Epidemiology of Fallacies

Defeasible Reasoning and Informal Fallacies

In The Impossibility of Perfection, Michael Slote tries to show that the traditional Aristotelian doctrine of the unity of the virtues is mistaken. His argumentative strategy is to provide counterexamples to this doctrine, by showing that there are what he calls “partial virtues”—pairs of virtues that conflict with one another but both of which are ethically indispensible. Slote offers two lines of argument for the existence of partial virtues. The first is an argument for the partiality of a particular pair of virtues: frankness and tact. The second is a kind of feminist critique. I argue that both of these lines of argument fail. In both cases, Slote fails to ask whether the apparent conflict between putatively partial virtues has arisen from a misunderstanding of the demands of those virtues. From this error I suggest we can learn an important lesson: whether in our studies thinking about the virtues or in our everyday lives trying to practice them, it is a serious mistake to focus on the relationships among virtues without considering precisely what each of these virtues demands.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to propose an initial, exploratory and tentative theoretical construct related to the current consumption of landscape as a key symbolic and physical element in territorial representation and evocation, and for the deployment of place branding strategy. It constructs a line of argument to support what shall be referred to as “landscape branding”, that is, the paradigmatic role of landscape in place branding. It is, therefore, of interest to define the value of landscape as a social and cultural construction, which is why the paper awards importance to the specific analysis of their capacity for visual and/or aesthetic evocation within the context of a general branding strategy for geographical spaces.Design/methodology/approachTo develop a sufficient proposal for sustaining “a theory of landscape branding”, the paper deploys a meta-analysis, that is, an extensive review and interpretation of the literature related to visual landscape and place branding, to propose a tentative initial approach to landscape-infused place branding theory.FindingsThe relationship existing between landscape images and texts and their possible situating and subsequent interpreting within the context of the political, cultural and economic logics of contemporary society give rise to a renewed analytical framework for cultural geographies (Wylie, 2007). At this point, place branding becomes a recurring argument for the consumption of carefully staged places, representing, to use Scott’s terms (2014), the arrival of a cognitive-cultural capitalism characteristic of post-Fordism.Practical implicationsFrom a practical perspective, the landscape branding approach provides several benefits. First of all, regardless of the fact that many commentators have argued that logos, slogans and advertising campaigns are relatively ineffective in place branding, practitioners still seem to be focussed on these visual design and advertising tools. The landscape branding approach facilitates an identity-focussed perspective that reconfirms the importance of linking reality with perception and hence reinforces the need to link place branding to policy-making, infrastructure and events.Social implicationsLandscapes’ imageability facilitates visual storytelling and the creation of attractive symbolic actions (e.g. outdoor events/arts in attractive landscape and augmented reality or landscaping itself). This is the type of imaginative content that people easily share in social media. And, of course, landscape branding reiterated the importance of experience. If policymakers and publics alike understand this considerable symbolic value of landscape, it might convince them to preserve it and, hence, contribute to sustainability and quality of life.Originality/valueThe novelty lies not in the familiar use of visual landscape resources to promote places, but in the carefully orchestrated construction of gazes, angles, representations, narratives and interpretations characteristic of geographic space, which somehow hijack the spontaneous gaze to take it to a certain place. Everything is perfectly premeditated. According to this, the visual landscape represents a critical point as a way of seeing the essence of places through a place branding strategy. In this sense, that place branding which finds in visual landscape a definitive argument for the projection of aspirational places imposes a new “way of seeing” places and landscape based on a highly visual story with which to make a particular place desirable, not only for tourism promotion purposes but also with the intention of capturing talent, infrastructures and investment, among other objectives.

