Stranger Than Fiction

Stranger than fiction.

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Truth is Stranger than Science Fiction: The Quest for Knowledge in Andrei Tarkovskii’s Solaris and Stalker

This article explores Andrei Tarkovskii’s conception of truth in Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979) as part of his wider philosophical project concerning knowledge. The director’s epistemological views form a core dimension of his life and aesthetic as he strives towards what he considers a higher, spiritual ‘idea of knowing’. In his search for this idealised notion of truth, Tarkovskii uses the...

"Truth" is Stranger than Prediction, More Questionable than Causal Inference

Robert Luskin's article in this issue provides a useful service by appropriately qualifying several points I made in my 1986 American Journal of Political Science article. Whereas I focused on how to avoid common mistakes in quantitative political science, Luskin clarifies ways to extract some useful information from usually problematic statistics: correlation coefficients, standardized coeffic...

More than cautionary tales: the role of fiction in bioethics.

Is there a role for fiction in explorations of ethics? Are words, as Conchis says, only for truth, for facts? Or is it perhaps the case that words can be used to help us reach a deeper truth—through fiction? This month the Journal of Medical Ethics features a form of publication rarely found in the pages of scholarly journals: the first instalment of a fictional “bioethics soap opera” designed ...

Myth-information about family medicine: is fiction better than truth?