There is a variety of epistemic roles to which photographs are better suited than non-photographic pictures. Photographs provide more compelling evidence of the existence of the scenes they depict than non-photographic pictures. They are also better sources of information about features of those scenes that are easily overlooked. This chapter examines several different attempts to explain the distinctive epistemic value of photographs, and argues that none is adequate. It then proposes an alternative explanation of their epistemic value. The chapter argues that photographs play the epistemic roles they do because they are typically rich sources of depictively encoded information about the scenes they depict, and reliable depictive representations of those scenes. It then explains why photographs differ from non-photographic pictures in both respects.

Philosophy

The Epistemic Value of Photographs

The Epistemic Value of Photographs CATHARINE ABELL Photographs play epistemic roles that most other pictures cannot. Firstly, they can provide compelling evidence that the things they depict existed at the time they were taken. We might doubt that the unfamiliar animals drawn by zoologists of the past ever existed, but be convinced by photographs of Tasmanian tigers that this now extinct marsupial once populated its namesake state. Likewise, a photograph of a politician lunching with a known criminal may convince us of her corruption, when a drawing of the same scene would not. Secondly, photographs play a unique investigative role, enabling us to identify features of their objects that are easily overlooked. Police detectives consult photographs, rather than paintings, of crime scenes, looking for clues that will help them solve cases. Similarly, consumers pore over photographs of potential purchases on eBay, looking for flaws that a hand-drawn picture would not reveal, whether unintentionally or through deliberate omission. This does not mean that all photographs are alike in respect of epistemic value. While many photographs are suited to the epistemic roles described above, others-for example, those that are badly focused-are not. Token photographs may lack the epistemic significance that photographs generally possess, and token non-photographic pictures might have such epistemic Thanks to Katerina Bantinaki and to the audience at Mimesis, Metaphysics, and Make-Believe, a conference in honour of Kendall Walton, University of Leeds, 2007, particularly my commentator, Aaron Meskin, for helpful feedback on earlier versions of this chapter. 82 CATHARINE ABELL significance, although non-photographic pictures generally do not. For example, a painting by Vermeer may better enable us to identify readily overlooked features of the scene it depicts than would a photograph of that scene. Photographs have a distinctive epistemic value because the epistemic properties they generally possess differ from those that non-photographic pictures generally possess. The contrast between the epistemic properties of photographic and non-photographic pictures obtains between photographs, considered in general, and non-photographic pictures, considered in general. Nor does it follow that photographs generally have greater epistemic value than non-photographic pictures generally do. Their epistemic significance simply differs. Non-photographic pictures can play epistemic roles that photographs generally cannot. For example, botanical drawings may make salient features of plants that would not be prominent in photographs of them, but information about which is of particular epistemic value to us. The scope of non-photographic pictures also lends them an epistemic significance that photographs do not have. Whereas photographs can depict only particulars, non-photographic pictures can depict, in addition, objects of a certain type that are not existent particulars of the type at issue. Unlike photographs, they can thus be used to depict the prototypical features of a type in isolation from the accidental features of particular instances of that type. What nonphotographic pictures can teach us may be just as valuable as what photographs can teach us, but each teaches in virtue of different epistemic capacities. My aim, in this chapter, is to explain why photographs are generally able to play the epistemic roles described above, and why non-photographic pictures generally are not. This requires accounts, first, of the difference between the two sorts of picture and, second, of the form of epistemic value (let us call it EV) that a picture must have in order to play those roles. These I offer, respectively, in Sections 1 and 2. In Section 3, I examine three proposed explanations of why photographs generally have EV and non-photographic pictures generally lack it, and argue that none is adequate. In Section 4, I explain why nonphotographic pictures typically have little EV. In Section 5, I explain why the EV of photographs typically exceeds that of non-photographic pictures. THE EPISTEMIC VALUE OF PHOTOGRAPHS 83 1. Photographic versus Non-Photographic Pictures For the purposes of this chapter, we can understand a picture as something that depicts. Depiction is a distinctive form of representation, characteristic of figurative paintings, drawings, and photographs. Some philosophers claim that pictures depict their objects in virtue of looking like, or visibly resembling, them (Hopkins 1998). Others deny that depiction can be explained in terms of resemblance (Kulvicki 2006; Lopes 1996). Nevertheless, none denies that pictures generally seem, to those viewers who successfully interpret them, to resemble the things they depict (Kulvicki 2006: 81; Lopes 1996: 4). Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide an account of depiction,1 we can therefore understand a picture's depictive content as that content a grasp of which is generally accompanied by the visual perception of apparent resemblances. In specifying a picture's depictive content, we must be careful to distinguish between its internal and its external object. Its internal object is what it depicts, whereas its external object, if it has one, is the independently existing object whose properties are causally responsible for the picture's surface being marked in the way it is. A black and white photograph of you has a person of indeterminate colour as its internal object, but a person of perfectly determinate colour as its external object. What distinguishes photographic and non-photographic pictures is not the form of representation each employs, but the way in which each is produced. Photographs are produced by largely mechanical means, whereas non-photographic pictures are not. Moreover, photographic mechanisms operate such that all photographs have external objects, and the design features of any photograph (those features in virtue of which it depicts its object) depend causally on the features of its external object, such that the former depend counterfactually on the latter. When I photograph a mountain, for example, the mountain causes my photograph to have the design features it does, such that, had the mountain been different, my photograph would likewise have differed. By contrast, not all nonphotographic pictures have external objects (there need be no existent particular which they depict) and, while the features of some of those that 1 I provide such an account in Abell (2009). 84 CATHARINE ABELL do are counterfactually dependent on features of their external objects, not all are. I might seek to draw a mountain accurately such that the features of the drawing I produce depend counterfactually on those of the mountain. However, faced with the same mountain, I might instead employ a schema or formula for the depiction of a mountain, in which case the features of my drawing need not depend counterfactually on those of the mountain. One might likewise sever the counterfactual dependence of a photograph's features on features of its external object-by over-painting it, for example. However, this would render the photographic mechanism redundant. Consequently, the resultant picture would not be genuinely photographic. Photographers' intentions play a significant role in determining what their photographs depict. Their intentions determine where they point their cameras, what kind of cameras they choose, and how they set their variable parameters. They can also affect depictive content after the photographic mechanism has been employed. By using the darkroom technique of dodging and burning, for example, photographers can realize their intention to represent certain aspects of the photographed scene as darker, and others as lighter, than they would otherwise have been depicted. Likewise, by cropping, they can select which aspects of the photographed scene are depicted.2 However, photographers' intentions can sever the counterfactual dependence of features of the photograph on features of its external object only by overriding the effect of the photographic mechanism, and producing a picture that is not purely photographic. 2. An Account of EV What features enable a picture both to provide compelling evidence that an object existed and had certain properties at the time the picture was produced, and to reveal features of an object that are easily overlooked? We need a clear grasp of EV, the form of epistemic value that enables a picture to play these roles, before attempting to explain why photographs and non-photographic pictures play different epistemic roles. 