To quibble just a bit I think that it is occasionally (tho probably not in the terminator examples the paper briefly mentioned) reasonable to use a very throughly fleshed out fictional account as evidence of plausibility. I mean by giving a detailed narrative you rule out the possibility the idea is internally incoherent or requires some really really implausible things to be true.
Still, I don’t think this is a very strong effect and is overestimated all the time by people who think that literature gives more than entertainment/enjoyment but actually gives insight.
I would say that literature does in fact give insight, but that it is a different type of insight that a historical account is meant to give. For a piece of literature shows you how your emotions will be affected by hearing or seeing different circumstances; it allows your brain to develop causal models about how emotions are generated. History lessons do not do this, at least not in the same way; thus literature fulfills an important role that history is missing.
To quibble just a bit I think that it is occasionally (tho probably not in the terminator examples the paper briefly mentioned) reasonable to use a very throughly fleshed out fictional account as evidence of plausibility. I mean by giving a detailed narrative you rule out the possibility the idea is internally incoherent or requires some really really implausible things to be true.
Still, I don’t think this is a very strong effect and is overestimated all the time by people who think that literature gives more than entertainment/enjoyment but actually gives insight.
I would say that literature does in fact give insight, but that it is a different type of insight that a historical account is meant to give. For a piece of literature shows you how your emotions will be affected by hearing or seeing different circumstances; it allows your brain to develop causal models about how emotions are generated. History lessons do not do this, at least not in the same way; thus literature fulfills an important role that history is missing.