I’ve been thinking recently about the ways in which literature might give us some sort of knowledge (or experience) of other minds. It’s been a regular concern in this blog. This led me to Daniel Dennett, who is pretty confident that such knowledge is possible: he calls it heterophenomenology, and he sets out some thoughts about it in Consciousness Explained (Boston / London, 1991). This isn’t his last word on the subject by any means, and I have a lot of thinking to do about it, but something he says in that book (pp. 79-80) is so arresting that I thought I’d post about it.
      Dennett’s idea is that we can acquire knowledge about the interior worlds of others, including other species, as long as we are drawing appropriate conclusions from appropriate evidence. He gets past some key problems (e.g. the incommensurate nature of different kinds of consciousness) by an analogy with literature. Yes, he says, we may not be able to replicate the processes involved in , but we can understand the bat’s world nonetheless. This is similar to the way that we know things about fiction. Take it away, DD…

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The interpretation of fiction is undeniably do-able, with certain uncontroversial results. First, the fleshing out of the story, the exploration of ‘the world of Sherlock Holmes,’ for instance, is not pointless or idle; one can learn a great deal about a novel, about its text, about the point, about the author, even about the real world, by learning about the world portrayed by the novel. Second, if we are cautious about identifying and excluding judgments of taste or preference (e.g., ‘Watson is a boring prig’), we can amass a volume of unchallengingly objective fact about the world portrayed. All interpreters agree that Holmes was smarter than Watson; in crashing obviousness lies objectivity.

I am quoting Dennett in order to dissent, or at least to register anxiety from the perspective of literary criticism. However, I don’t want to do this insensitively. There’s a tone here that I need to handle properly. Still, I am not sure I agree that anything ‘unchallengingly objective’ has been demonstrated or evoked yet. Smartness, for example, is a modern category that might not map easily onto Holmes or Watson. It’s clear enough what Dennett is trying to get at, though: yes, there are things in fictions that I expect every reader to agree about. It’s the elaboration of this point that gets bracing.

Third — and this fact is a great relief to students — knowledge of the world portrayed by a novel can be independent of knowledge of the actual text of the novel. I could probably write a passing term paper on Madame Bovary, but I’ve never read the novel — even in English translation. I’ve seen the BBC television series, so I know the story. I know what happens in that world. The general point illustrated is this: facts about a world of a fiction are purely semantic level facts about that fiction; they are independent of the syntactic facts about the text (if the fiction is a text). We can compare the stage musical or the film West Side Story with Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet; by describing similarities and differences in what happens in those worlds, we see similarities in the works of art that are not describable in the terms appropriate to the syntactical or textual (let alone physical) description of the concrete instantiations of the fictions. The fact that in each world there is a pair of lovers who belong to different factions is not a fact about the vocabulary, sentence structure, length (in words or frames of film), or size, or shape, and weight of any particular physical instantiation of the works.

Cheeky! I mean, I am not saying you’d certainly fail the literature course I teach if you talked about the worlds of novels without talking about their language, but it’s clear to me that you wouldn’t be doing the subject at all. And I think most of my colleagues and students would say that this knowledge, inasmuch as it’s worth talking about, is inseparable from ‘concrete instantiations’. He goes on to expand the point.

In general, one can describe what is represented in a work of art (e.g., Madame Bovary) independently of describing how the representing is accomplished. (Typically, of course, one doesn’t try for this separation, and mixes commentary on the world portrayed with commentary on the author’s means of accomplishing the portrayal, but the separation is possible.) One can even imagine knowing enough about a world portrayed to be able to identify the author of a fiction, in ignorance of the text or anything purporting to be a faithful translation. Learning indirectly what happens in a fiction one might be prepared to claim: only Wodehouse could have invented that preposterous misadventure. We think we can identify sorts of events and circumstances (and not merely sorts of descriptions of events and circumstances) as Kafkaesque, and we are prepared to declare characters to be pure Shakespeare. Many of these plausible convictions are no doubt mistaken (as ingenious experiments might show), but not all of them. I mention them just to illustrate how much one might be able to glean just from what is represented, in spite of having scant knowledge of how the representing is accomplished.

He has lost me, really. I suppose there is an idea of what a Dickensian character might be like, but this seems to me to perform a function for people that doesn’t constitute or really arise from a worthwhile knowledge of what’s in the novels of Dickens. As above, I can see what Dennett is trying to do with this thought experiment. He wants to demonstrate the substance of our resourceful ability to compose understandings of things that can live independently from a precise understanding of the contexts in which they arise. But the turn to literature doesn’t work, as I understand it anyway.

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It’s ironic. I think it might be worth embracing some aspects of heterophenomenology on behalf of literature. It offers a way of thinking about how we may be able to imagine the life of an otter or a Martian or a next-door neighbour, in and through fiction. However, when literature is invoked in return support, things fall a bit flat.