Getting Started: Fictionalism and Exemplarism in Education

Abstract In this paper my aim is to compare and contrast Linda Zagzebski’s theory of moral exemplarism with a form of fictionalism modeled after Hans Vaihinger’s philosophy of ‘as if.’ The purpose for doing so is to address the pedagogical implications of underestimating affective and social dimensions of modeling moral behavior in a general educational setting. It is suggested that Vaihinger’s fictionalism offers a less instrumental view than moral exemplarism, and that focusing on getting started by way of expedient fictions is a more productive approach in education than focusing on attaining the exemplary via a model of admiration-emulation. Because the role of the teacher in the exemplarist setup is limited to offering narratives portraying exemplars, the pedagogical relation between teacher and student is downplayed in favor of the unidirectional relation between the student and the exemplary narrative. In the fictionalist setup, in contrast, the teacher is tasked with the more demanding and pedagogically rich undertaking of affective attunement, where awakening the curiosity of students through fictions demands an acute sense of how different people with different ingenia can be influenced to strive for the same thing via mind-reading and the imitation of affects. It is concluded that the main challenge for the fictionalist teacher is not to ensure that students admire and emulate what is truly admirable (i.e. to function as a corrective of students’ unreflective admiration), but to endeavor to prevent expedient fictions from turning into dogmas that inhibit moral thought and action rather than promote it.