So you asking about the status of the evidence provided to back up a premise, using refernce to fact or fiction argumentatively.
Well "evidence" is a much stronger word than I would use, as the messages I'm thinking of are more based on the principles of a group or a person, and based on reactions habitual to humanity (observed through experience), rather than a scientific proof.
That's an interesting point. It's also interesting to my mind that the same sentence - "government policy X is bad, and can lead to war" in your example - can be backed up with several vastly different references - fact or fiction in your example. That seems to me to point to the interesting point that both fact and fiction can carry across the same message (maybe sharing the same propositional value).
That is very interesting.
Yeah, that makes more sense.
Something interesting and inescapable is that what you say and the way you say it are inseparable. So deciding whether to convey your message through fiction or non-fiction is not some arbitrary choice- the two messages being conveyed are inherently different. For example, say you want to say your example, "government X policy is wrong and can lead to war". You could make a dogmatic documentary giving the facts about the policy and the details and all that. Or you could make a piece of fiction, imagination, like Avatar or Nausica, which may be way more effective, as they transcend politics and cyclical argumentation. The two approaches do not convey the same message. The approach matters. Sometimes fiction allows a type of generalization that non-fiction cannot avoid. It lets us see things in a more idealized way, more compact and clean and "real".
Can you elaborate what you mean when you say that "the two messages conveyed are inherently different"? I'm not quite grasping your meaning yet.
I agree that a fiction can provide a "safe" sense of detachment from specific cultures and political positions, on the other hand someone's reaction to a fictional illustration might be "yeah but I don't believe that outcome would happen in real life".
Perhaps "illustration of a point through factual or fictional storytelling" may have been a better way to describe what I meant in the OP.
Edited by Cukeman, 12 November 2017 - 04:04 PM.