2 This understanding of what it is to be a photograph is thus broader than Scruton's notion of the ideal photograph (Scruton 1983). THE EPISTEMIC VALUE OF PHOTOGRAPHS 85 A picture provides compelling evidence of an object's existence, and of its possessing certain features, only if it is produced by a reliable process. That is, the process linking picture and object must be such that we are likely to form true beliefs about objects on the basis of pictures produced by that process. This requires two things. Firstly, the pictures produced by this process must be likely to carry information about their external objects. Secondly, they must be likely to do so in depictive form. For the purposes of this chapter, we can understand information carrying, with Jonathan Cohen and Aaron Meskin, as a counterfactual relationship between independent variables, such that x's being F carries information about y's being G if and only if the counterfactual conditional (if y were not G, then x would not have been F) is true (Cohen and Meskin 2006: 3). A picture's having a certain feature carries the information that an object has a certain property if and only if, had the object not had that property, the picture would have lacked that feature. Things may carry information in virtue of a variety of different features. A tree trunk may carry information about the tree's age in virtue of the number of rings in its bark. A history book may carry information about a war in virtue of the words written on its pages. A picture-production process is reliable only if the pictures it produces are likely to carry information about their external objects in depictive form. A picture carries the information that an object has a certain property in depictive form if it both carries that information and depicts the object as possessing that property. Pictures may carry information about objects without doing so in depictive form. For example, a photographic negative may carry the information that an object had a certain colour because, had the object's colour differed, the colours of the negative would also have differed. Nevertheless, the negative does not depict the object as having the colour it had: adequate knowledge of the photographic process involved may enable one to work out, from the negative's colour, what colour its external object was, but doing so does not make the negative appear to resemble that object in respect of colour. It is difficult to work out, from a colour negative, the colour of the object about which it carries information. By contrast, it is easy to discern such information from a picture which carries it in depictive form. The information pictures carry in depictive form is easier to grasp than that which they carry in other forms. Consequently, we are more likely to form 86 CATHARINE ABELL true beliefs about objects on the basis of the former information than the latter. It is an interesting question why this is so. One possible explanation is that the interpretation of depictive content engages our visual recognitional abilities (Lopes 1996; Schier 1986), and thus inherits the reliability of our perceptual processes. Nevertheless, detailed discussion of this issue must await another occasion. The upshot of these two conditions is that a process will be more reliable the more likely it is to produce pictures whose depictive content is accurate: whose internal objects have only features possessed by their external objects. Consequently, it is tempting to analyse the reliability of a picture-production process as the probability, given any picture produced by that process, that its object was as it is depicted as being at the time it was produced. However, doubts that there is any non-epistemic account of probability able to accommodate probabilities of inverse conditional properties make this approach seem unpromising (Cohen and Meskin 2006: 4). Fortunately, an alternative, modal analysis is possible. If a picture depictively encodes information about its object, then, according to David Lewis's semantics for counterfactuals (Lewis 1973), its depictive content will differ in the closest possible world in which its object differs. The likelihood that a process will produce pictures that depictively encode information about their external objects can be construed in terms of the distance between worlds in which the depictive content of pictures produced by that process is accurate, and worlds in which it is not.3 Accordingly: A given picture-production process4 is more reliable the greater the distance, for any non-actual picture produced by that process, between the nearest possible world to the actual world in which the picture exists and its external object was as it is depicted as being at the time the picture was produced and the closest possible world to that world in which the picture exists and its external object was not as it is depicted as being at the time the picture was produced. This construal of reliability assumes that the actual world is closer to the former than to the latter world.5 3 In what follows, I construe the likelihood of this outcome in the way specified, not as synonymous for its probability. 4 The level of generality at which any picture-production process is to be individuated depends on how it is conceived by those who designed it (where it is mechanized), or those who use it (where it is not). 5 As Cohen and Meskin point out, Lewis construes distance relations between worlds as interestdependent, which would make counterfactuals depend tacitly on the doxastic (Cohen and Meskin THE EPISTEMIC VALUE OF PHOTOGRAPHS 87 We cannot understand EV solely in terms of the reliability of pictureproduction processes. Even if it is the result of a reliable process, a picture will not reveal features of an object that are easily overlooked unless it carries a reasonable amount of information about that object. To play such a role, a picture must also be rich, where richness is a measure of the amount of depictively encoded information a picture carries. The more such information it carries, the richer it is. How much information a picture carries is a measure of the number of features of its external object about which it carries information in depictive form. How finely the features of its object can be individuated is determined by the relations of counterfactual dependence that obtain between picture and object. If a difference in the shape of a single hair on a woman's head would result in a corresponding difference in the shape a portrait of that woman depicts the hair as having, the shape of the hair counts as a feature of the woman about which the picture depictively encodes information. However, if she would have to have lacked hair altogether in order for the portrait to depict her hair differently, her having hair counts as a feature about which the picture depictively encodes information, but neither the shape nor the existence of the individual hair counts as such. A picture may be richer-and the process by which it is made more reliable-regarding some types of features than others. For example, black and white photographic processes may be very likely to produce pictures that depictively encode information about the shape properties of their external objects, and may produce pictures that carry a lot of information about such properties, but are generally both unlikely to produce pictures that depictively encode information about the colour properties of their external objects, and incapable of producing pictures that carry much information about colour properties. We can understand a process's reliability relative to features of a certain type as follows: A given picture-production process is more reliable, relative to features of type F, the greater the distance, for any non-actual picture produced by that process which depicts F features, between the nearest possible 2006: 10). However, like Cohen and Meskin, I take the distance relations between worlds to be mind-independent. 88 CATHARINE ABELL world to the actual world in which the picture exists and its external object had the F features it is depicted as having at the time the picture was produced, and the closest possible world to that world in which the picture exists and its external object did not have the F features it is depicted as having at the time the picture was produced. Again, it is assumed that the actual world is closer to the former than to the latter world. A picture is richer, relative to features of type F, the more information about F features it carries. We thus need to distinguish between a picture's EV simpliciter, and its EV relative to features of a certain type. A picture's EV simpliciter is a measure of its richness and of the reliability of the process by which it was produced, while its EV relative to features of a certain type is a measure of its richness relative to features of that type and the reliability of its production process relative to features of that type. This account construes EV as independent of individual viewers' particular interests and attributions. A picture could have a high EV simpliciter despite the information it conveys being less important to some viewers than the information conveyed by a picture with a lower EV simpliciter, and thus of less overall epistemic value to them. As I noted earlier, EV is not the only form of epistemic value a picture may have. Nevertheless, given that information about features of a certain type is important to viewers, one picture may have greater EV than another relative to features of the type at issue. I have not specified how richness and reliability combine to determine EV. Rather, I construe them as independent dimensions, each of which may contribute to EV in isolation from the other. This reflects the fact that different purposes impose differing demands for reliability and for richness. Someone consulting a picture to determine whether a galloping horse ever has all its hooves in the air simultaneously seeks reliability above richness. The detective who consults pictures of a crime scene looking for information that will enable her to solve the crime seeks both richness and reliability. A fashion stylist who consults pictures of the Paris catwalks looking for inspiration seeks richness over reliability. Individual viewers may make erroneous attributions of EV. A viewer who mistakenly takes a photorealist painting to have been produced by a photographic process will attribute to it greater EV than it possesses. THE EPISTEMIC VALUE OF PHOTOGRAPHS 89 Moreover, even when their attributions of EV are accurate, viewers will derive inappropriate beliefs from pictures if they misidentify their external objects on the basis of their internal objects. Suppose the photographs apparently showing the first moon landing were in fact taken in a Hollywood studio. While our beliefs about photographic processes may justify an attribution of high EV to such photographs, it would be wrong to construe them as providing good evidence that a moon landing occurred, since their external object is not a moon landing. Let us now consider three different explanations of the epistemic differences between photographic and non-photographic pictures. Their adequacy will depend on whether they explain it as a difference in EV. 3. Existing Explanations 3.1. Photographs as Transparent According to Kendall Walton, photographs are aids to vision, not mere representations (Walton 1984: 263). Just as we see a scene when we examine it through a telescope or regard its reflection in a mirror, so too, he claims, we literally see a scene when we look at a photograph of it. Photographs are transparent: we see through them to their objects. Like mirrors, they are transparent although their surfaces are visible when we see through them, and although they afford only indirect visual access to things. Unlike mirrors, photographs enable us to see spatially and temporally distant scenes. Seeing through photographs is a unique form of perception that enables us to see things that could not otherwise be seen. Contrarily, Walton argues, most non-photographic pictures are opaque: when we look at them, we see depictive representations, not the scenes they depict. He identifies three conditions that, he claims, are individually necessary for transparency. Firstly, to see one object through another, the object through which it is seen must be counterfactually dependent on the object seen through it. Secondly, this relation of counterfactual dependence must be belief-independent. Walton asks us to suppose that an explorer goes into the jungle and comes back with either photographs or sketches of a dinosaur. Both the photographs and the sketches may convince us that there is a dinosaur in the jungle. However, he argues, 'The important difference is that, in the case of the sketches, we rely on the picture maker's 90 CATHARINE ABELL belief that there is a dinosaur in a way in which we don't in the case of the photographs' (Walton 1984: 263). If the explorer did not believe there were a dinosaur in the jungle, Walton thinks, his sketches wouldn't depict a dinosaur, whereas his photographs would depict a dinosaur no matter what he believed. Finally, Walton claims, transparency requires the preservation of the real relations of similarity and dissimilarity between objects. Pears are similar to apples and dissimilar to bears. Visual experiences of pears reflect this fact: perceivers may mistake pears for apples, but not for bears. Both photographic and non-photographic pictures, and our visual experiences of them, likewise preserve the similarity relations among objects: we may mistake a picture of a pear for a picture of an apple, but would not mistake it for a picture of a bear. However, neither written descriptions nor our experiences of them preserve real similarity relations between the objects they represent. 