Abstract

This paper considers the charge that fictions and metaphors are non-normal, non-serious, non-primary uses of communication. This charge was made when Plato undertook the first critique of narrative art; and, ever since Aristotle’s Poetics, what there is that might be called a philosophy of narrative art has always seemed duty-bound to worry about it. This apologetic predicament has limited the development of a philosophy of fiction. The complementary charge—that literal, non-fictional uses have normal, serious and primary status in human communication, and that fictions and metaphors are parasitic uses—is widely held; and, as expressed by John Austin in his theory of speech acts, it drew a response from Jacques Derrida, setting off a curious little debate between two philosophical traditions that have normally been as oil and water to one another. This paper investigates the relation between literal and non-fictional uses on the one hand, and metaphorical and fictional uses on the other. In the matter of determining the status of priority, it looks to the history of selection—both natural and social selection—of communicative traits and functions. Though it deals mainly with language, it argues that the questions should be generalised to cover human symbolic communication generally, if only because human symbolic communication has not evolved in isolation from mimetic acts and linguistic acts are themselves so often mimetic. And it argues that, because of the nature of conditional inferences involved in symbolic communication, metaphorical and fictive forms are inseparable from normal, serious, primary use. This ‘defence of poesy’ as contemporary with and inseparable from reason is offered not simply as a contribution to the philosophy of language, but primarily as a contribution to a philosophy of fiction.