I don’t see why fictional evidence shouldn’t be treated exactly the same as real evidence, as long as you don’t mix up the referents. There is no fundamental use in singling out reality (there might be some practical use in specializing human minds to reality rather than fiction). Generalization from real evidence to fiction is as much a fallacy as generalization from fictional evidence to reality.
A fiction text is a model of fictional territory that can be used to get some idea of what that territory is like (found with the prior of fictional worlds), and to formulate better models, or models of similar worlds (fanfiction). Statements made in a fiction text can be false about the fictional territory, in which case they are misleading and interfere with learning about the fictional territory. Other statements are good evidence about it. One should be confused by false statements about a fictional territory, but shouldn’t be confused by true statements about it. And so on and so forth.
I think not mixing up the referents is the hard part. One can properly learn from fictional territory when they can clearly see in which ways it’s a good representation of reality, and where it’s not.
I may learn from an action movie the value of grit and what it feels like to have principles, but I wouldn’t trust them on gun safety or CPR.
It’s not common for fiction to be self-consistent enough and preserve drama. Acceptable breaks from reality will happen, and sure, sometimes you may have a hard SF universe were the alternate reality is very lawful and the plot arises from the logical consequences of these laws (often happens in rationalfic), but more often than not things happen “because it serves the plot”.
My point is, yes, I agree, one should be confused only by lack of self-consistency fiction or not. Yet, given the vast amount of fiction that is set in something close to real Earth, by the time you’re skilled enough to tell apart what’s transferable and what isn’t, you’ve already done most of the learning.
Not counting the meta-skill of detecting inconsistencies, which is indeed extremely useful, for fiction or not, but I’m still unclear where exactly one learns it from.
A mostly off-topic note on the conceptual picture I was painting. The fictional world was intended to hold entities of the same ontological kind as those from the real world. A fiction text serves as a model and evidence for it, not as a precise definition. Thus an error in the text is not directly an inconsistency in the text, the text is intended to be compared against the fictional world, not against itself. Of course in practice the fictional world is only accessible through a text, probably the same one where we are seeing the error, but there is this intermediate step of going through a fictional world (using another model, the state of uncertainty about it). Similarly to how the real world is only accessible through human senses, but it’s unusual to say that errors in statements about the world are inconsistencies in sensory perception.
I don’t see why fictional evidence shouldn’t be treated exactly the same as real evidence, as long as you don’t mix up the referents. There is no fundamental use in singling out reality (there might be some practical use in specializing human minds to reality rather than fiction). Generalization from real evidence to fiction is as much a fallacy as generalization from fictional evidence to reality.
A fiction text is a model of fictional territory that can be used to get some idea of what that territory is like (found with the prior of fictional worlds), and to formulate better models, or models of similar worlds (fanfiction). Statements made in a fiction text can be false about the fictional territory, in which case they are misleading and interfere with learning about the fictional territory. Other statements are good evidence about it. One should be confused by false statements about a fictional territory, but shouldn’t be confused by true statements about it. And so on and so forth.
I think not mixing up the referents is the hard part. One can properly learn from fictional territory when they can clearly see in which ways it’s a good representation of reality, and where it’s not.
I may learn from an action movie the value of grit and what it feels like to have principles, but I wouldn’t trust them on gun safety or CPR.
It’s not common for fiction to be self-consistent enough and preserve drama. Acceptable breaks from reality will happen, and sure, sometimes you may have a hard SF universe were the alternate reality is very lawful and the plot arises from the logical consequences of these laws (often happens in rationalfic), but more often than not things happen “because it serves the plot”.
My point is, yes, I agree, one should be confused only by lack of self-consistency fiction or not. Yet, given the vast amount of fiction that is set in something close to real Earth, by the time you’re skilled enough to tell apart what’s transferable and what isn’t, you’ve already done most of the learning.
Not counting the meta-skill of detecting inconsistencies, which is indeed extremely useful, for fiction or not, but I’m still unclear where exactly one learns it from.
A mostly off-topic note on the conceptual picture I was painting. The fictional world was intended to hold entities of the same ontological kind as those from the real world. A fiction text serves as a model and evidence for it, not as a precise definition. Thus an error in the text is not directly an inconsistency in the text, the text is intended to be compared against the fictional world, not against itself. Of course in practice the fictional world is only accessible through a text, probably the same one where we are seeing the error, but there is this intermediate step of going through a fictional world (using another model, the state of uncertainty about it). Similarly to how the real world is only accessible through human senses, but it’s unusual to say that errors in statements about the world are inconsistencies in sensory perception.