'Pear' is more like 'bear' than 'apple', and this is reflected in the mistakes we are likely to make about a description's content. Even though a mechanically generated description might exhibit belief-independent counterfactual dependence on its object, therefore, it is not transparent. Walton's account suggests an explanation of photographs as having EV because photographic processes have the reliability of perceptual processes and the richness of perceptual experiences. However, while many visual experiences may be the rich products of reliable processes, not all are. The visual experiences of the myopic and the colour-blind are not. The transparency of photographs therefore does not ensure that they have EV, since photographic processes may be among those visual processes that are unreliable. To explain the EV of photographs, we need an explanation of why photographic processes typically count among reliable visual processes, and why photographs are akin to rich visual experiences.6 Walton suggests that photographic processes are reliable in virtue of 'the fact that our photographic equipment and procedures happen to be standardised in certain respects' (Walton 1984: 273). However, there are many respects in which photographic equipment and procedures are not standardized, but differ considerably. For example, while most 6 A general evaluation of Walton's claim that photographs are transparent is beyond the scope of the present chapter, which is concerned solely with its epistemic implications. For criticisms of this claim, see Cohen and Meskin (2004), Currie (1991), and Dretske (1984). THE EPISTEMIC VALUE OF PHOTOGRAPHS 91 cameras utilize visible light, infra-red cameras do not, and both camera types may have either analog or digital mechanisms. Moreover, the mere standardization of such equipment and procedures would achieve only uniformity, not reliability. More needs to be said about the respects of standardization at issue and how they ensure reliability if this explanation is to succeed. One could relinquish the claim that photographs are transparent and simply insist that their epistemic value is explained by their meeting Walton's three conditions. On his account, photographs differ from those non-photographic pictures that depend counterfactually on their objects only in their belief-independence. However, many non-photographic pictures are also belief-independent, but lack the EV of photographs. Picture makers may, and often do, depict objects by employing schemata, or formulae, for the depiction of objects of particular types. In such cases, which schema they employ depends on what they believe about the object they seek to depict. However, many picture makers instead depict objects by attending carefully to their visible features and allowing those features to guide the way in which they mark the picture surface. As Dominic Lopes notes, 'In drawing, the eye and the hand work together, perhaps bypassing the mind, or rather that portion of the mind that deals in concepts and beliefs' (Lopes 1996: 186). There is empirical evidence to support this claim, which suggests that the visual information that guides our motor actions may differ from that carried by conscious visual experience. For example, subjects presented with disks arranged to produce the Tichener or Ebbinghaus illusion have conscious visual experiences that misrepresent the relative sizes of the disks. They experience disks of the same size as differing in size, and disks of different sizes as being of the same size. Nevertheless, when subjects reach for those disks, the aperture produced between finger and thumb is perfectly suited to the actual sizes of the disks, rather than the sizes they are represented as having in subjects' conscious visual experiences (Milner and Goodale 1995: 168).7 Since it is the information carried by conscious visual experience, rather than that used for visually based motor control, that is made available for conceptual mobilization, this evidence suggests that the 7 For philosophical discussion of these results, see Clark (2001) and Jacob and Jeannerod (2003). In their chapters in this volume, Lopes and Nanay discuss further the implications this experiment has for the philosophical understanding of depiction (see Lopes, Ch. 2, Sect. 3; Nanay, Ch. 7, Sect. 7). 92 CATHARINE ABELL information that guides picture makers' actions could indeed bypass their cognitive centres. Walton acknowledges that some non-photographic pictures, such as tracings and 'doodles done automatically, while the doodler's mind is on other things', may be belief-independent (Walton 1984: 267). They too, he claims, are probably transparent. While some such pictures may have EV, however, not all do. An automatic doodle of a crime scene would lack the EV of a photograph of that scene. The belief-independence of photographs does not suffice to explain EV.8 3.2. Photographs as Necessarily Accurate Robert Hopkins has argued that photographs are necessarily accurate (Hopkins 1998).9 For something to depict an object, he argues, it must not only have the right appearance, but also the appropriate history of production. This history comprises a standard of correctness, which determines whether something that appears to depict an object actually does so. Hopkins argues that the standard of correctness for non-photographic pictures is intentional. Something is a non-photographic picture of an object only if its maker intended it to represent that object. Even if it is visually indistinguishable from a picture of a lion, the blotch made by accidentally spilling a bottle of ink is not a picture, since it was not produced with the requisite intention. However, he claims, the standard of correctness that governs photographs cannot depend on photographers' intentions, since photographs that are taken accidentally depict scenes that photographers did not intend them to depict. Instead, he argues, this standard depends on the intentions of those who design the mechanisms with which photographs are taken. Since camera designers cannot always control how these mechanisms are used, their intentions are, of necessity, quite general. Hopkins argues that 'the relevant intention is better put thus. The camera's designer intended that we see in the photographs whatever is causally responsible for those surfaces being marked as they are' (Hopkins 1998: 72). In his view, therefore, the 8 One might think the real difference between photographic and non-photographic pictures lies in the latter's dependence on, and the former's independence from, their maker's intentional states in general, not their beliefs in particular. However, as I will argue in Sect. 5, some photographs depend on developers' visual states. 9 See also Scruton (1983) and Currie (1999: 288). THE EPISTEMIC VALUE OF PHOTOGRAPHS 93 standard of correctness for photographs comprises both an intentional and a causal element. The ink blotch is not a photograph, since it is not the product of a mechanism designed with the relevant intentions, and no lion is causally responsible for its appearance. Since it follows from his characterization of camera designers' intentions that they intend the photographs produced with the mechanisms they design to depict their external objects accurately, Hopkins concludes that photographs necessarily depict their objects accurately (Hopkins 1998: 72-3). However, the nature of camera designers' intentions is an empirical matter, not one that can be determined a priori. Like makers of nonphotographic pictures, camera designers may intend that the photographs produced with the mechanisms they design misrepresent their external objects. For example, the designer of a camera whose lens systematically distorts the shape of the things seen through it is best understood as intending that the photographs produced with his camera depict their external objects as having shapes that differ in various systematic ways from the shapes they actually possess. Moreover, even if camera designers' intentions were as Hopkins claims, this would not ensure the accuracy of the photographs produced using their cameras, since development processes are beyond camera designers' control. To the extent that techniques such as dodging and burning are available, which enable the depictive content of photographs to be altered during the development process, photographers can produce photographs that misrepresent their objects, irrespective of camera designers' intentions. Photographs are no less able to misrepresent their objects than other pictures. There is a sense in which photographs are necessarily accurate, but the form of representation at issue is causal (indexical, in Peirce's terminology), rather than depictive. Just as the number of rings in the trunk of a tree may accurately represent the tree's age, in virtue of the causal relation between its age and the rings, so too photographs accurately represent the objects that caused them. When photographs depict their objects accurately, their depictive and causal contents coincide. However, the two kinds of content can come apart. Even if photographs were necessarily accurate qua pictures, Hopkins's claims do not yield an adequate explanation of their epistemic significance. His claims would explain their reliability: there would be no possible world in which a photograph exists but its object was not as the photograph 94 CATHARINE ABELL depicts it at the time the photograph was taken. However, they would not explain their richness. Badly focused photographs have relatively little EV, not because they are produced by unreliable processes, but because they are not rich. Despite their accuracy, a detective would clearly prefer to consult a properly focused photograph of a crime scene. 