Writing the Liberal Arts
and Sciences

Truth, Dialogue, and
Historical Consciousness

Edited by
Mary Bouquet,
Annemieke Meijer and
Cornelus Sanders

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Floor Plan University College Utrecht

Reproduced with permission of Architectuurbureau Sluijmer en van Leeuwen BV

Cover design: Gijs Mathijs Ontwerpers, Amsterdam

Typesetting: Crius Group, Hulshout

isbn 978 94 6372 936 9

e-isbn 978 90 4855 508 6 (ePub)

doi 10.5117/ 9789463729369

nur 113

© The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2021

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Writing the Liberal Arts and Sciences

Mary Bouquet, Annemieke Meijer and Cornelus Sanders

I Truth

The indispensable Truth: Postmodernism and the possibility to understand each other

Floris van der Burg

Fictionality, or the importance of being earnest

Agnes Andeweg

And Justice for All

Alexis A. Aronowitz

Handling tricky questions

Jocelyn Ballantyne

What is Meaning?

Gaetano Fiorin

II Dialogue

Parmenides and Dōgen – an encounter

Chiara Robbiano

On being a doctor

Cornelus Sanders

Law, imagination, and poetry

Bald de Vries

Religion 2.0: Thinking about religion through technology

Katja Rakow

Global mental health and the evolution of clinical psychology

Robert Dunn

Heroes of the in-between

Rozi Tóth and Gerard van der Ree

III Historical Consciousness

What history’s most overqualified calculus student tells us about liberal arts mathematics

Viktor Blåsjö

Statistics: The art of seeking sense in numbers

Guus de Krom

The canon of the Netherlands revisited

James Kennedy

Love thyself: An abridged history of Western portraiture

Tijana Žakula

Two Monuments

Mary Bouquet

The challenge of living on renewable energy

Anton E.M. van de Ven

The earth as an observatory: Team work in science

Filipe Freire

The First Assignment

Markha Valenta

List of contributors

List of figures

Notes

Index of names

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge all those who presented papers at the Scholarly Stories seminar, 2017-2020, helping to create a fruitful setting for exchange among liberal arts and sciences practitioners at our Tuesday lunchtime meetings in Locke A. These include Sandra Ponzanesi, Bettina Boschen, Erwin van Sas, Robert Renes, Lonia Jakubowska (who initiated the series), Meindert Fennema, Wil Pansters, Sabine Uijl, Jan van Ophuijsen, Maarten Eppinga, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Diana Odier-Contreras Garduno, Christoph Baumgartner, Gert Jan Vroege, Nina Köll, Brian Dermody, Patricia Canning, Bas Defize, Gerda van Rossum, Arjen Vredenburg (and cello), Tatiana Bruni, Chiel Kattenbelt, Kim van der Wijngaart, Guido Terra-Bleeker, Maarten Diederix, Mark Baldwin, Elisa Veini, Ingrid Wesselink, Konstantina Georgelou. Even though time and other constraints conspired against their writing an essay for our rather open-ended project, we nonetheless benefited from all of these contributions for cultivating a liberal arts and sciences habitus in our community.

Our heartfelt thanks to Inge van der Bijl of Amsterdam University Press for graciously receiving us and our proposal for a book and encouraging us at every step, and to AUP Desk Editor Jaap Wagenaar for his cheerful efficiency.

Former Dean of UCU, James Kennedy, gave the project his blessing, encouraged, and supported the full-day seminar we ran at Antropia, Driebergen; we greatly appreciate his trust and participation. Without the collegial understanding and support of Sjoerd Bosgra at decisive moments in the book’s coming-into-being, this project risked turning into a damp squib: sincere thanks for steady nerves. We also thank Thomas Hardeman for his incisive work on the index and Peter de Voogd for taking in hand our endnotes. We are grateful to Michael van Leeuwen for permission to use his ‘Masterplan Village Campus’ for the cover of this book.

We have also greatly enjoyed and learned from one another in creating this book: bringing together the different perspectives and competences that go into writing and editing a book has been a non-stop learning process.

