Description
There are certain works of fiction or scenes in them that we sometimes regard as “unrealistic” in an ordinary, non-technical sense. Hazlett and Mag Uidhir point out the phenomenon that fiction marked as “unrealistic” can sometimes be misleading and is almost always aesthetically flawed due to the fact that it is “unrealistic”. To explain this phenomenon within one account, Hazlett and Mag Uidhir propose a unified account of “unrealistic” based on fictional inconsistency.I argue that Hazlett and Mag Uidhir’s account fails. While their account is successful at explaining cases where a work of fiction is (i) unrealistic, (ii) misleading, (iii) aesthetically flawed, and (iv) misleading and flawed in virtue of its unrealisticness, more often than not, it has troubles specifying the conditions in which an unrealistic fiction is misleading/aesthetically flawed. I suggest that for a unified account of “unrealistic”, two of the three desiderata of Hazlett and Mag Uidhir’s theory should be given up, that is, a unified account 1. need not explain the misleadingness and 2. cannot explain the aesthetic flaws that accompany unrealistic fiction.
| Period | 25 Apr 2024 |
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| Held at | Department of Philosophy |