Call For Papers: Special Issue
The Red Stone is accepting submissions for its upcoming 2024 Science-Fiction Special Issue!
Aiming to offer a glimpse into the realm of philosophical argumentation through the possibilities of science fiction, this Special Issue is centred around science fiction as a springboard for philosophy, as well as the evaluation of science fiction’s epistemic role in thought experiments, imaginings, and models in human enquiry.
To contribute to this section, you may choose to either:
- Read Associate Professor John Holbo’s short piece Who’s It For? (download it here!) and write a response or analysis.
- Write out your own brilliant philosophical contribution inspired by science fiction.
We welcome current students, former students, and faculty to submit their manuscripts. Please send your submissions to us at theredstonenus@gmail.com, by no later than 2359 hours, 12 May 2024.
Submission Format:
All submissions are to be written in English, although translations and non-English terms are acceptable if references are given. Submissions should not exceed 6000 words. Manuscripts should be double-spaced, page-numbered, and have one-inch margins on all sides. We accept papers in Word format (.docx) only.
Who’s It For?
John Holbo
“Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.” – Brian Aldiss
Because science fiction is written for philosophers. Or is it?
Science fiction (SF) is, to a first approximation, philosophy fiction. The question then being: is it any good—philosophically? Or is it just, you know—mostly vibes?
But I’m getting a bit ahead of the argument.
Maybe start instead with Aldiss’ oft-quoted definition of ‘science fiction’, which fits with his ghost quip.
Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and its status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mode.
Aldiss thinks Frankenstein starts it. Mary Shelley’s novel is, for him, ‘the origin of the species’—that is, the first ‘proper’ SF work. Without filling in Aldiss’ argument to this conclusion (which I think we intuit as enjoying some prima facie plausibility), Frankenstein as the first science fiction fits with the proposed definition. Frankenstein is Gothic. If SF is post-Frankenstein, SF is post-Gothic, to a first approximation. Yes, that does seem to stand to reason.
So: just as ghost stories contain ghosts, but aren’t for ghosts, so SF contains science—scientists, mad or otherwise—but isn’t, therefore, for them.
Science fiction is, instead, ‘for’ anyone intellectually inclined (how shall we paraphrase Aldiss’ gist?) to envision, imaginatively, science-congruent outlooks on life, the universe and everything, thought-experimentally alternate to our actual, science-congruent outlook.
Science-congruent?
Yeah, that’s a tough one to explain.
SF is often, yet not necessarily, ‘about’ modernity, the modern human condition. Many of the ‘what-ifs’ that fuel SF are set, notionally, in the future. The future seems like the ‘natural’ habitat for SF, since it seems to consist of hypothetical branchings off of science as we know it.
You know, those jetpacks we’ve been promised. And those Frankenstein monsters we’ve been warned against.
But science fiction is not always set in the future—not just becomes sometimes it happened ‘a long time ago, in a galaxy far away.’ SF-as-future-science excludes an important and conceptually interesting class of cases.
Think about a game Ted Chiang (possibly our greatest living SF master) likes to play. He will furnish a world in seemingly obtrusively ‘unscientific’ fashion, naturalizing myth (“Tower of Babylon”), or theology (“Hell Is The Absence of God”), or magic (“Seventy-Two Letters”). The science in these stories is not remotely conformable with any extract from any physics or biology textbook of ours, or from any possible, updated future edition of any such textbooks. Yet there is science here—so our intuitions tell us. So our first impression that there is no science here—since it’s all so wrong—is wrong.
The science in these stories is to be found, first and foremost, between the ears of inhabits of the worlds of these stories. Science is a state of mind. A flat earth with a small sun in low orbit, with a tower touching the stone vault encasing it, past which may or not be found God in his heaven, is some Sumerian-style cosmological myth. But if it comes to life, scientifically, in the minds of engineers ascending that fabulous tower, it’s not myth but science, after all. Isn’t it? (The story in question is “Tower of Babylon”, if you don’t happen to know it.)
Such worlds are as alien to ours, scientifically, as the cosmic architecture of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Such worlds are absurdly impossible, from the point of view of science—our science. Yet their minds are our minds, recognizably—those inhabitants of these worlds. From the point of view of characters living in these worlds, science is. So: science is. They have a ‘scientific image’ of their world. So: science is possible in scientifically-impossible (so far as our science says) settings.
But so what? Thematically speaking, what’s the point of playing it this way?
You could say these tales function, thus, as thought-experimental refutations of any purported definition of ‘science’ too tied to the actual. This is science (points to existing textbooks, technology, theories etc.) No, that’s a mistake. You could have science and all our textbooks are false and many things our textbooks (presumably correctly) lead us to believe are not just non-actual but scientifically impossible are, fictionally, actual—and scientific.
But I think it might be better to say Chiang’s point is not just this. He is not just thought-experimentally pre-refuting too-narrow conceptions of ‘science’. This is but a step on his way to what Aldiss suggests science fiction is always getting at. Chiang wants to explore what it ‘means’ to think ‘like us’ in any world, possible or impossible; ergo, by extension, what it means to think ‘like us’ even in our actual world.