Mary Bouquet, Annemieke Meijer and Cornelus Sanders

Utrecht, 30 April 2021

Introduction: Writing the Liberal Arts and Sciences

Mary Bouquet, Annemieke Meijer and Cornelus Sanders

This book was written by authors from the fields of literary studies, criminology, physics, linguistics, political science, medicine, philosophy, clinical psychology, mathematics, art history, law, astrophysics, history, anthropology, and religious studies. It is the written outcome of a form of collegial storytelling among faculty members working in the liberal arts and sciences setting of University College Utrecht, the Netherlands. Weekly lunchtime gatherings brought together academics from these widely differing fields, with equally diverse personal journeys, to sample other fields of knowledge. There was a combined sense of curiosity about the content of these other fields and those in them; about different ways of approaching and understanding the world; and about the possibility of being able to ask questions outside one’s comfort zone. This interest was fostered by working together in a multidisciplinary liberal arts and sciences college; sharing offices and other facilities with colleagues from completely different fields meant that we were used to having chats across disciplinary boundaries, probably more so than our colleagues in monodisciplinary departments. We wanted to see where these conversations would lead if channelled into written form. The willingness to think beyond the boundaries of a given field when approaching a particular phenomenon proved stimulating as a writing experiment: critical feedback on content and style from a diverse body of faculty members was unprecedented. We began to wonder whether we could write about some aspect of our respective fields of knowledge not just for ourselves but also for external audiences. We imagined our readers as potential liberal arts and sciences students, but also as interested peers and lay people. As we proceeded, the subjects we wrote about changed and evolved. The many-faceted process of transformation from the spoken to the written word reflects the effort of moving beyond disciplinary jargon. The interdisciplinary in this respect is a particular kind of scholarly attitude built upon curiosity and open-endedness: we did not know the outcome in advance, but allowed our voices to emerge through a process that stretched over several years.

The themes of truth, dialogue, and historical consciousness surfaced slowly – while contributors moved from storytelling mode to the written essay format – and became a possible way of sequencing the texts. That said, each essay exceeds the category to which it was assigned, intersecting with the other two. A sense of history surely informs the quest for truth through language in the realm of philosophy. Truth can also be revealed through the language of fiction: novels, poems, and plays, written at various historical junctures, use various conventions that establish truths in fictional worlds that are nonetheless part of the world. Trials involve the deployment of evidence and argument by prosecution and defence, calling upon witnesses, requiring a jury to arrive at a truthful verdict, and presided over by a judge. Loaded questions that plant ideas in people’s minds are a means of mystifying history and obscuring the truth by means of syntax. Language, as a dynamic interface between cognitive and environmental realities, each of which translates and shapes the other, entails that some meanings exceed grammatical relations. The material forms of sacred texts through history exercise particular kinds of agency through their liturgical and ceremonial uses, combining the Word with print and digital technologies that call into question assumptions about secularization and modernity.

Notions of the truth are conceptualized and approached quite differently in the respective domains of philosophy, literature, criminology, linguistics, and religious studies, due to their respective histories. Yet the contributions from these disciplines show that approach and the subject matter are not simply ‘different’, but that questions, conversations, and dialogue across those disciplinary boundaries opened up new perspectives and deepened the awareness of the position of each domain of knowledge with regard to the others. Growing awareness of the fragility of our world, and the damage inflicted by collective consumption patterns and engrained assumptions, has infiltrated many disciplines and was sharpened by the global Covid-19 pandemic that struck in 2019/2020. This biosocial crisis gave an impetus to our writing: writing as a form of social life, a search for truth and dialogue, when our professional lives took an unexpected turn: the transformation of the university into a digitalized cottage industry brought home the core value of writing projects. Amid the uncertainty wrought by a virus, writing became a way of engaging with and reflecting upon the world, a way of adding value to the fragmented world we found ourselves in. Writing became, quite literally, a moment of truth and sustenance at a moment of historical rupture.

Authors have recourse to several literary forms including dialogue, poetry, fiction, and the written assignment. These forms provide means of reconnoitring such matters as the archaic language of seventeenth-century philosophers, the eloquent silence of monuments, and the emergence of a voice by means of a college assignment. An imagined dialogue between non-contemporary Western- and Eastern-schooled philosophers opens up new vistas on the central question of being in the world. Writing poetry offers law students a new entrée for reading political philosophy and making it their own. Case studies written as human stories offer new insights into the decisive conversations between medical practitioners and their patients which usually take place behind closed doors. Taking account of local healing systems in low-income countries by engaging trained paraprofessionals helps to bridge the gap in mental health care while changing the course of clinical psychology. The letters exchanged between historical scientists, who were also friends, elucidates how the broader intellectual setting can enrich or impoverish the development of knowledge in a particular field. Literalizing a metaphorical dialogue between two monuments is a way of exploring the agency of aesthetics, space, materials, and form, which can reinforce understanding while going beyond words.