While researchers have looked at many aspects of argumentation, an area often neglected is that of argumentation strategies. That is, given multiple possible arguments that an agent can put forth, which should be selected in what circumstances. In this paper we propose a heuristic that implements one such strategy. The heuristic is built around opponent modelling, and operates by selecting the line of argument that yields maximal utility, based on the opponent’s expected response, as computed by the opponent model. An opponent model may be recursive, with the opponent modelling of the agent captured by the original agent’s opponent model. Computing the utility for each possible line of argument is thus done using a variant of M* search, which in itself is an enhancement of min-max search. After describing the M* algorithm we show how it may be adapted to the argumentation domain, and then study what enhancements are possible for more specific types of dialogue. Finally, we discuss how this heuristic may be extended in future work, and its relevance to argumentation theory in general.

Summary The paper aims to analyze the attitudes to German language in the Lithuanian public discourse. Texts written on this topic and chosen for the analysis appeared in two news portals – the national news portal delfi.lt and the regional news portal kaunodiena.lt. The database covers the period from 1 January 2011 to 1 March 2017; it consists of 82 articles from both news portals. For studying the image of German, the present study applies the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis taking into account different argumentation strategies for learning or not learning German as a foreign language as well as main topical priorities. The general attitudes towards countries can serve as an important foundation for motivation to language learning, so the analysis starts with the discussion of the specifics attributed to Germany and German-speaking countries (effectiveness governing the world, sympathy, economic success, and reliability). The analysis of the selected texts confirms that the image of Germany in Lithuania is quite positive: Germany, especially on delfi.lt, is presented as a target country for qualified Lithuanian experts, as an economically stable country having a large degree of political and cultural influence in the world. Regarding the status of German, the analyzed texts reveal a more ambiguous picture: on the one hand, it is stated that German is not popular in Lithuania, on the other hand it is emphasized that the popularity of the German language is increasing. The argumentation scheme for learning German consists of several argumentation lines: German is represented as a commodity in such domains as a professional career in Germany, in dealing with bilateral business relations, and to some extent in building a professional career in one’s home country and upholding cultural relations.

Writing primarily for an audience of medievalists, in his brief afterword to the collection The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages, Fredric Jameson remarks: “Suffice it to say then that allegory, on my reading of it, is always intimately related to a crisis in representation, and that the medieval period is an extraordinary laboratory in which to witness its elaborations.”1 Almost a decade later, in his Allegory and Ideology, Jameson expands on and thus clarifies these remarks. Moving across time and space, from late antique biblical hermeneutics to twenty-first-century world literature, he shows the relevance of this seemingly archaic form to modernity and its crises of representation. For Jameson, allegory—as opposed to allegoresis and symbolic interpretation—promises hermeneutic simplicity and unitary meaning but delivers multiplicity and disruption: I tend to feel that allegory raises its head as a solution when beneath this or that seemingly stable or unified reality the tectonic plates of deeper contradictory levels of the Real shift and grate ominously against one another and demand a representation, or at least an acknowledgment, they are unable to find in the Schein or illusory surfaces of existential or social life. Allegory does not reunify those incommensurable forces, but it sets them in relationship with one another in a way which, as with all art, all aesthetic experience, can lead alternately to ideological comfort or the restless anxieties of a more expansive knowledge.2Jameson’s electrifying remarks capture the discordance inherent to medieval allegorical narrative, to those works that extend the possibility of hermeneutic fixity but, as they disperse into shards and fragments before the reader’s eyes, ultimately show this fixity to be illusory. Within the context of English poetry, this experience of reading premodern allegory, frustrating yet intoxicating, registers perhaps most intensely in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, a fourteenth-century dream vision.This is a poem famously difficult to summarize, one