]: 291–313) (who takes fictional composition to just be the representation of illocutionary action) are the targets here. Alward next offers a host of compelling arguments for thinking that rival accounts also carry unacceptable consequences regarding reader or listener engagement with fiction. One may favor a view on which the attitudes of the reader or listener engaged with a fictional work are either doxastic or imaginative. Among the views of the former sort, those of Colin Radford (“How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 49 [1975]: 67–80) and Eva Schaper (“Fiction and the Suspension of Disbelief,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 18 [1978]: 31–44) seem to wrongly take our emotions and attitudes toward fiction to ultimately be explained by beliefs (for example) we bear to fictional worlds and their inhabitants. After rejecting these theories as well as some “intra actual world” doxastic views, Alward settles on the claim that the relation engaged readers must bear to fictions is an imaginative one. However, some of the prominent views of this sort, for example, Kendall Walton's (Mimesis as Make Believe [Harvard University Press, 1990]) and Derek Matravers's (“The Paradox of Fiction,” in Emotion and the Arts, eds. Mette Hjort and Sue Laver [Oxford University Press, 1997], pp. 78–92), fail in virtue of their reliance on de se imagining. Such theories usually entail that our engagement with fiction is best understood in terms of simulations of genuine emotions; as Alward notes, however, if this is correct, one would expect a simulated frustration at our lack of an ability to intervene on behalf of the characters we are involved with. But engaged readers typically feel no such thing. Alward thus registers his intention to argue for a fundamentally different sort of imaginative account, one that has the engaged reader imagining de re of a fictional text that it is a report provided by a fictional narrator. Throughout Part I of Empty Revelations, one is struck by Alward's thoroughness and attention to detail. The arguments are subtle and careful, and one does not feel rushed through the tangle of complex issues. The beginning of Alward's positive account in Part II of the essay contains his defense of the idea that fictional composition begins by authors first creating “word sculptures,” that is, appropriately unified sequences of word occurrences. A text is created when a word sculpture is created, and such texts may then be institutionally transformed into various types of literary works. Those texts related via an appropriate continuity relation to the original are also instances of the work. A work is thus the network of texts that develops, and works of fiction are those networks transformed by “fiction centered” practices. A practice is fiction centered when it is sustained by the goal of having readers engage with the work via imagining de re of the work that it is the factual revelation of a narrative informant. I am sympathetic to the picture of fictional composition Alward defends here. But it is one that relies on an ontology that is far from being sparse. Words, word sculptures, sequences, networks, plots, and works all exist, and all are created abstracta. At this point, I question whether the brief comments in the introduction meant to motivate antirealism about other entities that a great many philosophers nowadays would take to be abstract artifacts, namely, fictional characters, are sufficient. Alward next turns his sights on explicating the nature and role of the narrative informant that his model of fictional discourse relies on as well as a defense of the claim that every fiction has some kind of narrative informant or other (known as the “ubiquity thesis”). Readers and listeners of fiction believe de re of the report of the narrative informant that they are involved with that it is a fiction, but they imagine de re of the report that it is factual. Also, they imagine de re of the informant that the informant is reporting facts. Alward elaborates by stressing that narrative informants are not always reliable, they can pragmatically convey things not asserted, and, in general, they can reveal more than they assert. Moreover, narrators need not even inhabit the fictional worlds that their revelations are about. We here encounter an elaborate taxonomy of narrative informants, and some of the worries that are vexing for Currie's view (which instead relies on the reports of a fictional author) really do seem to be avoided here; for example, we need not maintain that readers have inconsistent beliefs in the case of mindless fictions (stories about no intelligent beings). I was, however, left feeling just a little overwhelmed and a bit perplexed at times. For instance, one type of narrative informant Alward describes is a nonfictional, nonactual fact teller, and this is supposed to be a type of narrative informant that we may potentially encounter, although no well known examples currently exist. But despite the explanation, I was ultimately puzzled how a nonactual entity could be both nonfictional yet capable of revealing facts about a fictional world she does not inhabit. More fundamentally, I wondered just how we engage in imagining anything de re of narrative informants who, qua fictional or nonactual entities, do not exist. (This last issue does get addressed in the next chapter, but I have independent worries regarding Alward's ultimate proposal: readers of fiction allegedly have cognitive relations relevantly similar to the sorts audience members bear toward plays.) One also finds at this point in the essay thorough critical discussion of prominent analyses of truth in fiction. David Lewis's (“Truth in Fiction,” The American Philosophical Quarterly 15 [1978]: 37–46) and Currie's views are rejected on the grounds that both seem too permissive about what is true in a fiction; moreover, problems with inconsistent fictions seem insuperable for Lewis, whereas Currie has difficulties regarding mindless fictions. (Alex Byrne's [“Truth in Fiction: The Story Continued,” The Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71 (1993): 24–35] view is also criticized.) Alward's positive account is then presented: fictional truth consists of the revelations of a narrative informant. It occurred to me at this point that besides overcoming the aforementioned worries, one potential further benefit of Alward's view of truth in fiction may be that the so called puzzle(s) of imaginative resistance (discussed, for example, by Brian Weatherson [“Morality, Fiction, and Possibility,” Philosopher's Imprint 4 (2004): 1–27]) gains no purchase here; what is revealed in a fiction turns out to be a function of what we readers ought to imagine, given our evidence. (Although I do worry a bit about Alward's reliance on such normative constraints on the imaginative process.) Part III of the essay begins with the semantics of (allegedly genuinely empty) fictional names. A basic worry for Millian accounts, says Alward, concerns psychological explanations for behavior of those employing fictional names, and the problems for the prominent Fregean views (roughly) have to do with their inadequacy to properly handle co referential fictional names occurring in differing contexts. I note here that when characterizing the Millian view, Alward spends no time discussing a certain neo Millian strategy, specifically, the view that fictional proper names are contentful and contribute a gap to the propositions expressed by the sentences in which they figure. Neo Millians of this sort (for example, David Braun [“Empty Names, Fictional Names, Mythical Names,” Nous 39 (2005): 596–631]) argue that such an account can still make sense of the roles such names play in psychological explanation. This is a serious rival to the view that Alward ultimately defends, and it deserves at least some critical attention. Alward eventually argues for a sort of neo Fregean view: the content of a fictional name, he claims, is a collection (or “team”) of intersubjective cognitive relations corresponding to notional objects (objects merely believed to exist). (Note: teams are not altogether familiar entities; specifically, they are not types of sets, as they do not have their members essentially. For recent critical discussion of an ontology of teams, see, for example, Nikk Effingham, “The Metaphysics of Groups,” Philosophical Studies 149 [2010]: 251–267). However, Alward does claim that he is himself a Millian when it comes to ordinary proper names in extensional contexts. I wondered again at this point whether eschewing (a direct reference theory incorporating) realism about fictional characters is ultimately the best route. After all, an elegant, unified account seems prima facie preferable. Alward's final aim is to further apply his positive views to a variety of types of fictional discourse he had heretofore not fully addressed. We begin with fictional storytelling. Before we see his account, however, Alward turns his critical sights on the views of Currie and David Z. Saltz (“How to Do Things on Stage,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49 [1991]: 31–45). Currie's idea that storytelling involves a sui generis form of illocutionary action seemingly fails to account for questions or commands made fictively, whereas Saltz's view, one that takes fictive storytelling to consist of making genuine illocutions motivated by game playing intentions and game playing obligations, fails to avoid the basic problems facing more naïve illocutionary views. Alward thus ultimately endorses a Searle inspired view: storytellers (when not composing a fiction) pretend, as do stage or screen actors, to make illocutions. Lastly, we see the application of Alward's views to meta fictive and trans fictive discourse, each of these being a type of commentary about fictional works. Meta fictive discourse (for example, “Holmes smokes a pipe”) by both imaginatively engaged and disengaged readers is claimed to consist straightforwardly of genuine illocutions that, when occurring in extensional contexts, are elliptical for sentences having intentional fiction prefixes. Trans fictive discourse (for example, “Holmes is more clever than Nancy Drew”), however, is a more complex phenomenon, and Alward argues that a sophisticated taxonomy of “one world imaginer” and “two world imaginer” interpretations are required to cover the various types of assertions made by both engaged and disengaged commentators. Here the feeling that realism about fictional characters may be worth the cost again crops up; for example, Amie L. Thomasson's (Fiction and Metaphysics [Cambridge University Press, 1999]) account of such discourse really does seem to benefit from a simplicity not found in Alward's account. Overall, one cannot deny that this is philosophical scholarship at the highest level. At the very least, Empty Revelations is a paradigm case of organization and methodological rigor. The reader is constantly aware of Alward's plans, and he never fails to deliver on his promises. While I think a number of the crucial arguments are ultimately unsound, it is nonetheless an example of research at its most careful. And while not quite as groundbreaking as Walton's Mimesis as Make Believe or Currie's The Nature of Fiction, it clearly deserves its place among them. It is a well crafted, well argued addition to the philosophical literature on the nature of fictional discourse and our attitudes toward fiction.

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