THE FULL VALUE OF THE HALF-TRUTH

 The first time I encountered the following quote online, I didn't think it sounded much like Aristotle, even speaking as someone who's not an expert on the philosopher:

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

And sure enough, it turned out that an accurate version of the quote from the NICOMACHEAN ETHICS reads:

It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible.

The first quote apparently comes from an early mistranslation of the ETHICS. Possibly the translator was misled by the passage dealing with the relative nature of "precision" that one can discern regarding a given subject. (For instance, the chemical composition of a particular compound can be determined with far more accuracy than the nature of a process such evolution, which can't be broken down and analyzed in the same manner.) The mistranslation seems to be an endorsement of relativity for its own sake.

Now, I believe that in philosophy one can only entertain thoughts up to a certain point before accepting or rejecting them. However, in literature, "thoughts" are not truths, but rather "half-truths" as I argued here.  "The poet never affirmeth," said Sir Philip Sidney, which I interpret as meaning that the nature of "poetry" (i.e., literature) is one that changes depending on the viewpoints of both its authors and its audiences. Art is primarily meant to be an activity of "play," no matter how often it's used to perform "work." 

Now, even though the fake Aristotle quote doesn't apply to his philosophy, it does hew a little closer to one of his pronouncements in the POETICS, where the philosopher states that the act of poetry is mimesis or imitation, and that the poet must imitate one of three categories of phenomena: 

things as they are, things as they are said or thought to be or things as they ought to be

In Renaissance times mimesis became equated with verisimilitude, with imitating "things as they are," and thus the term passed into literary history with a meaning that endorsed a form of real-world fidelity that Aristotle would never have endorsed. Whatever the philosopher preferred to read or watch on stage, he explained that the range of imitation had to extend beyond the observable world, even though presumably Aristotle would have desired some "degree of precision" even when dealing with the hypothetical, with "things as they ought to be."

In my earlier essay I emphasized the idea of "half-truths" as a form of "weak proposition," meaning that the author may be as unserious about what his narrative proposes as the audience is in entertaining the notion. Of course, some authors and some audiences can become very serious about how much a given proposition represents reality, but it can even be difficult for an author and his audience to remain on the same page. For instance, take the well-known phrase, "Hell is other people" from Sartre's play NO EXIT. Sartre himself argued that he didn't mean to give the line the connotation that most listeners got from it. Yet the listeners are not necessarily wrong in the way that Aristotle's translator was wrong. 

One key notion I argued in the cited essay was the importance of epistemological patterns to the process of concrescence in fiction. It's not that any work of fiction necessarily seeks to make definitive statements about epistemology. But in the process of any act of imitation, it's natural though not inevitable for authors to attempt buttressing their fictional works by drawing upon patterns that represent the "real world." Often these patterns are based upon propositions that the consensus-audience no longer accepts, or does not accept universally, ranging from the Oedipal theories of Freud to the 19th-century theories of "the Hollow Earth." To the audience, what's important is whether or not the author can make even the most absurd proposition "entertaining"-- and this, not real-world applicability, is what gives even the weakest of weak propositions a peculiar endurance, if not strength in the usual sense.