Fiction as Carrier Bag-sign

Abstract

Thought experiment as a philosophical resource is not rare or even recent – we can think of Schrödinger’s cat or the Platonic Allegory of the Cave. However, it is uncommon for texts anchored in Philosophy to propose to analyze objects or debate proposals from fiction literature, and in particular, science fiction. Hastily taken, the relation would raise a mismatch between the philosophical concern with reality and truth and the libertarian poetic license of fiction. As if philosophical imagination and creative imagination could not coexist. We advocate just the opposite. We believe that this mismatch cannot be sustained beyond appearance, a forcefully rigid imposition between reality and

fiction as separate fields. This paper intends to analyze the possibility of science fiction operate as a cognitive tool capable not only of simulating, but also proposing new dynamics for the present world, informing about the real. Bringing the exercise of creating stories closer to the exercise of thinking about alternative realities, science fiction opens space for critical questioning and transformation of our own waking reality, ceasing to be a mere daydream necessarily devoid of agency in the world. In order to do so, we will make use of certain aspects of Charles Peirce’s semiotic philosophy and some of Ursula K. Le Guin’sessays on science fiction and narrative skill. For Peirce, signs are uninterruptedly linked in semiosis that participate both in the understanding of the world and in its intervention. While the exercise of science fiction at first may seem counterintuitive or unnatural, mentally exploring new possibilities can yield precious insights. Peirce institutes and values a third way of thinking, different from the vertical logic of deduction and induction: abduction, an operation of reasoning that seeks to explain facts through hypotheses. We might think that science fiction often relies on abductions in the quest to glimpse deeper understanding. Insights not simply good for examining what alternative, fictitious situations would be like, but useful in the necessary task of putting oneself in criticism and continuous transformation of the world into a better place. From Ursula Le Guin, we examine how the – as far as we know – human skill of fictional narration can be a technology of transformation of what is the case in the real present we live in. The author makes an analogy between the ability to narrate and the carrier bag: both would be one of the first evolutionary technologies of our species. Bags and baskets, histories and stories, are semiotic artifacts that store, transport, gather, classify, feed. Fiction as a carrier bag and as a sign is a proposal that shelters and puts in relationship not only humans, but diverse beings, connected in semiosis more or less close, more or less dependent, more or less perceptible; but never unreal.