3.3. Photographs as Spatially Agnostic Informants Cohen and Meskin argue that photographs are epistemically valuable because they are spatially agnostic informants: they carry information about their objects' visually accessible properties other than their egocentric spatial locations, without carrying information about their egocentric spatial locations (that is, about their objects' spatial locations relative to oneself) (Cohen and Meskin 2004: 204). Contrarily, visual experiences can carry information about the former properties of their objects only if they also carry information about the latter. On Cohen and Meskin's view, photographs are epistemically valuable because they can provide information about their objects' visually accessible properties, in conditions in which information about those objects' egocentric spatial location is unavailable (Cohen and Meskin 2004: 205). Many non-photographic pictures are also spatially agnostic informants. Cohen and Meskin construe the epistemic differences between photographs and such pictures as merely apparent, not real. Viewers take photographs, but not most other pictures, to be spatially agnostic informants, they argue, because the type photograph is salient to viewers and because they believe tokens of that type typically to be spatially agnostic informants, whereas this is not true of most non-photographic picture types. A picture type is salient if viewers typically categorize tokens of the type in question as belonging to that type (Cohen and Meskin 2004: 205). The type photograph is salient because viewers typically categorize token photographs as belonging to that type. Contrarily, the type accurate landscape drawing is not salient, as viewers will typically categorize tokens of that type as belonging, not to it, but to the more general type landscape drawing. Whereas viewers believe that tokens of the type photograph typically carry information about visually accessible properties, they do not believe the same of tokens of the type landscape drawing (Cohen and Meskin 2004: 205). Viewers do not take tokens of most non-photographic picture types to be spatially agnostic informants because the types at issue are either not salient to them, or THE EPISTEMIC VALUE OF PHOTOGRAPHS 95 they don't believe that tokens of those types are typically spatially agnostic informants. There are two reasons why Cohen and Meskin's account does not suffice to explain our attributions of epistemic value. Firstly, like the type photograph, the type photographic negative is salient. Moreover, while some viewers may not believe that photographic negatives typically carry information about visually accessible properties, others-those with insight into the nature of information-believe that they do. Nevertheless, such viewers will take the photographs produced from such negatives to differ from the negatives in respect of EV. A lawyer would not use negatives, in lieu of the photographs produced from them, to provide a jury with evidence about an object's colour, even if she knew the members of the jury believed the negatives to carry information about the object's colour, since it would be much more difficult for them to derive such information from the negatives than from the photographs. Cohen and Meskin's account fails to accommodate the relevance of the form in which information is carried. Secondly, we may attribute different EV to pictures of two different, salient types, both of which we know to be spatially agnostic informants. For example, we attribute different epistemic value to court drawings than to photographs. If it were permissible to take photographs in the courtroom, most newspapers and television news programmes would show photographs instead of court drawings, precisely because of their distinctive epistemic properties. Like the type photograph, the type court drawing is salient to viewers. The distinctive content of such drawings, and the contexts in which they are usually presented-on television news programmes and in newspaper reports-mean that viewers typically categorize such pictures as belonging to the type court drawing rather than to some more general type. Moreover, viewers also usually believe that court drawings typically carry information about their objects' visually accessible properties. We attribute different epistemic capacities to court drawings and photographs because we take the latter to be both richer and more reliable sources of information about their objects. Because Cohen and Meskin's account does not mention the amount of information pictures carry about their objects' visually accessible properties, it does not capture the epistemic significance of richness. Neither does it capture the epistemic significance of reliability: it appeals to our beliefs about the information different 96 CATHARINE ABELL types of picture typically carry, but not our beliefs about the likelihood that pictures of the relevant types will carry information. It therefore fails to capture the epistemic differences between photographs and court drawings. None of the accounts considered here succeeds in explaining why photographic and non-photographic pictures differ-or appear to differ-with respect to EV. In the remaining sections, I propose an alternative explanation of this difference, which I construe as an actual difference in the EV pictures of the two types actually possess. 4. The EV of Non-Photographic Pictures Non-photographic picture-making processes typically lack the reliability required for their pictures to play the epistemic roles to which photographs are suited, because their makers' intentions affect the relations they bear to their objects. Picture makers' intentions are variable. Sometimes they intend to depict objects accurately, while, at others, they intend to misrepresent them. The fact that someone who uses any non-photographic process might have done so with the intention of misrepresenting an object severely limits the reliability of that process. Generally speaking, those nonphotographic pictures that are the product of intentions to misrepresent objects will misrepresent their external objects. However, it is not true that non-photographic pictures that are products of intentions accurately to represent objects will generally depict them accurately. Picture makers' ability to realize their intentions is constrained both by the limitations to their technical abilities and by the reliability of their visual processes. Even in cases in which they intend to depict something accurately, the former constraint in particular significantly diminishes the likelihood that they will succeed in doing so. Picture makers' intentions affect the reliability of some non-photographic processes more than others. The processes involved in court drawing are more reliable than many other non-photographic processes, for example. A variety of factors-professional norms, the threat of unemployment-make the likelihood that such processes are exploited for the purpose of misrepresenting objects much lower than the likelihood that many other non-photographic processes were used for such a purpose. However, the THE EPISTEMIC VALUE OF PHOTOGRAPHS 97 fact that their makers might have intended that they misrepresent their objects affects their reliability nonetheless. The possible world in which a picture produced by a non-photographic process depicts its external object accurately is therefore never very much closer to the actual world than one in which it misrepresents that object. Furthermore, even when non-photographic pictures do carry information about their external objects, the serial process by which they are made limits their richness. Picture makers cannot mark a picture surface so as to achieve simultaneous depictive encoding of information about the various different features of an object. Instead, they must encode information little by little. Consequently, the more information a picture maker seeks to encode depictively, the longer the picture-making process takes. This places practical limits on how much information picture makers can encode in depictive form. Moreover, many of the scenes picture makers seek to depict change during the time taken to produce rich non-photographic pictures of them. This further limits how much depictively encoded information most non-photographic pictures can carry. Some picture makers (Vermeer, for example) possess the tenacity required to pursue richness despite the time required to achieve it. Nevertheless, it is no accident that many of those non-photographic pictures that rival photographs in richness are still lifes or are copied from photographs. 5. The EV of Photographs Most photographic processes are parallel, rather than serial: they enable the simultaneous depictive encoding of information about the various different features of objects. Most cameras simultaneously record light reflected from the various different parts of the scene photographed. While some photographic processes are serial-such as those involved in astronomical photography-this does not affect the richness of the resultant photographs, in so far as the things they are used to photograph remain unchanged during the time taken to photograph them. Moreover, the automation of such serial photographic processes means that there are fewer practical limitations on their employment than on that of serial non-photographic picture-production processes, which require their makers' participation throughout. 98 CATHARINE ABELL Photographs are therefore generally immune to the factors that limit the richness of non-photographic pictures. However, this alone does not explain why they are typically richer than the latter. Poorly focused photographs may be the result of parallel processes, but are less rich than many non-photographic pictures. Photographic richness is a technological achievement. The richness of the photographs that could be produced using early cameras was no greater than that of many paintings. Later cameras could be used to produce much richer photographs, and the advent of colour film further enhanced their capacity for richness, by enabling photographs to encode information depictively about more kinds of features of their objects. Contemporary colour film has enhanced the capacity for photographic richness further still, by enabling photographs to encode more information depictively about the colours of their objects. The fact that a photograph was produced using photographic technology that enables a high degree of richness is no guarantee that it is rich. There are certain conditions that need to be met in order for such technology to yield rich photographs. For example, many cameras will produce them only if there is a certain level of ambient light in the photographed scene, or if the film is exposed for a suitable length of time. Nevertheless, photographs are typically considerably richer than non-photographic pictures because most photographs are produced using photographic technology that ensures a high degree of richness under the conditions in which they are taken. The reason why both photographic technology has developed in the direction of increasing richness and the conditions required for richness are usually met is precisely that, in general, we value richness. We may not value it enough to pursue it at the expense of the other activities we