Unreality: truth and fiction
Ada: Do you sometimes find it hard to write things that are true?
Brenna: Yes, but mostly in non-fiction prose. It’s much easier to write the truth in fiction, or poetry.
A: Controversial. Say more?
B: Well, prose comes with an implicit claim to be describing reality, unless it is explicitly fiction. If you write, ‘the great ships came over the horizon’, you are making a claim about what happened with literal ships and water, which is a pretty risky thing to make claims about. Whereas if you write that in fiction, or you paint ships coming over the horizon, these make no such claims.
A: Well that’s an interesting point, but doesn’t that make it harder to tell the truth, in fiction or paintings? Since you are not even claiming to?
B: No, it’s easier to tell the truth when you aren’t claiming to tell the truth.
A: How so?
B: There are broadly two kinds of consequences of making a claim. One is that it changes your listener’s views about the world, and what is true or possible or salient in it. And the other is that it changes your listener’s views about *you* —both about your commitments, and about what is going on with you that would cause you to make such commitments or to be thinking such things. And it is easier to get the former one right the less you are constrained by optimizing the latter one.
A: Ah, you mean like if I say ‘we are going to China Star for dinner’, this changes your expectations about dinner, and also makes you think that I personally have committed to this dinner choice? So if we don’t go, you’ll be annoyed with me, not with Clara?
B: Exactly. Claiming things is a move in the social game. You could alternately think of it as a bet that the thing you said is true, where the stakes are your good name.
A: Which is why it is increasingly stressful to say anything at all if your name is good?
B: I have no idea if that is true. But anyway, on top of that, claiming things associates you with the claim.
A: You mean like, I might want you to know that the Hitachi magic wand is life-changingly arousing for some people, but I won’t say it because you will infer all kinds of things about my sex life, and about my beliefs about your sex life, and about my appreciation of our now common knowledge of all this, and it will be awkward?
B: Well, that’s really an example of a more advanced problem, which is that the other person can infer things about you from the fact of your making the claim. I just meant that for instance if the sky is falling, and everyone is kind of ignoring it, and then you are like, ‘the sky is falling!’ then everyone might think of you as the ‘the sky is falling’ guy forever.
A: Ok, I see.
B: But the thing you mentioned is huge too—the fact of your wanting to make a claim tells a listener so much about is going on inside you. People can’t even hear object level claims sometimes, so naturally do they assume that they are ‘about’ what is happening inside a person that would cause them to make those claims.
A: Well often that is what it is about!
B: Which means that making a claim is also often an invitation to infer things about your motives or what you want.
A: Yes and therefore an implicit request! I have noticed it is basically impossible to claim some things without making requests. Like the other day, I kind of wanted to tell people that I had seen this really shocking thing. I don’t know why I wanted to tell them. But I couldn’t, because they would take it as a request for sympathy, and that would be a whole thing.
B: Right, that’s one kind of problem. Another is that if you claim things are true, you have to really check them. But suppose you don’t know if they are true, you just think they are an interesting thought, and you want the other person to have the interesting thought. You can say ‘Here is an interesting thought, that may or may not be true: ..’ Or you can just communicate the thought in a medium that doesn’t come with an implicit claim to truth.
A: Is it so hard to say ‘here is an interesting thought..’?
B: No, but it’s awkward sometimes. And what if you want to write about the experience of fighting with your friend? Or your feelings for your other friend? You can’t just write these things on the internet, when people can infer who you are talking about. Or if you write about work, that is now your position on work. If you write about the experience of having sex, you have basically had sex in front of the world. Write fiction, and you are merely a person with some abstract relationship with fictional characters who might fight and love and work and fuck. And yet you can communicate every detail of the things, without making them about you.
A: True. But aren’t you still implying things about yourself?
B: A bit, but so much less. Also, I when you say something in non-fiction prose, it feels like you are claiming that it was not selected to look good, somehow. You are implicitly claiming to be reporting the thing because it is true or interesting or such. But maybe that is false, and barely hidden. So it feels insincere. But if you write fiction, you make no such claim. Who knows why you are writing fiction? …Actually, why did you want to know about writing true things?
A: Well, I wanted to say this poem:
Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.
What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?
Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
B: Okay, I have to interrupt this train of thought briefly: did you see how much easier it was there to communicate an idea by gesturing at it in fiction than it would have been if you set out to explicitly claim something? In which case you would have got all sidetracked for entire books of philosophy trying to justify precise claims about what it is to be something, and you would probably even miss the entire thought-feeling that was arguably the point. Is that why you asked about the difficulty of saying true things?
A: I agree this might be a good example of your point, but no—I asked because I hoped you could provide us with an excuse for being fictional characters, instead of characterless prose. That achieved, I wanted to talk about this poem.
B: Ok, cool. If this were on a blog, that blog would really have diverged from being about travels in the world.
A: Nah, the most interesting thing about travels in the world is how you make your own world. To which let us now return!
B: Ok, so I think this poem uses its freedom from making explicit claims to gesture at—and therefore try to make me believe—a claim that is false. In particular, while the world in which I walked exists only in my own mind, it is surely heavily influenced by an actual physical reality outside my mind, which has a lot in common with the world in which I walked. It is almost entirely influenced. When I walk down the street, I have basically no control of what I perceive, and probably there are a bunch of houses and flowers and cars actually out there, which basically determine my experience. Maybe I can pay a bit more attention to the flowers or not. And maybe facts about my own brain determine how the array of colors looks to me, and which things are salient. But in any usual sense of things coming from myself, they don’t. Maybe they could, in some sense. If we were less well evolved, and each person’s experience was some weird kaleidoscope only vaguely inspired by reality. But that isn’t how things are—ten people looking at the same world will have basically the same experience of it. The poem is exciting for its suggestion that it is basically all in my interpretation, and that just seems false.
A: If you received a letter from an arbitrary alien creature, could you interpret it?
B: This sounds involved. I actually have to go to bed and am being bitten by approximately a hundred mosquitos. Another time?
A: Another time! Good night.