The essays exemplify historical consciousness in equally varied ways. These include writing about paradigm shifts within specific disciplines, which is a classic way of introducing and contextualizing a more specific topic. The historical shift from quantifying concrete phenomena to characterizing and quantifying abstract categories, in the field of statistics, aptly illustrates this point. A related point concerns the impact of an increasing body of knowledge within a particular field: mathematics. Since it takes more of the student’s lifetime to gain cognizance of the field of mathematics, the result is increasing specialization and the loss of a holistic vision of knowledge. Consciousness of the role of history in the present also impels the updating of national historical canons – where these exist. History is reconfigured when government calls upon specialists from the next generation to update the events, protagonists and phenomena featured in the canon in the light of current social issues and developments. This top-down version of history contrasts with the grassroots contestation and revision of a government-sanctioned version of the history of the energy sector by means of public art/ monuments. While visual representations of the self, led by the selfie, are ubiquitous, few are aware of the historical conditioning of the pose they adopt, the attire they don, and the attributes with which they surround themselves. The truth is that such portraits have been a matter of debate and censure for centuries: historical awareness here functions almost as a cautionary tale. The photographic portrait of the black hole at the other end of the universe, an event that happened lightyears ago, mesmerized public attention. The image was an outcome of dialogue and cooperation in the global scientific community of astrophysicists, searching for something that is known but invisible. Faced with this sense of universal historical catastrophe, the practice of writing, of finding a voice, gains new élan.

Dear Reader, we wish you much pleasure in perusing our essays – in any order you wish – which we hope may inspire you to explore for yourself the joys of writing, and of the Liberal Arts.

I

Truth

The indispensable Truth: Postmodernism and the possibility to understand each other

Floris van der Burg

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.

– Hannah Arendt1

Truth is under siege. Fake news is everywhere and serious research that warns of current climate change is happily impugned by non-experts. The internet is rife with conspiracy theories ranging from the usual alien abductions, to claims about a flat earth, or the dangers of vaccination. We grow up with politicians who have, to say the least, a strained relationship with the truth. Disagreements about the possible truth of a story or position frequently end in: ‘Well, that is my truth!’ or ‘That is just your opinion.’ This is a widespread approach to the confusing times we live in. Every day we are confronted with an enormous amount of information that may or may not be true. How do we decide what to believe? Or does it simply not matter? Is my truth indeed as good as any other? Is truth relative to me, or my circumstances, or to a particular culture?

In the wake of the Enlightenment, Modernism (roughly from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century) taught us that logic and reason are universal, and that the discoveries of the natural sciences could, ultimately, be substantiated by irrefutable evidence. That is, the claims of the sciences about the way the world is are objectively true or false. While science yields an ever more truthful picture of the way the world is, this ever-improving understanding of the world we live in will also ensure that human beings will change themselves and their societies for the better. The expectation is that life in the future will be more humane, just, and prosperous.

But not everybody is so optimistic. The twentieth-century movement of Postmodernism, although quite diverse within itself, rejects this Modernist optimism and its faith in Truth, reason, and logic (where ‘Truth’ with a capital ‘T’ stands for eternal, unchanging truth). Characterized by a deep suspicion of any claims to universality, the Postmodernists often deny the very existence of objective truth, and the universal validity of reason and logic. Truth, some argue, is relative to a culture, and any attempt to impose one’s own truth on another culture might even be considered an act of aggression, an attempt to replace their truth with yours.

Such scepticism about the very possibility of our sentences, theories, or beliefs accurately describing an objective world has taken hold of many of us, quite independently of any knowledge of, or even an interest in, Postmodernism. There are some compelling reasons for this: widespread disagreement about the nature of many aspects of our lives is common, and, rightly, often encouraged. We disagree about politics, morality, philosophy, and aesthetics. Even in scientific debate we disagree about how best to understand the world. The history of science is not a neatly progressive story of humankind slowly encroaching upon the final, True story of nature. Instead, it is the story of a messy, haphazard series of hypotheses, theories, and arguments between scientists. Could it be that this disagreement is merely symptomatic of a deeper problem: the absence of an objective, eternal Truth?

