On the Phenomenon of Deception in Fictions

DOI

10.2991/hss-26.2016.62How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Fiction, Necessity, Deception, Pasteurized lumps of truth.

Abstract

We human beings are not fact machines—beings who scan the environment for information and then process it in their extremely large brains to produce pasteurized lumps of truth. Thomas Gradgrind’s vision in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times—a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact—has never been realized. Through the course of the novel, Gradgrind comes to understand that human beings are not governed by facts and that they cannot be forced into a world of fact without a substantial amount of violence against their very natures. There are times, of course, when we need accurate information—but such times occur less frequently than we like to imagine.

Copyright

© 2016, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yanhui Wang
PY  - 2016/01
DA  - 2016/01
TI  - On the Phenomenon of Deception in Fictions
BT  - Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Humanities and Social Science
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 377
EP  - 381
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/hss-26.2016.62
DO  - 10.2991/hss-26.2016.62
ID  - Wang2016/01
ER  -