by Paul Chalmers

Created on: January 12, 2009

This is an epistemological issue, and its crux is the idea that we make judgments about whether to believe based not only on the merits of the isolated case, but on that belief's coherence with other beliefs, which we already hold and want to continue holding. In a sense it is the idea that the merits of believing in a case cannot be isolated; they are composed of the truth of the case in point's relationship with other things believed to be true.

So why do I say this has a bearing on the existence of fantasy creatures? Because if we were to believe in a fantasy creature we would either have to discard many other beliefs, which would be epistemologically unwise, or incorporate our understanding of the nature of that creature into our prevailing and 'naturalistic' world view. So, we might be held to explain the unicorn's place in evolutionary history, for example. The distinction between 'fantasy creature' and 'rare creature' would thereby collapse; it is up to you whether you think it can survive this collapse, but it seems that to do so it would need to become a lot more mundane, and not really carry the same sense.

A similar logic applies to belief in miracles; in taking their occurrence to be physically true, we must either say that they are an aberration from physical law, in which case the logic is to disregard them as a mistake as with any strange data, or that they are explained by a yet undiscovered physical law. The latter option would render them mundane (and not miracles, perhaps). The similarity between miracles and fantasy creatures seems to be that they both require a 'specialness' that separates them from the normal scientific world, yet to properly believe in them we need to incorporate them into this scientific world.

An interesting manifestation of this need is in modern children's fantasy books. Cases in point; Harry Potter, Northern Lights (et al). Both of these seem to use pseudo-scientific explanations to weave the magical sub world of the main characters into the real world which surrounds them, and of course which the reader is a part of. Examples might be the universal of 'dust' or the making of the Amber Spyglass in the Dark Materials trilogy, the endangered status of griffons in Harry Potter, or the methodological way in which magic is practiced; importantly with actions and objects not available to the reader in his life for comparative experimentation. The fact that these explanations are not truly scientific is not a problem;

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