whose various episodes, discontinuous rather than progressive, never seem to cohere into a narrative whole.3Piers Plowman follows its protagonist as he navigates an allegorical landscape in search of a spiritual truth that remains, time and again, nebulous and elusive. In his quest, he encounters—indeed, often verbally spars with—a lengthy catalog of personified abstractions that both aid and subvert his spiritual quest. These personifications are, for the most part, not unchangeable but pliable; they instantiate the “surreal, fluid, and confusing” design of Langlandian allegory.4 This poem’s disruptive form seems to endorse Jameson’s account of allegory and the “crisis in representation” that this mode of writing signals. Yet his account dismisses the literary mode of poems like Piers Plowman: “We will find ourselves reverting again and again to this insight: that it is the disappearance of personification that signals the emergence of modernity.” For Jameson, the personifications of classical and medieval allegory reify an ethical binary of good and evil; they embody “fixed substances or passions” that often devolve “all the way to the caricatural or the stereotypical.”5In their second monographs, Katharine Breen and Nicolette Zeeman—respectively, professor of English at Northwestern and professor of medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge—interrogate the plasticity of medieval personification instantiated in the allegorical experimentation of Piers Plowman and other works. Like Jameson, Breen and Zeeman recognize that the instability inherent to this mode of writing captures the incommensurable and otherwise unrepresentable forces that collide in our experience of the world. However, both medievalists also advance a forceful rebuke to Jameson’s account of personification as a stagnant form—a critique certainly unintended, given the books’ publication dates. Breen’s Machines of the Mind traces the formal and historical development of three traditions of personification that, as she argues throughout the book, are available to medieval authors: Prudentian, Platonic, and Aristotelian. She describes how each type of personification functions as a pliable and complex “engine of thought” that allows writers and readers to think through difficult questions (MM, 8). For instance, in one thirteenth-century poem, personified vices register how sinfulness constitutes a “collective rather than a purely individual” problem; thus the poem proposes “public policy,” rather than private penance, as a solution to social ills (MM, 248–49). The book’s final chapter then describes how these three types of personification all “rub shoulders” in Piers Plowman (MM, 232).Zeeman’s Arts of Disruption focuses closely on moments of allegorical and narrative disjuncture in Piers Plowman, such as those in which the logic of specific personifications comes undone: when their “names remain the same while their actions and words degenerate” (AD, 13). Zeeman’s account of allegory bears a striking resemblance to Jameson’s. This mode of writing is “slippery, contrastive, pugnacious, episodic, contradictory—and not always glossable” (AD, 15). The first three parts of the book describe the pliability and argumentative vigor of Langland’s personifications. They are changeable and hypocritical; they debate and rebuke each other with violent words and gestures. The fourth and fifth parts explore how, by drawing material from the psychosomaticism of Galenic medicine and the unfulfilled quests of grail romance, Langland gestures to the ultimate unknowability of Christian salvation. Moving in and out of Langland’s poem, Zeeman argues boldly that allegory makes meaning out of frictions between narrative structures and bodies of discourse.In years to come, Breen’s and Zeeman’s insightful readings of Piers Plowman and other premodern works will transform the concepts and categories with which scholars in medieval studies talk about allegory. Certainly, medievalists are the primary intended audience for both books. This is especially true of Zeeman’s dense book, evidently written for a narrow community of readers intimately acquainted with Langland’s poem and its critical tradition; summary and context are often scant. Engaging in what Piers Plowman criticism calls “crux-busting,” Zeeman treats the poem as a constellation of enigmas that begs to be solved; she both grapples with and celebrates the poem’s many knots and slippages.6 To a degree, the last chapter in Breen’s book engages in a similar critical mode. She deploys her tripartite theory of personification to explicate the strange behaviors (and, in one especially brilliant case, gender fluidity) of Langland’s allegorical characters. Most of these enigmas—Why does Piers tear the pardon? What do Hawkyn’s tears signify? Why does Piers welcome Hunger into the half acre?