Reply to Abell’s and Gilmore’s comments on Currie’s Imagining and Knowing: the Shape of Fiction

I am grateful to Catharine Abell and Jonathan Gilmore for their comments and for the opportunity to think again about some important questions. Before I respond, I’ll say something about the approach I took in Imagining and Knowing (2020), and how that might seem to make critical discussion difficult. In the book I never tired, apparently, of hedging my bets: insisting on not denying that we learn from fiction, insisting that my anti-learning arguments are no more than helpful contributions to a balanced discussion. That seems to leave me with a vast capacity to gracefully welcome criticism and congratulate myself for having prompted a useful debate. Tempting though this line is, I won’t adopt it. It is true, I think, that all parties to the debate over the cognitive value of fiction agree (or should) that we do sometimes learn from fiction and sometimes fail to learn, acquiring instead ignorance and error. But to emphasize this agreement ignores something important about the kind of broadly scientific debate I hope we are contributing to: that what divides us is not a single claim or theory but a research programme. A research programme is not just a big theory, it is an orientation to a problem, characterized by techniques and policies that help us move from one specific version of the programme to another, responding to counterarguments and recalcitrant evidence along the way (Lakatos, 1970). The programme I’m currently employed on is marked by the injunction ‘look for arguments and evidence that undermine claims that we learn from fiction’. I agree that there are ways we learn from fiction—it’s just not my role in this debate to find any.