Event Detail

It’s often claimed that reading fiction tends to inculcate a general purpose skill of cognitive empathy: the habitual fiction reader is able to accurately simulate the mental lives of others, as well as hypothetical future versions of him or herself. I’ll offer some skeptical considerations concerning this optimistic view about the epistemic powers of fiction. However, the skepticism I defend differs from the principled view that we can’t imagine others’ mental lives unless we’ve had similar experiences ourselves. Instead, I argue that even if we allow that fiction can in principle enable us to imagine what it’s like to live lives very different from our own, there are still serious evidential obstacles to gaining a general purpose skill of cognitive empathy by reading fiction. I consider two models for how optimism about the epistemic powers of fiction might be vindicated: one treats fiction as a source of extrapolatable data, the other as providing archetypal models for fitting to experience. I argue that both models face serious challenges, especially concerning the representativeness of fictional data in the first case, and the lack of opportunities for learning from error in the second.