As our view of the world expands and we are increasingly aware of the different points of view held by different people on many topics all over the globe, we are ever strengthened in our scepticism about claims to Truth. Such relativism, especially about issues to do with values, is not new. It simply comes with this wider view of the world that includes more, different cultures. It is unsurprising then, that the relativism of Postmodernism fell on fertile ground. By arguing against the universality of our general philosophical, scientific, and moral assumptions, the Postmodernists pointed to the boundaries of the validity of our, often Western, ways of thinking. Perhaps the world is not the same for everyone, perhaps there are alternative versions of logic, perhaps there is not only one single human nature, and perhaps science is relative to culture too.

It may be possible to explain the popularity of the Postmodernist movement by the many amusing and creative applications of its very basic tenets. If science is not a collection of accurate descriptions of the way the world really is, then it might just be a story, a story like any other story, not better and not worse. Inside the story or narrative one would be tempted to accept its truth as the Truth, but from the outside this may not be so obvious. Stories then, are ideal to illustrate the point of Postmodern thinking. We often hear Coleridge’s phrase ‘suspension of disbelief’2 when we accept the truth or plausibility of certain ingredients in a story which we would reject in the real world. Think of the magic in the Harry Potter stories, or the uncanny ability of the spaceships in Star Trek to fly at multiple times the speed of light. In such cases the boundaries between contexts, or truth-worlds, are clearly drawn. But a more powerful way to raise awareness of different truth-worlds may be to deliberately cross the boundaries between them.

Consider this example. In the 1986 John Hughes film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off we see the lead character, Ferris Bueller, repeatedly turn away from the action in the movie and address the audience in the cinema about the content of the film.3 Famously, he tells the audience about his reasons for taking the day off school: ‘Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.’ In the final scene, when the credits are already rolling, Ferris returns on screen and says: ‘You’re still here? It’s over. Go home.’ Ferris Bueller undoubtedly was not the first one to step outside the context of the work of art he was part of, while staying in character, and he will not be the last. The Postmodern point of such a context-busting device is to deliberately cross the boundary between two different contexts, between two different truth-worlds. Truth, in such contexts, is relative to its truth-world. A truth-world can be a culture, a system of values, a scientific theory, or, as in our example, a movie. Ferris Bueller’s stepping out of the movie to address the audience in the cinema confronts us with the relative nature of all that is said within the context of a single truth-world. It draws attention to the boundary between our world and the movie-world, where things are different, where different statements are true and false.

If truth can depend on the particular narrative it is part of, be it a story, a theory, a system of values, or a culture, it is no wonder many people are suspicious of any and all truth-claims. Why should we believe any of these claims? Why should we regard truth as any more stable than a ‘mere’ opinion? As said, then, truth, and especially Truth, has earned itself a bad reputation.

It may well be fair and reasonable to question the truth of the content of the claims that we make about politics, ethics, aesthetics, and, yes, even science. But should we doubt the validity of these claims just because they are truth-claims? The truth or truth-claims is what we can doubt. There is good reason to do so on many occasions. The best reason for a critical attitude towards truth-claims is that we do not know that these truth-claims are indeed the Truth (note the capital T). Thus Truth is elusive. Some thinkers, known as radical sceptics, even say that we can never attain Truth, not even in the best and most fruitful sciences. They have good cause to say this: it is not possible to find conclusive confirmation by means of experiment of any theory. This is not some mysterious rule, but rather a simple consequence of what our theories (laws) in experimental science do. They govern events of a certain type in the past, the present, and the future. The problem is, of course, that we cannot confirm by experiment that our theory or law will always work in the future, no matter how successful it has been in the past. So there always remains an element of doubt.