T.S. Eliot:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
By bolding going, imaginatively, into scientifically impossible (by our lights) worlds, within which science is actual, hence possible, we clarify what it really means, actually, to have a ‘scientific image’ of the world. We thus clarify, by extension, who we must be, who do have a broadly ‘scientific image’ of life, the universe and everything, whether we be card-carrying scientists or not.
But this may rotate us back into a different problem. Rather than being too narrow, if it forgot to allow for Ted Chiang, Aldiss’ definition will turn out too broad, if it absent-mindedly admits Jane Austen. ‘Science fiction’ doesn’t mean just any fiction exhibiting a broadly ‘secular’ outlook or sensibility. A lot of modern fiction does that. Science fiction isn’t co-extensive with literary humanism, including the modern ‘realistic’ novel as a proper subset of itself—would be another way to put it
This brings us to the oddly definitionally-duplicative aspect of Aldiss’ definition, which I think can be seen as an attempt to deal with this threat of over-breadth.
SF is being defined as a genre that seeks to define.
We want to define our broadly science-congruent image of the world, not just explore it. Yes, one senses why Aldiss jumps that way. Science fiction feels like it seeks to put a sharp edge on questions, conceptually. It feels thought-experimental. An effective SF ‘what-if’ is engineered to solve for variables, for conceptual clarification purposes.
Then again, given that, the next element of the definition is exceedingly odd.
Why tack on, of all things under the sun, a genre requirement: “… and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould”?
Compare:
Solve the mind-body problem—but make it a meet-cute rom-com!
Defend a Lockean theory of personal identity—but make it a paranoid techno-thriller!
Dramatize Descartes’ dream argument—by giving Keanu Reeves “guns, lots of guns!”
You take my point, my implied criticism. We seem to be running in two directions at once. Demand rigor—then demand that the rigor be rubbished by gratuitous inclusion of a lot of strictly unnecessary, if not downright silly elements, for sheer entertainment purposes.
It is not the job of a thought-experiment to be entertaining. To demand a thought-experiment entertain seems tantamount to demanding a bad thought-experiment.
A thought-experiment is an intuition pump (in Daniel Dennett terms.) Why would you deliberately set your pump to pumping just at the spot you can be sure there is maximum pollution due to erroneous emotional responses.
Thought-experiments are minimalistic, wire-frame conceptual structures. A genre-based tale is an emotion machine. Let’s illustrate this point in a more or less trivial way, with reference to The Matrix, the paradigmatic cinematic spin-off of Descartes’-Evil-Demon-meets-Nozick’s-Experience-Machine. A philosophical question raised by The Matrix might be: does authentic human existence require ‘reality’—that is, authentic ‘contact’ with reality (whatever that means)? If you are in an experience machine, is that, in itself, a decisive objection to the value of your life? The Matrix makes us intuit this is so, but it does so by pushing our emotional buttons via a series of more or less familiar narrative tropes. We cheer Neo’s escape from the Matrix because we ‘boo’ the sinister Agent Smith. We disapprove of Cypher’s retreat into the Matrix because he also plays the role of betrayer. Rationally we should tease apart the question of whether a decision to enter the experience machine can ever be ‘authentic’ from the separate question of the badness of being a Judas. But a film like The Matrix works by deliberately crossing our intellectual and emotional wires, for entertainment purposes, pumping moral intuitions of predictably low philosophical quality.
So we have arrived at a rather melancholy conclusion. Science fiction is the literature of bad thought-experiments. Science fiction, genre-wise, is a technology for pumping polluted intuitions, for entertainment purposes.
But perhaps we can attempt one last salvage of the genre’s dignity.
Frederick Pohl—another SF master—once remarked that “A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” And sex in the backseat at the drive-in movie theatre, I think he added, as an afterthought.
I am tempted by the thought—so I will conclude with this tentative hypothesis: food for thought!—that science fiction has tended to be, not the literature of (say) Descartes’ Dream Argument, or Searle’s Chinese Room, but the literature of thought-experiments filled in, imaginatively, as sites for real human habitation. What would it be like, what would it mean for human life, if there were an Evil Demon? What would it be like to have to go to work in Searle’s Chinese Room, day in, day out?
It’s a rare SF story that is engineered carefully enough, philosophically, that it is a candidate for airtight conceptual soundness. But perhaps that’s alright. Rather than trying to prove, say, Locke’s memory-based account of personal identity, the story chooses to explore the existential implications of that account if it is right. Many an SF story hinges on some what-if involving memory swapping, or memory duplication, say. But, again, the philosophical payout for intuitions hereby pumped is not: Locke is right, epistemologically. Rather: what would it mean, ethically—existentially—if Locke were right.
Richard Feynman once quipped that, “philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” Perhaps science fiction should not be faulted if, strictly speaking, the quality of thought-experimentation its tales tend to turn on seems ‘for the birds’—or, anyway, not up to the highest standards of scholarly rigor. Instead the philosophy of science fiction can allow that this volatile, hybrid mix of half-finished thought-experiments and conventional tropes so characteristic of the genre is neither scientific or philosophical, but instead, ‘for’ readers who are themselves, half-philosophical and half-scientific in their outlook on life.
Science fiction: a great, gothic pile of half-ruined thought-experiments, converted into an amusement park for entertainment and edification of the conceptually curious. (It’s more complicated, of course, but there’s some truth to it, it seems to me.)