Aspects, Points of View, and Objectivity

Abstract

AbstractThe aspectival nature of fictional content is not an intrinsic feature of a ‘language of fiction’ but a feature of the conventional response associated with the fictive stance. For it is a consequence of adopting the fictive stance to propositional content, under the conventions of the practice, that the aspects through which that content is characterized acquire special prominence. The notion that fictional content is aspectival in this way relates to familiar conceptions of ‘point of view’ in literary criticism. A central task for the literary critic is to identify the means by which a certain content is presented, and the literary purposes behind such a presentation, usually with the working assumption that the content itself is not clearly independent of the mode of its presentation. Less familiar issues, however, of a more philosophical nature, need to be addressed about ‘point of view’ with regard to fiction per se. This chapter discusses the idea of objectivity in order to secure the position on ‘point of view’ — based on the fictive stance — against metaphysically motivated arguments that seek to show that it is not only fictional objects, but in fact all objects, that possess an aspectival nature.