Recently, philosophers have discovered that they have a lot to learn from, or at least to ponder about, fiction. Many metaphysicians are attracted to fiction as a model for our talk about purported objects and properties, such as numbers, morality, and possible worlds, without embracing a robust Platonist ontology. In addition, a growing group of philosophers of mind are interested in the impli...

While the far-fetched ideas brought up with imagination are shedding lights on Science Fiction Movies, occasionally ever-growing technology has been fuelled by these creative inspirations and imaginations. This article reflects on the findings of the data visualization project Dystopia-Utopia (www.dystopia-utopia.com) and investigates the existence of a common discourse that would stand out in ...

Closely related genres have complex interrelations. An antecedent genre can constrain a subsequent genre, but changing rhetorical situations can lead to distinctions between an antecedent and its descendent. In this study, we assess two genres of detective fiction to determine their hierarchical relation to one another. We use the Gramulator, a computational tool that identifies indicative lexi...

Adventure games, and specifically the textual kind that are works of interactive fiction, are actually cooperative games. How people cooperate to solve them is not well understood, however. We describe ifMap, a system to allow interactors trying to solve a work of interactive fiction together online to create a shared map. The system is based on cooperative hypermedia and combines different hyp...

Understanding others' mental states is a crucial skill that enables the complex social relationships that characterize human societies. Yet little research has investigated what fosters this skill, which is known as Theory of Mind (ToM), in adults. We present five experiments showing that reading literary fiction led to better performance on tests of affective ToM (experiments 1 to 5) and cogni...

stanley g. weinbaum was one of the american science fiction writers of the 1920s and 1930s who anticipated virtual reality early in the development of the genre in the united states. the machine in weinbaum’s science fiction plays a crucial role in the production of virtual space and time. not only does weinbaum’s gadgetry function within the domain of spatial alterity, but they also provide te...

There are two ways in which we can contemplate the global/local dimension in relation to Indian commercial fiction in English: first, in terms of processes of publication and circulation (the means of production); and, second, in terms of the broad characteristics and reception of such fiction (product and consumption). This paper discusses Indian commercial fiction in English since the 1980s a...

Fiction literature has largely been ignored by psychology researchers because its only function seems to be entertainment, with no connection to empirical validity. We argue that literary narratives have a more important purpose. They offer models or simulations of the social world via abstraction, simplification, and compression. Narrative fiction also creates a deep and immersive simulative e...

In December 2010, the FCC completed an almost 4 yearlong rulemaking process related to socalled “Internet Neutrality.” During this process, more than 32,000 comments and related documents were filed with the FCC, arguing for or against net neutrality regulation. The debate over net neutrality is largely understood to be one of access providers vs. content providers. Those companies providing ho...

Jin Feng, in her paper "The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction," proposes that the representation of the "new woman" in Chinese fiction was paradoxically one of the ways in which male writers of the era explored, negotiated, and laid claim to their own emerging identity as "modern" intellectuals. Previous scholarship on fiction of the period probed occasionally the thematic im...