could pursue in the time required to produce a rich non-photographic picture, but we value it enough to want it when the time required to achieve it does not prohibit us from pursuing other activities we value. The reliability of photographic processes results from the standardization, not of the processes themselves, but of the functions they perform. This standardization is enabled by the fact that photographic processes are largely mechanical. Although there is a variety of different photographic mechanisms, both analog and digital, the mechanisms involved in the production of most photographs are alike in respect of the outputs they produce, given certain inputs. In particular, given a certain scene, most such THE EPISTEMIC VALUE OF PHOTOGRAPHS 99 mechanisms will yield an accurate depictive representation of that scene. This is a purely contingent fact about photographic mechanisms. Contra Hopkins, camera designers might have intended that the photographs produced with the mechanisms they designed misrepresent their external objects, and thus have designed mechanisms that function to produce inaccurate pictures. The reason why they did not-in the most part, at least-may be that they designed them for consumers who, they assumed, generally value depictive accuracy over inaccuracy. There are two respects in which this standardization is incomplete. Firstly, it is incomplete to the extent that photographic mechanisms do not function to produce accurate photographs. As we have seen, some photographic mechanisms, such as those that incorporate distorting lenses, do not produce accurate photographs. Moreover, many mechanized processes are reliable relative to most, but not all, feature types. For example, many produce photographs that, while otherwise accurate, misrepresent the determinate colours of the scenes they depict. Even those mechanisms that generally produce photographs that are accurate in all respects may have the potential to produce photographs that misrepresent the scenes they depict. This may be because, while the mechanisms at issue produce accurate photographs given most inputs, there are some inputs-for example, scenes of very low absolute illumination-given which they produce inaccurate photographs. Secondly, it is incomplete to the extent that photographic processes are not mechanized. Whereas photographs taken with instamatic cameras and developed in commercial labs are produced by wholly mechanized processes, others are not. To the extent that photographic processes are not mechanized, their outcome is subject to the influence of the same factors as affect the reliability of non-photographic processes. For example, non-mechanized development procedures may depend, not just on photographers' intentions, but also on their visual states. Photographers sometimes include colour charts in the scenes they photograph so that, when they come to develop their photographs, they can check the colours the photographs depict the charts as having against the colours of such a chart (Snyder and Allen 1975: 162). This process will only ensure colour accuracy if photographers both intend to depict objects' colours accurately, and they are not colour-blind. Photographic processes are reliable only to the extent that they function to produce accurate pictures. The easier it is to produce an inaccurate 100 CATHARINE ABELL photograph using a given photographic process, the smaller the distance will be between the nearest possible world in which a picture produced by that process depicts its object accurately and the nearest possible world in which it depicts it inaccurately (assuming the latter world to be further from the actual world), and the less reliable that process will be. Nevertheless, the extent to which photographic processes standardly function to produce accurate pictures makes them considerably more reliable than non-photographic processes. The great majority of photographic mechanisms either function to produce such pictures, or do so under most conditions, or function to produce photographs that are accurate in most respects. Moreover, although the processes by which many photographs are produced are not wholly mechanized, and although photographers' intentions need be no less variable than those of other picture makers, two factors make it considerably harder for photographers to realize their intentions to misrepresent objects than for the makers of non-photographic pictures to do so. Firstly, unlike the latter, they can affect depictive content only if they preserve the counterfactual dependence of features of photographs on features of their external objects. This makes them dependent on the existence of techniques such as dodging and burning, or the use of colour filters, that enable them to influence the causal relation between picture and object without breaking it. Secondly, the extent to which photographic processes are governed by standardly functioning mechanisms significantly restricts the range of available techniques, and thus the capacity for photographic misrepresentation. For example, the use of distorting lenses is one of few techniques that enable the photographic misrepresentation of shape. However, the fact that the process of recording light reflected from scenes photographed is largely governed by standardly functioning mechanisms means that this technique is not readily available to photographers. What of photographic manipulation? There has been a dramatic rise, in recent years, in the frequency with which photographs are intentionally manipulated to misrepresent the scenes they depict. This is a direct result of the increasing prominence of digital photographic equipment; the greater accessibility of the computer technology required to manipulate digital photographs; and the spread of the skills required to use this technology. Digital photographic processes, it seems, can readily be exploited to produce photographs that misrepresent their objects. THE EPISTEMIC VALUE OF PHOTOGRAPHS 101 However, it is important to distinguish two forms of digital manipulation. The development of techniques which enable the systematic alteration of the shape or colour a digital photograph depicts its object as having, while preserving the counterfactual dependence of features of the photograph on features of its external object, has made photographic misrepresentation much easier than it previously was, and thus reduced the reliability of digital photographic processes and the EV of the photographs produced by them. By contrast, while techniques which enable the pixel-by-pixel retouching of photographs produce pictures which misrepresent objects' shapes and colours, they override the effect of the photographic mechanism by severing the counterfactual dependence that features of those pictures would otherwise bear to features of the objects photographed, and thus produce pictures that are not purely photographic. Such techniques do not affect the reliability of photographic processes, because they make them redundant. Consequently, although they can be used to undermine the EV of particular photographs by transforming them into non-photographic pictures, they do not diminish the EV that photographic pictures generally possess. Nevertheless, such techniques affect the EV we are likely to attribute to the pictures they are used to produce. The seamlessness of the manipulation enabled by such techniques makes us likely to mistake such pictures for photographs, and thus to attribute to them the EV that photographs generally possess. While digital manipulation of the first kind is still sufficiently rare for the EV typical of photographs to exceed that typical of non-photographic pictures by a comfortable margin, the epistemic future of photographs is by no means assured. As Barbara Savedoff notes, advances in digital photographic processes may one day eradicate the epistemic differences between photographic and non-photographic pictures (Savedoff 1997: 212). Conclusion On two of the explanations I have considered, the epistemic differences between photographic and non-photographic pictures result from essential differences between the two types of picture. Walton sees the difference between the two as consisting in the fact that photographs are aids to vision, 102 CATHARINE ABELL while non-photographic pictures are mere representations. Hopkins sees it as consisting in the fact that they are governed by different standards of correctness. By contrast, while they take photographs to differ epistemically from those non-photographic pictures that do not carry information about objects, Cohen and Meskin take certain of the epistemic differences attributed to pictures of the two types to be merely apparent. I have steered a somewhat different course, arguing that, while photographs in general do differ epistemically from non-photographic pictures in general, this difference is due to wholly contingent factors, namely advances in photographic technology and the standardization of the function of photographic processes. References Abell, Catharine (2009), 'Canny Resemblance', Philosophical Review, 118/2: 183-223. Clark, Andy (2001), 'Visual Experience and Motor Action: Are the Bonds Too Tight?', Philosophical Review, 110/4: 495-519. Cohen, Jonathan and Aaron Meskin (2004), 'On the Epistemic Value of Photographs', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 62/2: 197-210. (2006), 'An Objective Counterfactual Theory of Information', Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 84/3: 333-52. Currie, Gregory (1991), 'Photography, Painting and Perception', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 49/1: 23-9. (1999), 'Visible Traces: Documentary and the Contents of Photographs', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 57/3: 285-97. Dretske, Fred (1984), 'Abstract of Comments: Seeing Through Pictures', Nous, 18: 73-4. Hopkins, Robert (1998), Picture, Image and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Jacob, Pierre and Marc Jeannerod (2003), Ways of Seeing: The Scope and Limits of Visual Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Kulvicki, John (2006), On Images (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Lewis, David (1973), Counterfactuals (Oxford: Blackwell). Lopes, Dominic McIver (1996), Understanding Pictures (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Milner, A. D. and M. A. Goodale (1995), The Visual Brain in Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Savedoff, Barbara (1997), 'Escaping Reality: Digital Imagery and the Resources of Photography', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 55/2: 201-14. THE EPISTEMIC VALUE OF PHOTOGRAPHS 103 Schier, Flint (1986), Deeper into Pictures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Scruton, Roger (1983), 'Photography and Representation', in Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding (London: Methuen). Snyder, Joel and Neil Walsh Allen (1975), 'Photography, Vision and Representation', Critical Inquiry, 2/1: 143-69. Walton, Kendall (1984), 'Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism', Critical Inquiry, 11/2: 246-77.


