ASA Announces Outstanding Student Paper

The American Society for Aesthetics is pleased to announce that Alex Fisher has won the Outstanding Student Paper for the 79th Annual Meeting, to be held in Montreal November 17-20, 2021. The selection is made by the Program Committee from all the 42 student papers submitted for the meeting. The prize is $250 plus $1000 for travel to the meeting.

  Fisher is a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge, Robinson College, working on the philosophy of fiction and videogames.

His paper is "In Defence of Fictional Cases." The abstract:

This paper considers the use of cases drawn from narrative fiction, arguing that fictional cases can be used in two distinct ways. First, suitably realistic fictions are chosen, such that actual conclusions are drawn from merely fictional cases, exemplified by Miranda Fricker’s introduction of testimonial injustice. Second, a phenomenon is only illustrated with a fictional case, and is then argued to actually occur with real cases. These two uses of fictional cases are compared to rival accounts of thought experiments, before it is argued that fictional cases are in various circumstances preferable to both thought experiments and real cases.