—will probably mean little to those readers who do not already eagerly await the annual publication of the Yearbook of Langland Studies. Breen’s and Zeeman’s insightful responses will certainly provide medievalists with those “aha” moments that the best scholarship on Piers Plowman affords. They will also, most likely, spark fierce debates in conferences and specialized journals. For instance, I would reject Zeeman’s conclusion that Hawkyn’s tears signify “a kind of hope” and asseverate instead that they mobilize a critique of unthinking devotional formalism, of just going through the motions (AD, 177). In fact, Zeeman recognizes that the poem voices this worry throughout.However, these two monographs also speak beyond the disciplinary bounds of medieval studies. Breen and Zeeman stake a claim—a claim, for the most part, explicit in the former’s work and implicit in the latter’s—that personification allegory is not an “archaic or archaizing form” symptomatic of a premodern naïveté and designed for pedagogical ease (MM, 9). In their critical imagination, the alterity of the past, with its strange forms and genres, speaks to the concerns and crises of representation of modernity. My account of these books thus aims to expose those analytical moments that disclose the transhistorical vitality of medieval allegory, moments that, throughout both books, are interlaced with rigorous, historically situated engagements with medieval thought.Similar questions animate these two books: How and why do personifications in medieval allegory change? What are the cognitive, ethical, and social affordances of these fluid forms? How does medieval allegory make meaning? However, to answer these questions, Breen and Zeeman employ markedly different methodologies; I find such distinctiveness to be evidence of the rich and varied forms that the writing of literary history can embody. Piers Plowman is the indubitable gravitational center of Zeeman’s monograph. She begins not with the tradition that produced the poem but with the literary and philosophical logic of the work of art itself. After a brief introduction that describes “narrative disruption” as the “stuff of medieval allegorical narrative,” Zeeman plunges her reader straight into the poem’s muddy yet invigorating waters (AD, 15). The animating logic of this singular poem both illuminates and is illuminated by a rich corpus of medieval literature, philosophy, rhetoric, and theology. Zeeman thus continues the critical project of her first book, “Piers Plowman” and the Medieval Discourse of Desire, which explores how the poem’s many moments of “failure, rebuke, and renewal” participate in and disclose a broader history of medieval psychology. In Zeeman’s critical imagination, citations, allusions, and mere resonances assemble into a vibrant network of premodern thought, which constellates around Langland’s poem. Consequently, Zeeman’s footnotes are comprehensive, reminiscent sometimes of a commentary. Most of the author’s claims are supported by and contextualized in a mosaic of premodern sources and modern criticism. The critical pleasure that Zeeman’s work affords is thus not dissimilar to the pleasure of Langland’s poem: a poem that seems to refuse linear reading and that, rife with manifold allusions and biblical and patristic citations, provides the thrill of recognition and documentation.Zeeman’s book is theoretically sophisticated. Moving across this lengthy text, the reader can infer how schools of thought such as deconstruction and psychoanalysis inform her readings of medieval literature and philosophy. However, in contrast to her first book, Zeeman’s theoretical allegiances rarely make it to the body of her text. At times, ripples do form on the surface. It is clear, indeed, that much of Zeeman’s account of allegory as a disruptive art draws from Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that the “fragmentary” nature of allegory denies “the false appearance of totality” (AD, 9).7 At one point, she winks at her reader and suggests that “Langland’s narrator may have discovered the death drive” (AD, 297). A different book could have begun with an extended account of Freudian psychoanalysis and, slowly over the course of a chapter, outlined what it tells us about medieval culture. But Zeeman does not apply modern theory to premodern texts. Rather, as this nod to Freud suggests, she implies that aspects of medieval thought anticipate and thus illuminate modernity’s tools of inquiry. Zeeman’s tactical engagement with modern theory foregrounds the intellectual intricacy of the medieval text; it becomes not the object of theory but theoretical in itself.8In contrast to Zeeman, Breen does not begin with Piers Plowman. Instead, she writes a prehistory to this poem, recuperating and exploring in meticulous detail those moments in intellectual and literary history that made such a poem possible in the first place. Still, although she does not focus on the poem until her book’s final chapter, Piers Plowman is an absent presence throughout. As Breen’s book unfolds, the history of allegory teaches us how to read Piers Plowman. However, one can also sense that the allegorical experimentation