A review of John Woods, Truth in Fiction: Rethinking its Logic. Cham: Springer, 2018.

Philosophy

Tales Tall and True: John Woods on Truth in Fiction

TALES TALL AND TRUE: JOHN WOODS ON TRUTH IN FICTION ANDREW ABERDEIN∗ Truth in Fiction (2018) is a sequel of sorts to John Woods's much earlier The Logic of Fiction (1974). In that book, after canvassing a series of approaches to the semantics of fiction drawn from different areas of nonclassical logic, Woods eventually advocates a system of quantified modal logic which, as he now puts it, "appl[ied] to literary theory the refreshment of a well-understood and rigorously organized instrument of analysis" (125).1 However, the present book reflects the major turn Woods's thinking has taken over recent decades away from the formalization of informal reasoning and towards a naturalized logic. Elsewhere he has revisited his early work applying formal logic to the understanding of the fallacies in the light of this naturalistic turn (for example, Woods, 2013); here he revisits his early work on fiction. Woods now argues that formal approaches to everyday reasoning lose "sight of an important trichotomy which marks the difference between consequencehaving and consequence-spotting and . . . consequence-drawing" (14). Whereas formal logic acquits itself well in accounting for the first of these activities, since the latter two take place "in the psychological spaces of human beings, the need for an empirically sensitive naturalized logic is unmissable" (218). 1. Taking Stories Seriously Woods rightly avers that "One of the worst mistakes a philosopher can make about fiction, especially popular fiction, is to hold that since it is meant mainly for entertainment . . . fiction's not of much interest to anything as serious as philosophy" (104). Truth in Fiction is true to this admirable maxim, and pays due heed not just to fiction in general, but also to many of its idiosyncrasies. Woods complains that other philosophical accounts of fiction often display ∗School of Arts & Communication, Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne FL. Date: August 3, 2020. 1This and all subsequent unqualified page references are to (Woods, 2018). 1 2 ANDREW ABERDEIN "alienation from the home-thinking and home-speakings of stories" (217). Specifically, Woods attributes to many rival theorists of fiction five "Basic Laws of Fiction": I The something law: Everything whatever is something or other. II The existence law: Reference and quantification are existentially loaded. III The truth law: No sentence violating the existence law can be true. IV The fiction law: The sentences of fiction fail to refer and they fail to be true. V The inference law: Inferences from and within fiction operate, if at all, in a much more circumscribed way than natural language in referentially stable inferences (35). All but the first of these laws Woods repudiates as "an irretrievably lost cause for fiction" (149). He reasons as follows. Fiction plays a large part in many people's lives. They talk about fictional characters in much the same way that they talk about non-fictional characters. Hence we should not adhere to the Basic Laws, lest we conclude that in so doing the consumers of fiction are profoundly confused. Consider, for example, betting. Dick Van Dyke, as the eponymous protagonist of the justly neglected romantic comedy Fitzwilly (1967), makes a bar bet over who cut off Samson's hair. Everyone knows that it was Delilah, but, at least according to the King James Bible, everyone is wrong: "she called for a man, and she caused him to shave off the seven locks" (Judges 16:19, emphasis added). Van Dyke's character wins his bet. But, according to some theologians, the King James Bible has it wrong: the Hebrew text of Judges 16 should be read as implying that Delilah called out (perhaps to Samson, to check he is sound asleep) but then cut off his hair herself (Sasson, 1988). The Anchor Bible, for example, follows this reading. Had this been the Bible in the bar, Fitzwilly would have lost his bet. However, on either account, the doings of Delilah are what Woods calls "bet-sensitive" (105; Woods, 1974, 13): bets can be made about them and settled to the satisfaction of all parties. The outcome of the bet does not alter the bet-sensitivity of the issue; rather, it is because the bet has an outcome that the question is bet-sensitive. Nor does any part of the transaction hinge on whether Delilah was historical or fictional: the bet was on what the Bible says, not whether it was historically accurate. Subtle questions of higher criticism are seldom resolved in saloons. But if Fitzwilly and his drinking companions had bet TALES TALL AND TRUE 3 on who cut the hair from the present king of France, the bet would be irresoluble. In 1967, as in 1905, the present king of France was neither historical nor fictional. He was in Woods's terminology a "nonesuch" (105). Not much counts as a nonesuch. It might be thought that nonesuches would include the postulates of failed theories, such as phlogiston and caloric and the suppositious planet Vulcan (the one intended to explain the anomaly in the perihelion of Mercury, not the unambiguously fictional homeworld of Mr Spock). However, for Woods, Vulcan "was an existential error, but not a referential one" (154). The astronomers who postulated its existence turned out to be wrong, but they had no difficulty in talking about it, both before and after this setback-and nor do we when we recount the story. What they were talking about, it transpired, was a non-existent planet. Woods's commitment to take seriously the idiosyncrasies of (popular) fiction leads him to vexed questions of the interaction between fictional and nonfictional objects and between multiple authors engaging with the same fictions. Here he lightly revises a series of theses introduced in his earlier book (Woods, 1974, 44): The history-constitutivity thesis: A sentence S is history constitutive of a real entity x if and only if S is true, S is about x, and it is not the case that S is true solely in virtue of its utterer's sayso. The fictionalization thesis: S is a fictionalization of a real entity x if and only if S is true, S is about x and S could not have been true of x without the sayso of its author. The history-constitutivity of fictional entities thesis: S is history-constitutive of a fictional entity x if and only if S is true, is about x and is true simply by its author's sayso, and the author whose sayso makes S true is the creator of x. The fictionalization of the fictional thesis: S is a fictionalization of a fictional entity x if and only if S is true and about x, and could not have been true of x in the absence of its author's sayso, and the author in question is not the creator of x (100). These theses permit items from the real world to turn up in works of fiction and fictional items from one fiction to turn up in other fictions, as in pastiche or fanfiction, something many philosophical treatments of fiction overlook. Woods concedes that his theses as presented "aren't quite up to managing the facts presently in view" (102). I discuss some possible avenues for their revision in §4 below. 4 ANDREW ABERDEIN 2. Taking Inconsistencies Lightly A consequence of Woods's determination to take ordinary talk about fiction seriously is that much such talk must be, at least facially, both true and false. It is true that Fitzwilly made a bet in a bar-we can see it on screen. It is also false that Fitzwilly made a bet in a bar-because there is no such person and never was. If Woods's approach is to succeed he must acknowledge this apparent inconsistency and also accommodate the insouciance with which it is typically received. He takes a two-pronged approach to this problem, as he summarizes in the following two theses: The no-contradiction thesis: The systemic inconsistencies of fiction are logical inconsistencies but not logical contradictions. The no-bother thesis: In the circumstances of irremovable absolute inconsistency, closure constraints on consequence-drawing inoculate speakers and reasoners against cognitive collapse (16). In other words, the appearance of inconsistency is mostly removable (first prong) and, even when it isn't, it causes much less trouble than logicians might expect (second prong). Woods finds a solution to "fiction's systemic inconsistency problem" in Aristotle (130). In his Metaphysics, Aristotle states the Law of Non-Contradiction in several distinct ways. The most verbose of these statements reads as follows: "It is impossible that the same thing belong and not belong to the same thing at the same time. And in the same respect" (1005b 19-20, emphasis added). This provides a well-trodden path to inconsistency avoidance: what the paraconsistent logicians Richard Routley and Robert Meyer refer to dismissively as a "difference-of-respect procedure", remarking that it "goes back to the Socratic dialogues" (Routley and Meyer, 1976, 19).2 For example, William Empson employs this approach, observing that it is often feasible to "make the contradiction into two statements; thus 'p and −p' may mean: 'If a = a1, then p; if a = a2, then−p'" (Empson, 1947, 196). Woods adopts a similar approach, in terms of what he calls "the sitedness of truth" (130). He asserts that "the sites primitive" reflects "empirically discernible worldwide linguistic and doxastic behaviour" (191). Hence, to adapt Empson's terms, the ai would be sites, resolving the apparent