Epistemological Problems of Didactic Fiction

Abstract

People usually believe that didactic fiction implicitly conveys propositional truths about the real world, known as the moral of the story. This paper presents five possible epistemological concerns with the idea of implicit narrative transmission of propositional knowledge: (1) narratives do not contain justification of their didactic meaning; (2) recipients gain no knowledge if they are uncertain of the author’s intention; (3) fiction has no cognitive content or value; (4) whatever recipients gain from the story may not be new propositional knowledge; and (5) if a proposition is not explicitly stated in the story, it is unclear how it can be extracted. These concerns are presented as a series of arguments and possible objections. Most of the arguments and objections are drawn from the analytic philosophy of literature and adapted to the listed epistemological issues.