of Piers Plowman taught Breen how to read this history. Moreover, unlike in Arts of Disruption, the argumentative animus of Machines of the Mind emerges, in great part, from extensive engagement with twentieth-century criticism. To isolate those rhetorical techniques and modes of thought that produced Langlandian allegory, Breen’s introduction confidently declares that modern criticism has misunderstood medieval personification. What follows is a dazzling rewriting of literary history that emphasizes the complex cognitive and ethical affordances of these strange, seemingly arcane forms. In response to critics as influential as Erich Auerbach, Angus Fletcher, and Gordon Teskey, Breen rejects that personification commits depersonalizing violence against individual subjectivity. Rather, this pliable rhetorical tool, insofar as it represents “a body of data as a human body,” negotiates relationships between individuals and collectives (MM, 2).In this rich introduction, Breen also challenges scholarship that attaches personification allegory resolutely to a particular philosophical school. This genre, Breen explains, is neither inherently nominalist (it tells us that only particulars exist, as advanced by Paul de Man) nor inherently realist (it tells us that only universals exist, as advanced by Johan Huizinga). In fact, personification allegory is “not inherently anything” (MM, 315). De Man’s idiosyncratic attachment to nominalism notwithstanding, Breen’s introduction begins to advance a line of argumentation that traverses most of her book: critics typically assume that medieval personifications embody Platonic universals or Forms, unchanging and stable. For Breen, this Platonizing tendency has led critics to recognize fluid personifications in Piers Plowman and other works as somehow deficient. At this point, Breen’s iconoclastic argumentation falters slightly. Indeed, some of the smartest work on Piers Plowman as early as the mid-twentieth century recognizes the poem’s allegorical fluidity, unattached to a Platonist formalism.9 To my eye, even one of the main objects of Breen’s critique—Jill Mann’s contribution to the Cambridge Companion to “Piers Plowman,” cited recurringly throughout the book—does not advance such a rigid account of personification. Although she does call personification “Platonizing,” Mann does not quite construct a rigid philosophical schema from which all personifications emerge. Rather, she argues that, insofar as it captures the real existence of abstractions, this literary genre is no mere game. Like Platonism, it shows how ideas such as love and hate participate in the sensible world.10 Mann thus anticipates Breen’s claims that personification allegory has conceptual purchase on the social world. Indeed, Breen even acknowledges that, in an earlier essay unfettered by the pedagogical demands of a Cambridge Companion, Mann advances a more flexible account of personification reminiscent of her own category of Aristotelian personification (MM, 206).Breen’s vision of literary history is in no way dimmed by this oversimplification of the critical field. In her introduction, she demonstrates that personification allegory is not tied to particular philosophical positions, especially when the modes of inquiry of these bodies of premodern thought have been mediated and narrowed by modern criticism. Her wide-ranging critique also advances an important corrective to a great deal of historicist work in medieval literary studies that renders the literary epiphenomenal to its historical or intellectual context. Although as early as 1978 Russell Peck warned medievalists that Chaucer (and, I would add, Langland or Gower or any imaginative writer) “is not a logician, nor is he a systematic philosopher,” a great deal of scholarship still seeks to restrict imaginative literature to narrow philosophical viewpoints, in the process circumscribing the imaginative and theoretical work that the literary itself can effectuate, as well as erasing the dynamism of much medieval philosophy.11 Breen captures instead how imaginative literature participates in rather than merely reflects intellectual history, indeed often pushes its boundaries. Machines of the Mind thus avoids what as the of or in which and are against each an that is ultimately her book, Breen closely those early that scholarship to to historical context or to sources for In each chapter Breen a or of that think and, techniques of and their how and early medieval to as well as imaginative works in their own personified who are not of a ethical binary but inherently The first of the book to a poem often but personifications at the of and in they “a material and presence in and (MM, In the poem, personifications like and are not inherently through the of they a of and the reader to do This often the form of what Breen calls a a of gender through which personifications their (MM, In the second of the book in the of a Platonic a who is sometimes even (MM, as a changeable Breen scholarship that, to her this