Greg Currie Nj

Chris Frith has argued that a loss of the sense of agency is central to schizophrenia. This suggests a connection between hallucinations and delusions on the one hand, and the misidentification of the subject’s imaginings as perceptions and beliefs on the other. In particular, understanding the mechanisms that underlie imagination may help us to explain the puzzling phenomena of thought insertion and withdrawal. Frith sometimes states his argument in terms of a loss of metarepresentational capacity in schizophrenia. I argue that this formulation is unhelpful.

Chris Frith has argued that a loss of the sense of agency is central to schizophrenia. This suggests a connection between hallucinations and delusions on the one hand, and the misidentification of the subject’s imaginings as perceptions and beliefs on the other. In particular, understanding the mechanisms that underlie imagination may help us to explain the puzzling phenomena of thought insertion and withdrawal. Frith sometimes states his argument in terms of a loss of metarepresentational capacity in schizophrenia. I argue that this formulation is unhelpful.

Outlines a theory of genres: of what they are, what they do, and what they explain. The central notion is that of a genre‐for‐a‐community, which depends on psychological facts concerning tendencies of expectation in the audience. The minimal conditions for a genre to be instantiated are weak; Outlines some stronger conditions which allow us to focus on self‐conscious genre‐based effects. Suggests that genre, even thus strengthened, has only a very weak explanatory role. Gives accounts of genre identity across time, and of genre change.

This is a book about the nature of film: about the nature of moving images, about the viewer's relation to film, and about the kinds of narrative that film is capable of presenting. It represents a very decisive break with the semiotic and psychoanalytic theories of film which have dominated discussion. The central thesis is that film is essentially a pictorial medium and that the movement of film images is real rather than illusory. A general theory of pictorial representation is presented, which insists on the realism of pictures and the impossibility of assimilating them to language. It criticizes attempts to explain the psychology of film viewing in terms of the viewer's imaginary occupation of a position within the world of film. On the contrary, film viewing is nearly always impersonal.

Marianne Dashwood was well able to imagine circumstances both favourable and unfavourable to her. But for all her romantic sensibility she was not able to imagine these things from anything other than her own point of view. ‘She expected from other people the same opinions and feelings as her own, and she judged of their motives by the immediate effect of their actions on herself.’ Unlike her sister, she could not see how the ill-crafted attentions of Mrs. Jennings could derive from a good nature. And when Elinor had to explain her troubles with Edward Ferrars, she knew that Marianne would feel it as a reminder of her own relations to Willoughby, judging Edward's behaviour as equivalent to that of Willoughby himself. Without the capacity to shift her point of view, Marianne can get no ironic distance from herself; she cannot see the unrealism of her later determination ‘to live solely for my family’.

Cognitive film theory is reckoned a powerful and distinctive, if minority position in film studies. What does it say? Argues that Bordwell's constructivism about meaning and his account of perception are not essential components of the project, which is better characterized by commitment to theses calls rationalism and realism, and by a presumption in favour of folk psychology. Cognitivists — who might be better called rationalists — should not be too cognitive, especially in matters of perception.

Defends the idea that documentary is a distinctive and important cinematic category, though an essentially vague one. This notion depends on that of a trace. A documentary must involve traces of its subject, and not merely testimony of it. Defines an ideal documentary as one where there is a certain kind of coherence between the narrative and the trace‐content of the work. Argues that the notion of an ideal documentary explains much in our attitude towards, and practice concerning those things we commonly label documentaries.

Our experience of narrative has an internal and an external aspect--the content of the narrative’s representations, and its intentional, communicative aetiology. The interaction of these two things is crucial to understanding how narrative works. I begin by laying out what I think we can reasonably expect from a narrative by way of causal information, and how causality interacts with other attributes we think of as central to narrative. At a certain point this discussion will strike a problem: our judgements about what is a relevant possibility within the narrative’s story depend on our judgements of probability; but these latter judgements depend, in turn, on factors external to the world of the story, and cannot be explained in terms of causal relations available within the story. We need the external, author-centred perspective at this point. These different perspectives, the internal and the external, correspond to different types of explanations we may give of events in a story; I call these internal and external explanations. I show how these different explanations are made use of in two contrasting arthistorical projects. I use these examples as the basis for a generalisation about the structure of the two explanatory forms. Finally, I suggest some ways in which explanations of these two kinds relate to one another, and to our thinking when we are engaged by a narrative.

One way creatures of fiction seem to differ from real things is in their essential properties. While you and I might not have done many of the things we did do, Anna Karenina could not, surely, have been other than a lover of Vronsky. Is that right? Not straightforwardly: while it is true that “Necessarily, someone who was not a lover of Vronsky would not be Anna”, it is also true that “Someone who was necessarily a lover of Vronsky would not be Anna”. I use a framework developed by Stalnaker to explain this, and to shed light on the semantics of fictional names.

We identify a strategy for getting beliefs from fiction via three assumptions: a certain causal generality holds in the fiction and does so because causal generalities in fiction are carried over from what the author takes to be fact; the author is reliable on this topic, so what the author takes to be fact is fact. We do not question. While will, in particular cases, be doubtful, the strategy is vulnerable more generally to the worry that what looks like a causal generality may be instead an authorial intervention of a kind from which no causal connection can be inferred; in such cases turns out to be false though it may seem at first sight to be true. In consequence we have extra reason for being careful in forming beliefs based on fictions.

Should we hold that the natural history of our artistic capacities and responses is relevant to aesthetic judgement in the way that the history of making of particular artworks is? Distinguishes between what is explanatory within the aesthetic, and what is merely explanatory of the aesthetic. Facts about the natural history of artistic capacities and responses are more apt to fall into the first second than into the first. But there are odd cases where the facts of natural history do impinge on what we might call the space of aesthetic reasons.

Thirteen essays, five not previously published, on the arts. These are philosophical essays, mostly concerned with the ways in which theories about mind and language can contribute to our understanding of art. Some explore the challenges posed by art to the empirical sciences of mind – linguistics and pragmatics, psychology and anthropology. Particular problems confronted include: the nature of literary works, genres, and fictional characters; whether there is coherent and useful concept of documentary; whether fiction can tell us anything interesting about time; what pragmatics tells us about interpretation; the prospects for cognitive film theory; the role of empathy in our engagement with fiction; the role of the unreliable narrator; the relations between children's pretend play and their mind reading skills; how we should decide whether animals engage in pretence; what biological and cultural evolution can tell us about the development of art.