Learning from Science Fiction

guest post by Amy Kind

Thanks to Eric for inviting me for to take a stint as guest blogger here at The Splintered Mind. I’ve been having a lot of fun putting together this series of posts, all of which will focus in some way on philosophical issues raised by science fiction.

Like Eric, and indeed like many philosophers, I read a lot of science fiction. I won’t try to sort through the many possible explanations for why philosophers tend to be attracted to science fiction, but I’ll highlight one such explanation of which I’m especially fond. As Hugo Award winner Robert J. Sawyer has noted, science fiction would be better known as philosophical fiction, as “phi-fi not sci-fi” (see the back cover of Susan Schneider’s Science Fiction and Philosophy). Kate Wilhelm, another Hugo Award winner, makes a similar point in her introduction to an edited collection of Nebula Award winning stories from 1973:

The future. Space travel, or cosmology. Alternate universes. Time travel. Robots. Marvelous inventions. Immortality. Catastrophes. Aliens. Superman. Other dimensions. Inner space, or the psyche. These are the ideas that are essential to science fiction. The phenomena change, the basic ideas do not. These ideas are the same philosophical concepts that have intrigued [humankind] throughout history.

In fact, we might naturally take these claims by Sawyer and Wilhelm one step further. Not only does science fiction concern itself with the kinds of issues and problems that are of interest to philosophers, but it is also thought to provide its readers with important insight into these issues and problems. By engaging with science fiction, we can learn more about them.

As intuitive as this idea is, however, once we start to think about it more closely, we confront a puzzle. After all, science fiction is fiction, and the defining characteristic of fiction is that it’s made up. So how can we learn from it? If we really wanted to learn about space exploration or robots or time travel, wouldn’t we do better to consult textbooks or refereed journal articles focusing on astronomy or robotics or quantum physics?

I suspect that some think this puzzle can be easily resolved. The way that science fiction enriches our understanding is by providing us with thought experiments (TEs). Just as we can learn from TEs presented to us in philosophy – from Jackson’s case of Mary the color scientist to Thomson’s plugged-in violinist – we can learn from TEs presented to us in science fiction. The question of how we learn from philosophical TEs is the subject of considerable philosophical debate: Are they simply disguised arguments, or do they function in some other way? But the claim that we learn from them is widely accepted (though see the work of Kathleen Wilkes for one notable exception).

In his recent book Knowing and Imagining, however, Greg Currie has called into question this resolution of the puzzle. Though he is focused on fiction more generally rather than just on science fiction, his discussion is directly relevant here. In the course of an argument that we should be skeptical of the claim that imaginative engagement with fiction provides readers with any significant knowledge, Currie takes up the question whether one might be able to defend the claim that we can gain knowledge from works of fiction by treating them as TEs. Ultimately, his answer his no. In his view, there are good reasons to doubt that fictional narratives can provide the same kind of epistemic benefits provided by philosophical or scientific TEs. Here I’ll consider just one of the reasons he offers – what might be called the argument from simplicity. I focus on this one because I think consideration of science fiction in particular helps to show why it is mistaken.

As Currie notes, the epistemically successful TEs found in philosophy are notably simple and streamlined. We don’t need to know anything about what Mary the color scientist looks like, or anything about her desires and dreams, in order to evaluate what happens when she leaves her black and white room and sees a ripe tomato for the first time. But even the most pared down fictional narratives are considerably more complex, detailed, and stylized than philosophical TEs. These embellishments of detail and style are likely to count against from the epistemic power of the TE presented by the fiction. A reader won’t know whether they’re reacting to the extraneous details or to the essential content. Philosophical TEs would get worse, not better, if they were elaborated and told with lots of panache. And that’s just what fiction does.

In response to this argument, I want to make two points.

First, though epistemically successful TEs are generally simple, they do contain some of level of detail, and those details might well sway readers’ reactions – as Currie himself notes. Someone who has bad memories of their childhood violin lessons, or who associates violin music with a particularly toxic former relationship, might react differently to Thomson’s case from someone whose beloved partner excels at the instrument. Dennett’s TEs in “Quining Qualia” include lots of cutesy details, and so does Parfit’s description of his well-known teletransporter case. But despite this, we nonetheless think we can learn from these cases. Currie is undoubtedly right that we need to exercise care when engaging with TEs, and we need to be guard against being swayed by extraneous details. But in philosophical contexts, we generally seem able to do so – perhaps not perfectly, but well enough. So why wouldn’t that be the case in fiction as well?

Second, and here’s where consideration of SF becomes especially important, it’s not clear to me that simplicity is always the best policy. The seemingly extraneous details need be seen as so extraneous. Consider Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, and in particular, the character Rocky. Rocky is a sentient and intelligent alien hailing from the 40 Eridani star system. Members of the Eridian species do not have eyes and navigate the world primarily by using sound and vibration. In many ways, Weir is presenting us with an extended thought experiment about what kind of civilization such a species would develop. What would their interpersonal reactions be like? How would they make scientific progress? How would they achieve space flight? Trying to understand what it’s like to be an Eridian is a lot like trying to understand what it’s like to be bat – something Thomas Nagel has claimed cannot be done. But trying to understand what Eridian society might be like is not similarly out of reach, and Weir’s discussion helps enormously in achieving this understanding. Here’s a place where more complexity was helpful, not hurtful. To gain the understanding that I believe myself to have gained, I needed the fuller picture that the book provided. Without the details, I’m pretty sure my understanding would have been considerably impoverished.

While this is just one example, I think the point extends widely across science fiction and the TEs presented to us in this genre. Perhaps in other genres of fiction, Currie’s argument from simplicity might have more bite. But to my mind, when it comes to science fiction, the complexity of the thought experiments presented can help explain not only why philosophers would be so attracted to these kinds of works but also why we can gain such insight from them.

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