and actions and some in Arts of Disruption, Zeeman also writes a history of one systematic than For the most part, her focus on the actions and behaviors of particular allegorical not on the conceptual categories to which these In the first three parts of her book, Zeeman does the of Langlandian personification in rhetoric, and and it is that her contribution to the history of medieval personification and the plasticity of this form on Zeeman explores how the rhetorical of of as who embody and “the instability and of and (AD, To Jameson’s critique of these do not reify a ethical binary of and In fact, these make the reader to the and possibility of in and (AD, For Langland’s of advances a of an that, by the of the and to the of Christian of have both and to find a stable and perhaps unitary in a poem for its and In her own book, Zeeman celebrates recognition of the relationship between form and she neither nor rejects his more historicist claims about the poem’s Yet in her reading Zeeman the inherent to the rhetorical of which may a of the critique that in the like Breen’s Zeeman’s is inherently it also from a process of rhetorical Zeeman’s of the rhetorical of this form call to the of medieval personification. In her account of the and argumentative of personification Zeeman also emphasizes how this genre a or that aims to and concepts rather than to (AD, Her brief remarks about the imaginative and functions of personification to an about and that is to Breen’s In her of and Platonic Breen describes how these personifications from and complex of the personifications are rhetorical tools that in their readers (MM, In a Christian Platonic are not They are imaginative that a hermeneutics of that a and other personifications a of that think of as (MM, Although these forms conceptual purchase on the material they are in real and the of thought in these Breen continues to rebuke twentieth-century scholarship that emphasizes the pedagogical simplicity of premodern personification. the many Breen in Machines of the may be her and most resolutely In personification allegory, evidence of an realist unable to abstractions in (MM, For the personifications of medieval allegory to its their The of the medieval that suggests a medieval unable to the of that For this Breen’s of the literary in her account of the Platonic is Indeed, it from the work of her who in Middle English literature an of the literary from other modes of an that what it to and recognizes the of these works in the social work on the of personification allegory with the work of literary who have for and as concepts to the These are concepts that have been at least by of in literary history, as and to the Middle The work of these scholars challenges influential of literary history that as a historical indeed a historical first in the Breen speaks to similar For to read personification allegory is to read a and work of as well as to the complex cognitive that its world affords. She thus challenges a vision of literary history that the inherent of the of the modern to earlier literary modes for the world. As medievalists such as and have the of this type of critique beyond the critical relationship between premodern and modern After the logic that a Middle by premodern unable to from from similar not to the logic that, insofar as it the of the as a of intellectual literary that do not those as somehow indeed imaginative vigor of these personifications is perhaps most in Breen’s account of Aristotelian personification. This last in her tripartite personification the purchase that literature, insofar as it engages with reality and and complex modes of thought, can have on the social world. Breen two philosophical traditions the of nominalism universals concepts that in the human in dream like Piers Plowman, by the human as or enigmas that readers to think about in Langland’s poem the functions as a nominalist that readers think about the nature of the (MM, that from the of particulars to the of this personifications their from an of particular by they are for about the universals with which they are and, like Langland’s can detail (MM, in these Aristotelian personifications a literary form that purchase an complex social world (MM, This form into a that allows readers to think about and social questions (MM, in Piers Plowman the personified Hunger functions as an ethical thought that ultimately and readers to the conclusion that is not a of (MM, it is out of the multiplicity of the this type of Aristotelian personification becomes “the most literary form for the social of (MM, to this late medieval that their (MM, Although by Breen’s of the modern is She writing about produced in the Middle and expansive period against which modernity itself. Breen’s signals that modernity is a that the second half of the period that in social and structures the of the as Breen thus gestures to the theoretical and indeed of this To my eye, this signals the broader and transhistorical critical of this and, most of the premodern