Abstract
The mind has not been a central concept in sociology. According to the traditional view, the mind is located in the brain, and is thus bereft of observable social facts for sociological studies. At most, it is a concept of psychology or philosophy. This article argues that the history of the modern novel provides large amounts of data about minds and consciousness. Even though individual novels are fictional and invented, the continual reception of these fictional presentations verifies their social relevance. The article argues that fiction establishes the main social discourse on possible private thoughts, thus having a great impact on how we understand and speak about minds and human interiority. The argument is advanced by selectively reading a long-standing narratological debate on literary minds and their exceptionality. The article renounces the cognitive theories of ‘mind-reading’ as overly optimistic and metaphorically misleading, resorting instead to the phenomenological theories of ‘primary intersubjectivity’, which help in understanding how novelists are able to invent credible minds in the first place.
Highlights
The mind has not been a central concept in sociology
The mind appears to belong to psychology or philosophy, and it is bereft of socially observable facts for sociologists to study
I intend to tease out some relevant particularities of the fictional discourse on minds with the help of Ian McEwan’s novel The Children Act (2014)
Summary
Date of submission: April 2019 Date of acceptance: June 2019 Published in: July 2019. In: Olli PYYHTINEN (coord.) “Fictioning Social Theory: The Use of Fiction to Enrich, Inform, and Challenge the Theoretical Imagination” [online article]. Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and Universidad de Antioquia. The texts published in this journal are – unless otherwise indicated – covered by the Creative Commons Spain Attribution 4.0 International licence. The full text of the licence can be consulted here: http://creativecommons. The full text of the licence can be consulted here: http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/
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