inconsistency above by making a1 the real world and a2 the fiction of Fitzwilly: 2Woods, in his present naturalistic stance, is naturally unpersuaded by Routley and Meyer's favoured approach: "Paraconsistent logics describe how formal logistic systems, not flesh-and-blood people, manage to spare themselves the perceived chaos of absolute inconsistency" (178). TALES TALL AND TRUE 5 "We read the text knowing that the story it tells is not true in situ the world, and we also know that indeed it is true in situ the story" (140). Sites are less complete than the worlds of modal semantics and not necessarily consistent, thereby distancing Woods's account of fiction from accounts based in possible world semantics, such as that of David Lewis (1978). Woods appeals to sites to support the no-contradiction thesis; to support the no-bother thesis, he invokes "filters". He proposes that "the irrelevance filter is an inbuilt part of our cognitive machinery, doing what nature has designed it to do, for the most part without the distraction of conscious awareness" (187). By prioritizing our immediate concerns over the pursuit of every logical consequence of any combination of our beliefs, we are able to thrive in suboptimal epistemic environments, wherein our belief set is routinely corrupted by apparent contradiction. We succeed at resisting the temptation to draw arbitrary conclusions from inconsistent premisses as the classically valid rule of ex falso quodlibet would permit, but we do this without formally renouncing classical logic. In other words, as Woods puts it, our inconsistent belief set "is equipped with an agenda-irrelevance filter that enables proper subsets of its deductive closure to be truth-tracking" (188). As Woods concedes, his approach exhibits a preference for "the theoretically immature over the theoretically flourishing" (192), and is ultimately a promissory note for future work in cognitive science. Woods's robust commitment to the truth of fictional statements provides a ready solution to what has come to be known as "the paradox of fiction" (140). The paradox is that we are emotionally moved by works of fiction despite knowing that they are not real, even though reality might be thought necessary for the objects of our emotions. Woods persuasively likens fiction to flotation, since in each case, "competing causal powers are in play" (140). Just as floating objects are acted on by gravity, pulling them downwards, and buoyancy, pushing them upwards, so is the reader acted on by the emotional force of a story experienced as true (rightly, in situ the story) and by the knowledge that it is not true (in situ the world). If the story succeeds emotionally, the former outweighs the latter. 3. The Complete Sherlock Holmes The framework set out above allows Woods to tackle a range of questions, best illustrated by example. Woods's recurring example is Sherlock Holmes, an apposite choice not only because "Sherlock 6 ANDREW ABERDEIN is one of the world's best known non-existent objects" (102), but also because the stories in which he occurs present problems for theories of fiction that tidier and more self-contained narratives do not. Woods asserts that, in reading a story set in a world much like our own we may, indeed must, presume many facts about that world that we know to be true of the real world but which have not been explicitly confirmed for the fiction: "fictional works inherit the world" (81). (Woods is thereby committed to what William D'Alessandro calls "implicitism" (2016, 53).) For example, there are several parts of Holmes's anatomy that Arthur Conan Doyle never discusses, but this omission should not be taken to imply their absence.3 As Woods observes, "Sherlock's incompleteness is only an epistemic one, in just the way that Caesar's was or Vladimir Putin's is" (216). Less successfully, he tells us that "even Gregor Samsa had a spine, both before waking up and after, albeit not the same one" (81). But, at least if we follow the consensus of translators that Kafka's "Ungeziefer" should be rendered as something akin to "bug", then what Samsa awoke to find himself was, quite literally, invertebrate. Nonetheless, the problem here is confined to the example: for most fictional characters, spinelessness is strictly metaphorical. The Holmes stories notoriously contain inconsistencies: Dr Watson's war wound is variously in his leg or his shoulder; only two months elapse between April and October in "The Red-Headed League", and so on (Sayers, 1946, 168). Woods observes that most readers take these lapses in their stride: "Watson's wound is in one place or the other and remains, and as is most of what is true of Holmes' faithful friend, unknown to readers" (94). Some readers, of course, are more pertinacious. Notoriously, so in the case of "Sherlockians" playing the "Great Game" of attempting to resolve apparent omissions and inconsistencies in the stories by elaborate (and often tongue-in-cheek) extrapolations from the text and relevant historical sources, on the straight-faced supposition that the stories are historically true. The accidental inspiration for the Great Game was an essay by the writer and priest Ronald Knox satirizing the more far-fetched sort of reasoning sometimes employed in Biblical criticism (Knox, 1920). (This essay seems to mark the point at which "canon", used satirically by Knox, jumped the fence from 3Indeed, Woods reveals elsewhere that "the working title of Truth in Fiction was Sherlock's Member: An Essay on Truth in Fiction . . . I am a bit sorry now that I chickened out" (Woods, 2019, 358). TALES TALL AND TRUE 7 theology to literature and popular culture.) For example, in The Sign of Four, Doyle has Watson wed Mary Morstan, but isolated remarks in later stories suggest that he is widowed and remarries. However, any attempt at a chronology will show Watson moving in and out of Baker St on multiple occasions, which some Sherlockians have taken as evidence of further marriages. Hence Dorothy L. Sayers could complain of "a conspiracy afoot to provide Watson with as many wives as Henry VIII" (Sayers, 1946, 148). The Great Game lends helpful support to one aspect of Woods's account. Woods is at pains to distance himself from the approach to fiction he terms "pretendism" (13). On this account, defended in different guises by philosophers as various as Saul Kripke, Gareth Evans, John Searle, Kendall Walton and, more recently, Bradley Armour-Garb and James Woodbridge, readers of fiction don't believe the things they read, but pretend to do so. Woods rejects pretendism as phenomenologically implausible: readers of fiction do not experience reading fiction "as pretending, play-acting or makebelieving" (20). That is, however, exactly what the players of the Great Game do experience (unless they really have convinced themselves that Holmes was an historical figure). But, crucially, Sherlockians are not typical readers and playing the Great Game is not typical readerly behaviour. If pretendism succeeds as an epistemology of the Great Game, it must fail as an epistemology of everyday fiction consumption. A deeper inconsistency concerns Holmes's death and resurrection. Doyle indulged in an early specimen of what has come to be known as retroactive continuity, or ret-conning, when in "The Empty House" he reversed the decision made a decade earlier in "The Final Problem" to kill off his most famous creation. As Woods acknowledges, problems such as this present a dilemma for his approach. The specific case is not the worst possible, since Watson's presence as potentially unreliable narrator provided Doyle with an effective line of retreat. The wider problem is that presented by serial fiction in general: "how to individuate sites when stories are elements of a series" (95). If each individual story is treated as a distinct site, the continuity of the series is destroyed. But if the series is a single site, then sites cannot help resolve any contradictions internal to the series. Woods's favoured resolution is to treat auctorial statements in serial fictions as provisional, but subject to something like a statute of limitations or "a variant of the common law for the long-gone" (96). That is, after sufficient time has elapsed, some 8 ANDREW ABERDEIN matters should be treated as settled, if defeasibly so, just as missing persons may eventually be declared legally dead. Deepest of all are those "inconsistencies internal to the stories in which they inhere by narratively driven auctorial design" (192). Doyle's works would not seem to supply an example, since his stories were always at least intended to be consistent. Woods suggests Ray Bradbury's celebrated time-travel narrative "Sound of Thunder", in which the characters return to a present which has been changed by their actions in the past. Woods concludes that the nocontradiction thesis will be of no avail and resorts to the no-bother thesis: some statements may indeed be both true and false of Bradbury's 2055, ensuring by ex falso quodlibet that every statement is true as well, but readers are practiced at turning a blind eye to such things. Abandoning the no-contradiction thesis here may be premature-if we interpret the story in terms of Everettian spacetime, the characters return to a different world from the one they left. The natural way of accommodating this to Woods's system would seem to be to treat the two 2055s as different sites. However, the broader point is that readers can tolerate outright inconsistency, although even the most tolerant of readers may eventually abandon a story as incoherent. 