literary works that it contrast to Machines of the Arts of Disruption does not recognize the of personification allegory. Still, Zeeman does that allegory of and a linear narrative (AD, 15). These capture “the and of in the (AD, In she recognizes that the inherent to personification allegory captures a that and more modes of literary such as to the best in both and Piers Plowman, the of the quest, that be for the or truth an object of unfulfilled As in a personification debate that is rather than Zeeman does not provide her reader with the of unitary she in fact, that the poem does not these of salvation. Rather, Piers Plowman deploys the and disruptive work of and, in into the ultimate unknowability of (AD, and also in the often fluid of Zeeman’s monograph. At the of her Zeeman that has been a (AD, The of her reflects the of medieval spiritual In its of the book’s the that, for Zeeman, is inherent to allegory. To the book’s of is not In fact, it like a of in a publication landscape that the and more forms of Zeeman her as they to the of a to recognize across the Like the of Piers Plowman the argumentative of Zeeman’s book capture a its many parts collide and grate against each other but, any do not cohere into the illusory of unitary in her conclusion Zeeman also suggests that, to Breen’s three modes of these allegorical modes “rub against each and meaning out of their (AD, The and that to those spiritual that be in especially the of Zeeman’s remarks are Indeed, they at the of two critical to Piers Plowman: one that the poem as a narrative of and spiritual and one that emphasizes the poem’s and Still, this final at Zeeman has not to those moments in the in medieval thought more these allegorical modes in Although she begins to explore questions of her that Langland’s into the and of and extended Yet perhaps the is that any final at by feel of Machines of the Mind and Arts of Disruption to debates medieval and in the of Piers Plowman are My reading of these books has instead on their broader to literary history and to the history of Indeed, Breen and Zeeman boldly the of medieval these These two monographs thus participate in an important critical tradition that recognizes the of the Middle to critical theory as well as to the concepts and ills that in this does not apply seemingly theory to early it in the logic of medieval literature and the that the of modernity and its critical However, neither Breen nor Zeeman out to a of As literary they first and to the of or forms as well as to their books are, to a great of that poem that has most of their to the bodies of with which it and to the brilliant criticism that it has This is scholarship that, as it, emphasizes how the medieval work of art, moments of its and its their true our own in those that do not the of Piers Plowman but rather to other bodies of medieval thought, these two books can sometimes feel like They rather than critique a corpus of premodern literature, rhetoric, and philosophy. In they to the vibrant thought and alterity of a medieval that and as yet especially to and the of for their and I also and for and

The present multidisciplinary theoretical article develops its focal line of argument gradually. At first, feminist and narrative theory are consulted; after that, some treatments in the philosophy of mind are discussed. The latter’s correlative relationship with the recent “materialist turn” in philosophy affords to propose a tentative alternative to the current and universally accepted approaches to the (fictional) character much indebted to philosophical idealism. This latter observation also determines the broad – some might argue seemingly overtly complicated – theoretical reach of the article. However, its timely point of departure – the online misogynistic abuse in fan discussions directed at Breaking Bad’s Skyler White and the actress Anna Gunn –, enables to cast the issue of character engagement in necessarily broad terms, disciplinarily speaking. Be it in the context of different scientific disciplines or as the crucial vertebra connecting them, whilst also suggesting far-reaching philosophical implications. This kind of engagement, and especially its expression in online discourse, provides an impetus to inquire about the peculiarities of the human mind and the operation of human thought. Therefore, the present article zooms in on the conventionally understood binary relationship between “fiction” and “reality”, sketching appropriate terminology (continuance, narrative person, realitization) and theoretical framework (inspired, in part, by the Soviet school of philosophical Activity Theory) to help explain the human proclivity to treat characters in naïve realist terms, i.e., as real people. The central research question is as follows: what kind of ramifications can be detected for the conceptualization of character (and narrative) engagement from a particular kind of value-laden reception (like the forms of digital misogyny that emerged in the context of Breaking Bad’s reception)?