Show, Don't Tell

Emotion, Acquaintance and Moral Understanding Through Fiction

Bibliographic Data

ID4158645
AuthorsShannon Brick (0000-0003-2644-9634, Georgetown University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume63
Issue4
Pages501-522
Publication date2023-11-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe British Journal of Aesthetics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-0904 • E-ISSN: 1468-2842
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/aesthj/ayad005
OpenAlexW4388007505
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited69

This paper substantiates a distinction, built out of Gricean resources, between two kinds of communicative act: showing and telling. Where telling that p proceeds by recruiting an addressee's capacity to recognize trustworthy informants, showing does not. Instead, showing proceeds by presenting an addressee with a consideration that provides reason to believe that p (other than the reason provided by an informant's credibility), and so recruits their capacity to respond to those reasons. With this account in place, the paper defends an account of one way in which authors can show their readers that certain moral states of affairs obtain both inside, and outside of, their fictions. It is argued, moreover, that this kind of showing gives addressees access to more than just reasons for moral belief-it also gives them access to the sorts of reasons that enable agents to increase their moral understanding. In virtue of these latter capacities, the showing identified is a way of communicating about morality that is markedly different from the sort of moral testimony that many philosophers have been increasingly interested in of late

Credibility · Epistemology · Morality · Sociology · sort · Trustworthiness · Virtue · Computer Science · Emotions and Moral Behavior · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Philosophy · Psychology · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment · Social Psychology

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