4. From Sayso to Fanfic The Holmes narratives have been frequently adapted-perhaps more frequently than any other works. This presents at least two problems: the identity of the characters across the different versions and the canonicity of the adapted works. Woods provides a means of addressing both issues. His history-constitutivity of fictional entities thesis ostensibly restricts canonicity to works produced directly by the creator of an entity, rendering all adaptations noncanonical. However, Woods qualifies his theses to widen the scope to include cases where "ownership of a fictional character passes by agreement to a different author, who is then free to make further things history-constitutive of that identically the same character" (100). For Sherlock Holmes, that would appear to extend canonicity at least to authorised adaptations, from William Gillette's 1899 play onwards. Woods constrains this broad account of canonicity by his world-inheritance thesis: for example, since the later Basil Rathbone films were set in the 1940s when Holmes would have been in his nineties, as Rathbone manifestly was not, "what Hollywood borrowed in 1944 was not the person whom Doyle created TALES TALL AND TRUE 9 but rather the name . . . and a fair bit of its connotation" (118). This applies a fortiori to adaptations set in the twenty-first century, such as Sherlock (2010-17) and Elementary (2012-19); conversely, adaptations set in the 1940s which do depict Holmes as nonagenarian, such as Mr. Holmes (2015), could still be construed as depicting the same character. All of these speculations are at odds with the established usage of "canon" in discussion of Holmes: the 56 stories and four novels published by Doyle (excluding the so-called "apocrypha"- noncanonical pieces written by Doyle-let alone any adaptations). This definition of the Holmes canon is due some deference, as it is so firmly established (and, as we have seen, marks the first use of the term outside of theology). Moreover, on this narrower interpretation, Woods's fictionalization of the fictional thesis not only provides a plausible account of Holmesian pastiche and fanfiction, it also provides an affirmative answer to Sara Uckelman's question, "Is it possible for an author to write fanfic of their own work"?4 At least some of the apocrypha would seem to be exactly this. For example, "The Field Bazaar", written for an Edinburgh University student fund raiser in 1896, may be seen as Doyle fictionalizing his own fictional creations. This sheds doubt, for instance, on Watson's otherwise unattested status as an Edinburgh graduate. There are two questions here: did Doyle seriously intend that Watson graduated from Edinburgh; and, if so, are his extra-canonical statements to that effect history constitutive? Woods's reliance on author's sayso requires him to take authors' intentions seriously, but there is more than one way to do this. The contrast is brought into focus by the question of Dumbledore's sexual orientation: gay according to J. K. Rowling in public comments but as yet unspecified in her novels and film scripts. Can Rowling make history constitutive statements about the fictional entities she created when talking about her work and not just when writing that work? On Woods's account of author's sayso, Rowling would seem entirely unrestricted in how she communicates history constitutive statements. (A perspective Rowling seems to share (Gendler, 2010, 152).) By contrast, we could require that author's sayso is made explicit in the text itself. A possible compromise would be that the author's sayso must be present in the text, but may be wholly implicit, provided that it was intended by the author as something that the 4On Twitter, November 21, 2018. See also (Uckelman, 2018). 10 ANDREW ABERDEIN reader might in principle grasp (Irwin, 2015, 146). External statements such as Rowling's can then be relevant to our understanding of the text by making the implicit explicit. Holmes adaptations present another problem for theories of fiction: they are so numerous that they may qualify as what Roy Cook defines as "massive serialized collaborative fiction" (MSCF). Cook defines "massive" as so large that it is "impossible, extremely implausible, or unlikely that a single person can, or will, experience all parts of the fiction in a manner appropriate for the interpretation, evaluation, and so on of the fiction" (Cook, 2013, 271). This is surely true of the multitudinous versions of Holmes, which are also clearly serial and collaborative, although they may exhibit less cohesion than Cook's examples of the central continuity of DC or Marvel comics. Cook makes five observations about canonicity in MSCFs: (1) "some noncanonical works are interpretationally relevant"; (2) "the canon versus noncanon distinction is sensitive to medium"; (3) "canonicity practices are, at least partially, political and commercial"; (4) "canonicity practices are dynamic and negotiable: a work is not eternally canonical"; and (5) "canonicity practices are participatory" (Cook, 2013, 272 f.). Each of these points suggests possible further refinements to our understanding of sayso. The first reflects the discussion above: perhaps we should favour interpretations that make Watson an Edinburgh graduate and Dumbledore gay, even if we do not have canonical author's sayso to support these claims. The second point offers a possible restriction on sayso: prioritize auctorial statements in the favoured medium. (For Doyle, this is prose: his Sherlock Holmes plays are not usually seen as canonical.) As to the third and fourth points, we have seen that Holmes's death at Reichenbach was made canonical by Doyle's sayso, but is no longer; this reflects a commercial decision: the $45,000 Doyle received from Collier's for bringing Holmes back to life made him the best paid author in the world. The last point suggests perhaps the most important departure from Woods's account: canon formation reflects collective decision making by the audience as much as the author, whose sayso is thereby constrained. These factors suggest a friendly amendment: replace "is the creator of x" with "has canonical authority with respect to x and is accepted by the audience as having acted in accordance with that authority in stating S" in the history-constitutivity of fictional entities thesis and, suitably negated, the fictionalization of the fictional thesis. Creators and their assignees would ordinarily have canonical authority, but may chose not to exercise it, or may intend to exercise TALES TALL AND TRUE 11 it but fail to do so if they are not accepted by the audience as having done so. (Conversely, a creator may chose not to exercise canonical authority, but be (mis)interpreted by the audience as having done so. Unless the creator corrects the error, the audience's take on their sayso should stand.) The audience may revisit their acceptance or rejection. In particular, they may do so at the prompting of the creator, although they are not obliged so to do. While there are many such details in Truth in Fiction with which one may take issue, and there is much left to do in the broader programme of which it is a part, it is never less than a thoughtprovoking and enjoyable read. Anyone interested in the semantics and pragmatics of fiction will find much of value in its pages. References Cook, Roy T. 2013. Canonicity and normativity in massive, serialized, collaborative fiction. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71(3): 271-275. D'Alessandro, William. 2016. Explicitism about truth in fiction. The British Journal of Aesthetics 56(1): 53-65. Empson, William. 1947. Seven Types of Ambiguity. London: Chatto and Windus, 2nd ed. Gendler, Tamar Szabó. 2010. Is Dumbledore gay? Who's to say? In The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy: Hogwarts for Muggles, ed. Gregory Bassham, 143-156. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Irwin, William. 2015. Authorial declaration and extreme actual intentionalism: Is Dumbledore gay? The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73(2): 141-147. Knox, Ronald A. 1920. Studies in the literature of Sherlock Holmes. Blackfriars 1(3): 154-172. Lewis, David. 1978. Truth in fiction. American Philosophical Quarterly 15(1): 37-46. Routley, Richard and Robert K. Meyer. 1976. Dialectical logic, classical logic, and the consistency of the world. Studies in Soviet Thought 16(1/2): 1-25. Sasson, Jack M. 1988. Who cut Samson's hair? (and other trifling issues raised by Judges 16). Prooftexts 8(3): 333-339. Sayers, Dorothy L. 1946. Unpopular Opinions. London: Victor Gollancz. Uckelman, Sara. 2018. Fanfiction, canon, and possible worlds. Online at . 12 ANDREW ABERDEIN Woods, John. 1974. The Logic of Fiction: A Philosophical Sounding of Deviant Logic. The Hague: Mouton. Woods, John. 2013. Errors of Reasoning: Naturalizing the Logic of Inference. London: College Publications. Woods, John. 2018. Truth in Fiction: Rethinking its Logic. Cham: Springer. Woods, John. 2019. On the follies of intercourse between models and fiction: A naturalized causal-response diagnosis. In Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology: Inferential Models for Logic, Language, Cognition and Computation, eds. Ángel NepomucenoFernández, Lorenzo Magnani, Francisco J. Salguero-Lamillar, Cristina Barés-Gómez, and Matthieu Fontaine, 337-371. Cham: Springer.