Doing philosophy with fictions and games: a regulatory account of bracketed engagement

Philosophers increasingly use fictions and games as instruments of inquiry, and the practice faces two boundary problems. A thought experiment or a story is entertained without being asserted: how can anything warranted come out of it? A game sets up an end that stops mattering when play ends: how can pursuing such an end leave anything behind? This paper proposes that both practices are kept in order by the same three regulative functions. Source-tagging (C1) keeps the subject aware that the scenario or the game is not the real world. Target-fixing (C2) keeps track of the question the exercise is answerable to. Bridging calibration (C3) governs what may cross back into real life, along which route and at what level. Thought experiments and narrative fiction engage the model with entertained content; games, the paper argues, engage it with the player’s own agency, held under the bracketed frame while it is being exercised, a configuration here called reflexive metarepresentation. The analysis supports a common regulative profile across the two cases, including how they characteristically fail, and advances their unity in a single functional kind as an explanatory hypothesis. A boundary condition separates this instituted coexistence of registers from its clinical counterpart, Bleuler’s double bookkeeping.