著者
田村 均 Tamura Hitoshi
出版者
名古屋大学文学部
雑誌
名古屋大学文学部研究論集. 哲学 (ISSN:04694716)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.59, pp.1-34, 2013-03-31

This paper has two purposes. One is to introduce Kendall Walton's theory of representational arts to the Japanese philosophical community. His theory is highly original in that it reveals the fact that the representational works of arts, such as paintings, sculptures, films, plays and novels, are to be regarded as being functionally the same as playthings, such as dolls, hobbyhorses, toy trucks and teddy bears. The theory depends on distinctive use of such concepts as games of make-believe, props, and representations. I try to make it clear what these concepts are meant to serve for. In doing this, I also try to give an overview of the role of imaginative activities as the foundation for our intellectual and emotional understanding of the world. This is the other purpose of this paper. According to Walton's view, dolls, toy trucks and works of arts, which serve for props of our games of make-believe, prompt us to imagine a fictional world where we have them as real things. An object in the real world can be turned into an item in an imaginary world that is different from itself-in-the-real-world. It should be real, however, in this fictional world. So we can take ourselves living with multiple realities in view of a Waltonian theory of make-believe. We would have an unexpected revelation of reality by artistic appreciation regarded as a kind of children's games of make-believe. In this sense, fiction-making capacity emerges as something very important and essential to human beings.
著者
田村 均 TAMURA Hitoshi
出版者
名古屋大学文学部
雑誌
名古屋大学文学部研究論集. 哲学 (ISSN:04694716)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.58, pp.1-29, 2012-03-31

John Searle argues in his seminal paper of fictional discourse that the author of a work of fiction pretends to perform a series of illocutionary acts. He does not make it very clear, however, how one could make a pretended performance of an illocutionary act, e.g. an assertion: he does not tell us what else should be done in order to make a pretended assertion in addition to uttering an assertive sentence. The analysis of truth in fiction put forward by David Lewis may seem to give a plausible account of the meaning of fictional discourse; but his theory also contains the concept of pretence as a primitive notion of its explanatory components. Gregory Currie criticizes the Searlean pretence theory of fiction and advocates a communicative approach to the problem of fictional utterance. He introduces the idea of make-believe instead: the author of a fiction intends that the audience make believe her story. In his communicative approach it seems to be taken for granted that we know what it is to induce someone to make believe something and how it can be carried out by a speaker. Pretence or its equivalent, makebelieve, appears in these theories as a fundamental but unexplained frame of mind that constitutes the essence of fictional discourse. It is suggested that pretence or make-believe may be a primitive equipment of human mind like belief or truth inasmuch as storytelling and playacting can be seen everywhere in human life.
著者
田村 均 TAMURA Hitoshi
出版者
名古屋大学文学部
雑誌
名古屋大学文学部研究論集 (ISSN:04694716)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.58, pp.1-29, 2012-03-31 (Released:2012-09-06)

John Searle argues in his seminal paper of fictional discourse that the author of a work of fiction pretends to perform a series of illocutionary acts. He does not make it very clear, however, how one could make a pretended performance of an illocutionary act, e.g. an assertion: he does not tell us what else should be done in order to make a pretended assertion in addition to uttering an assertive sentence. The analysis of truth in fiction put forward by David Lewis may seem to give a plausible account of the meaning of fictional discourse; but his theory also contains the concept of pretence as a primitive notion of its explanatory components. Gregory Currie criticizes the Searlean pretence theory of fiction and advocates a communicative approach to the problem of fictional utterance. He introduces the idea of make-believe instead: the author of a fiction intends that the audience make believe her story. In his communicative approach it seems to be taken for granted that we know what it is to induce someone to make believe something and how it can be carried out by a speaker. Pretence or its equivalent, makebelieve, appears in these theories as a fundamental but unexplained frame of mind that constitutes the essence of fictional discourse. It is suggested that pretence or make-believe may be a primitive equipment of human mind like belief or truth inasmuch as storytelling and playacting can be seen everywhere in human life.
著者
田村 均 TAMURA Hitoshi
出版者
名古屋大学文学部
雑誌
名古屋大学文学部研究論集 (ISSN:04694716)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.56, pp.1-24, 2010-03-31 (Released:2010-05-21)

This report deals with the results of a questionnaire about four historico-philosophical concepts: “modernity”, “tradition”, “individualism”, and “the will”. The questionnaire was designed to make it appear what attitudes or evaluations Japanese people had toward these concepts. It was filled out by more than five hundred Japanese college students. The results are this: the majority of them hold that contemporary Japan is a modern society but that it more or less belongs to the Eastern tradition; they feel that individualism is something nice; and, most important, they think that an individual can have several Ishi (wills) simultaneously. It is a common presupposition in English that one does not have wills. Nearly ninety percent of Japanese college students, however, take it for granted that there can be plural Ishi (the Japanese counterpart of “the will”) at one time in one person. They may not believe that it is the one and only Ishi (the will) that makes decision and chooses the best course of action among options. They may have quite a different scheme of explanation of decision making from that which English speakers naturally presumes to be valid. Hopefully, a new perspective for the explanation of human action will be obtained through a comparative study of the Japanese concept of Ishi with its English counterpart.
著者
田村 均 TAMURA Hitoshi
出版者
名古屋大学文学部
雑誌
名古屋大学文学部研究論集 (ISSN:04694716)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.54, pp.43-78, 2008-03-31 (Released:2008-10-01)

I bring forward an argument for dismissal of methodological individualism as an adequate theory for understanding human action. I make use of Kashiwabata Tatsuya’s theoretical explication of selfsacrificial action propounded in his recent book, Jiko-Giman to Jiko-Gisei (Self-deception and Selfsacrifice), in order to produce the evidence for explanative insufficiency of personal intentional states for bringing about self-sacrificial decision making. Kashiwabata establishes that a self-sacrificial action of an individual can be regarded as rational only if it is assessed in terms of the shared intention among people who are engaged in a collective activity. An individual always has good reason not to take such an action as may carry a great loss to her. In reality, however, no one can avoid all the situations that could cause personal losses in the name of collectivity: one’s family, the community, or the nation. She would be entitled to say that her action be self-sacrificial if she were persuaded into doing something that was not good for her. She might not be considered as utterly irrational provided that she gave up the good thing for the sake of others. No one can deny this but the concept of rational action with personal utility cannot explain the rationality of such an action as this. The shared intention to promote some sharable good rationalizes an individual’s self-sacrificial decision making that cannot be rationalized by means of the individual’s personal utilities. As long as the act of self-sacrifice is to be placed at the high position in the list of virtuous acts, philosophers cannot take it for granted that methodological individualism is the correct way of explaining all the human actions.