When we use the word ‘true’ for less exact, or better, less exceptionless areas of study, such as ethics, aesthetics, or politics, then there appears to be even more reason to question such truth-claims. It is difficult enough to try and formulate strict laws that predict the behaviour of the lifeless world of the material objects that surround us. But when the behaviour we are trying to capture in universal generalizations is the behaviour of human beings, then our inclination to doubt the universality of these laws is even stronger. Perhaps there is a simple explanation for this tendency: we simply do not like it when we are explained by means of law-like regularities. It does not do justice to our conviction that we are individuals whose behaviour warrants a complex, individual explanation. Our strong sense of individuality rebels against any temptation of the natural sciences to say that our behaviour, our innermost motives and desires, may well be reduced to the behaviour of perfectly predictable physical particles. This type of physicalist reductionism does not fit in well with the unique value we like to ascribe to every human individual, or as the l’Oréal ads like to tell us: ‘You’re worth it!’ You are unique and exceptional.

It is entirely in line with this powerful sense of self then, that we are strongly inclined to reject all truth-claims that are not our own. If, by the lights of some Postmodernists, it may be the case that claiming a truth that transcends the individual, is at once an attempt to replace another culture’s truth with yours, then any truth-claim may also be considered an assault on your personal truth. Cultural relativism, in these cases, easily descends into individual relativism.

Fortunately, this strikes most of us as an undesirable situation, because it is unworkable. We resolve it, in most cases, by separating the individual, or even cultural, claim from a more universal one. So, we tend to allow the outcomes of thorough research on the efficacy of a certain painkiller to carry more universality than claims about the beauty of the Mona Lisa. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, we say, but the power of morphine is not. But some Postmodern thinkers insist that all truth is relative to a culture.4 This would then render even the most well-established claims of the empirical sciences non-universal. It is quite easy to maintain such a stance as there are many sensible scientists who are radical sceptics. So, they would not claim absolute truth for any theory. It is not difficult to see how this cautious attitude towards science can be used to impugn all truth claims, as there always remains an element of doubt about what we appear to know to be true. And yet there is good reason not to give in to this temptation.

How then should we respond to such varied and widespread denial of the possibility of objective truth? The most important difference between a relativist and a radical sceptic is that the relativist denies that there is Truth. That is, the relativist simply says that there is no one way the world really is. The radical sceptic is perfectly happy to say that there is Truth, that there is one way the world really is, but we never know whether we got it right. This may appear a subtle difference, but it is not. The relativist has given up, whereas the radical sceptic can happily continue to investigate the nature of the world. The sceptic sees scepticism as a methodological stance: it makes good sense to question all your conclusions, even if you are quite certain of them. But when your critical attitude does not force you to admit that you are wrong (this time), you may of course hold on to this theory until it is indeed falsified by new insights or evidence. This way we do not need to give up on all our sciences as ‘not True anyway’, or ‘just another opinion’. The crucial difference here is the difference between the expertise of a specialist in a certain field and the lay opinions of the non-specialist in that field.

Still, the dogged relativist will not be persuaded by any of these arguments. Nothing that has been said so far makes it impossible to stick to the claim that there is no Truth, if for no other reason than that it is not possible to establish any of these ‘Truths’, even by the radical sceptical scientists’ own admission. So, even if we have, and I suspect that we indeed have done this, established that there are very good practical reasons to work at finding out the Truth about the world we live in, this will not dissuade the relativist from the position that there is simply no Truth. Perhaps, the relativist will argue, this obsession with Truth is unhealthy, and it would be better for all if we admitted that truth is relative, and hence there is no role for truth left in our (post)modern world. Sometimes it is only a minuscule sliver of doubt that gives the relativist enough reason to impugn even our most reliable theories as ‘not True’.

We might respond by giving up on the end-goal of Truth in science, and turn to a form of pragmatism: what works stays, what does not work, goes. And the term ‘truth’ has become obsolete. I suspect this is not an advisable route to take, if for no other reason than that very often in the history of science, we have given up empirical success (what works) in favour of a new theory that did not work so well, but seemed Truer. What works is not the only criterion when choosing which theory to embrace. Certainly, anyone concerned with the social, political, or power-implications of truth claims, in science and beyond, must be very cautious around purely pragmatic considerations in deciding how to view the world. Unjust, but eminently pragmatic solutions to moral or political problems continue to offend our most fundamental sensibilities.

But what do we say to the relativist, who is principled, and still wants to give up on all uses of ‘truth’? We must say that the relativist cannot dispose of truth. The reason is as simple as it is far-reaching. Truth is not part of the world. Truth is a function of language. What can be true or false are sentences claiming something. What is true or false are theories, propositions, statements, or stories. So when our relativist mistakenly identifies Truth with ‘the World as it really is’, she is confusing the world being described in our sentences and theories with the predicate ‘is True’ that we use to class these sentences and theories. The world is not true or false; the world just is. That is, trees and dogs and fire hydrants and brick buildings are not true or false, but the sentences we use to talk about them are. It is here that the concept of truth becomes relevant. The relativist may be able to maintain that no sentence is reliably True, but that does not mean that the relativist can also claim that we have no further use for the concept of truth. This concept is not part of the world. It is part of language. If we did not have the concept of truth in our language, we could not understand each other. If we did not have the concept of truth the relativist could not even begin to speak of theories that are all just stories, the one no better or worse than the other.

An example: if I say ‘I believe the sun is shining’, what should my audience then assume about me? Surely it is that I believe the sentence ‘the sun is shining’ is true in the context in which I uttered it. Imagine a world in which we do not think that when people say what they believe, they also think that their belief is true. In this world our language would no longer make sense. And we could no longer make sense of what people are trying to tell us. This use of the concept of truth cannot be abolished by the relativist, on pain of abolishing all language and with it the wonderful literature of which the Postmodern relativist is so fond.

If this is right, and I believe that it is, then the relativist is not much more than the radical sceptic, who believes that there is always some remaining question as to the Truth of any theory. For the relativist this scepticism may then also include all beliefs and all narratives. But again, that is no different from the radical sceptic, who simply never even considered quibbling over the truth of the magic in the Harry Potter novels. That the truth or falsehood of such linguistic expressions is context-bound was long clear to the sceptic. Indeed, the degree to which we can or should doubt the truth of some story, theory, or statement is relative to the domain to which it belongs. But that says something about the different domains, such as narrative, art, politics, science, or maths, to name but a few, and not about truth itself.

Suggestions for further reading

C. Butler. Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

R.L. Kirkham. Theories of Truth: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.

S. Read. Thinking About Logic: An Introduction to The Philosophy of Logic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Fictionality, or the importance of being earnest

Agnes Andeweg

If I were to ask you to give some examples of fiction, chances are you would come up with a book or film with an invented story, such as Star Wars, or The Fault in Our Stars. Fiction, so the common definition goes, contains imaginary characters or events. But in spite of that seemingly straightforward definition, things quickly become more complicated once we start thinking them through. As we can tell from just these two examples, fictional texts come in various shapes and gradations of invention. John Green’s bestseller The Fault in Our Stars (2012), for example, features an imaginary writer (Peter van Houten) and his imaginary work, but also refers to historical writers (Shakespeare), and it is set in cities that exist in reality (Indianapolis, Amsterdam). Star Wars, on the other hand, takes place in an imaginary galaxy peopled by both human and non-human characters. On imaginary planets like Tatooine and Hoth many things happen that are simply impossible on Earth.

So, what then is fiction, exactly, and how do we recognize it? Are there any features all fictional texts share? And should we even limit the search for characteristics of fictionality to texts? These complex questions have been discussed for many decades by, among others, literary theorists, philosophers, and psychologists. To dip into the latter question: while we most commonly associate fiction with a type of texts, scholars have argued that it can also be found beyond the page if we realize fiction can be considered a form of make-believe, a game of pretence. This expands the realm of fiction to the situation where a parent cries, ‘Here comes the monster that is going to eat you!’ and makes their child scream with laughter. The child is clearly able to recognize the make-believe, or it would immediately flee. Or think of children’s games where a tree becomes a house, or snippets of paper are turned into money. Children act out made-up situations like ‘You were the patient, and I was going to make you better’. Interestingly, these are often enacted in the past tense, which points to the close proximity of fictionality and narrativity: where there is fiction, there are stories, so it seems.1

Speaking of pieces of paper: is not our use of money one big game of make-believe, a pretension that allows us to do real transactions by using digital numbers and pieces of paper? Isn’t this fiction, too? Well, to an extent: just like in children’s games, we can make something stand in for something else by using a prop. This process of representation – to make something stand in for something else – seems crucial for fictionality. But using money is also different from a children’s game. When we use the prop of money, this use is bound by very strict rules: I cannot use just any sort of paper to pay you. The purpose of using money is to convey something in our actual world, rather than to imagine a possible world which we are free to invent. Arguably, encouraging the imagination is also a condition for fiction.

Lawyers know fiction as well: law has a so-called fictio legis. This legal fiction is a situation which is known to be untrue but nevertheless taken for a fact by the court. For example, in Roman law only free citizens were allowed to make a testament. To prevent the situation that a citizen who was imprisoned would not be able to make a testament, a law was made in which it was assumed that Roman citizens in prison were still free. Here the fiction does not so much create a new possible world, as Star Wars does, but rather turns a non-existing situation (the free Roman) into the actual one. Thus, the fictio legis ‘fixes’ a blatant discrepancy between the actual world and the desired reality.

Another field where we – perhaps surprisingly – may find a type of fiction is mathematics, which has imaginary numbers. An imaginary number is a real number (like 1, -6, π or √2) combined with an imaginary unit which has -1 as its square (i2 = -1). We all learnt in school that squares cannot be negative, so does that make imaginary numbers fictions? They are surely representations, props if you will, of a non-actual world, but that could be said about a lot of mathematics. And do imaginary numbers encourage playing with the imagination? Probably they do, though the purpose may not be playing in itself but solving serious mathematical problems. But perhaps we should not separate play and seriousness so strictly but rather stress the common factor of creativity. What would any scientist be without the imagination, without the capacity to speculate about possible worlds? Their fictions may become reality.

Apart from lawyers and mathematicians, philosophers have wrestled with the issue of fiction and truth. What toddlers grasp intuitively – that in stories ducks can talk and elephants can fly – has turned out to be a stubborn philosophical problem. How come we agree that the statement ‘A unicorn has one horn’ is true, and ‘A unicorn has two horns’ is not, when unicorns do not exist in the first place? How can we make truth statements about fictional entities? Humans use language to state things about the world, but apparently, we have to assume there are fictional worlds which have their own logic, and their own truths.

The interest of cognitive neuroscientists in fiction stems from a similar wonder as the philosophers’. How is it possible that readers can be moved to tears by events they are perfectly aware of never happened, like the death of Albus Dumbledore? What does reading fiction do to your brain? Clearly, we are able to respond emotionally to fictional situations just as strongly as to actual ones. Neuroscientists have also shown that ‘flowery’ figurative language, such as the use of metaphors, produces a different response than literal language. Language that is less directly representational (a more imaginative ‘prop’ so to say) triggers a different part of the brain.

This brings us back to the question of language: how do we recognize fiction? Are there any features, or ‘signposts’ that mark a text as fictional? Literary scholars have long debated this question, but let us try to work out a first answer using the following text:

Mrs Darwin

7 April 1852

Went to the Zoo

I said to Him—

Something about that Chimpanzee over there reminds me of you.

It is likely that many readers will recognize some features of this text as belonging to the genre of the diary: the date at the top, and the ellipted sentence ‘Went to the zoo’ are typical for a diary entry. Without any information about the author or the context in which this text appeared, these features are signposts of factuality rather than of fictionality. People write diaries to report or reflect on their lives, perhaps being more honest than in any other type of self-representation, rather than to make something up. Also, the name Mrs Darwin combined with the date seems to tie the text to the real world: even if you do not know whether Charles Darwin was married, you will infer it from this text and be inclined to take it for a fact, especially when you have identified the genre as a diary. Readers who happen to know a little bit about evolution theory may even be tempted to construct a chronology of events: when was Darwin’s The Origin of Species published? (In 1859). This also signals a desire to anchor the event described in the text in a historical reality.

So far, the signs point to factuality, but how about fictionality? Are there any signals that this text is not an actual diary entry? Here many readers will point at the rhyme. Rhyme distracts from content, it is language that draws attention to itself as language, something we do not usually find in texts that try to convey a message as transparently as possible. Rhyme can only be noticed in hindsight, at the repetition of a sound, so you probably noticed the rhyme of ‘Zoo’ and ‘you’ only when you reached the last word of the text – which suddenly turned this presumed diary entry into a poem. It is also only in hindsight then that one can notice that the rhyme is already present in the date (eighteen fifty-two). Do not worry if you did not notice this, it only confirms we tend to read for content (date) rather than for form (rhyme) – perhaps even more so with numbers than with words. But once you have realized that 1852 rhymes with Zoo and you, the date as an anchor to historical reality is called into question. Or as somebody remarked when I discussed this text with a group: ‘if it had been 1857, she would have had to go to heaven!’