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3. The fitness indicator function. Whereas the first two functions We admire clarity, accuracy, and relevance in realistic, uses of language and regard these qualities as showing a speaker possesses desirable intellectual qualities. Fictional creations—stories, jokes, and ornamented speech, such poetry—are similarly judged. Behind every act of speaking, or artistic, looms the idea of a fitness test. Human are continuously judging their fellows in terms of cleverness or banality of their language use. Skillful employment a large vocabulary, complicated grammatical constructions, surprise, stylishness, coherence, and lucidity all have bearing how we assess other human beings. Intentionally artistic language are parpaticularly liable to assessment in terms of what they reveal about the character of a speaker or writer.

Every speech act has the potential for all three of these functions present, overlapping in different ways. Pride and Prejudice is a fiction, that does not mean that it cannot represent realistic elements. It tells about how lives were lived in Regency En gland, including descriptions physical conditions, housing, diet, class relations, and so on. We will in it also a variety of moral and factual views expressed by characters in the novel; these represent the kinds of views—foolish or wise, or ignorant—one would have been likely to hear in the day. Unless authors write in genres allowing nonrealistic elements (such the gothic novel or science fiction), they will be judged by their authenticity—or lack of it, as when, for instance, a movie that takes place in the 1940s has a character talking anachronistically about his lifestyle.”

But what ever their factual accuracies or unintended gaffes, fictional for mances are untethered from practical, descriptive communication. Like every other story, Pride and Prejudice is play, make-believe grown-ups. The notion of Kantian disinterestedness, contemplation aesthetic object, is a phi losopher’s abstract way of describing deep and spontaneous human capacity to disengage the worlds of storytellers from ordinary communicative and descriptive acts. At its heart, general doctrine of aesthetic autonomy, so much debated by theorists experience.

Implicated in this whole sphere, however, we find the third function, already identified as a product of sexual selection. Speech perperformances, especially artistic speech perperformances, are Darwinian fitness indicators: ways of judging the wit, originality, or general cleverness of a person. This does not mean that anyone normally picks up Pride and Prejudice learn about Jane Austen’s health, mental or physical, at the time wrote the novel. It does mean that it is impossible for any sophisticated, informed speaker of En glish to read her novel without feeling twinges admiration for her extraordinary skill and style. Our intense interest artistic skill, as well as the pleasure that it gives us, will not be denied: it is an extension of innate, spontaneous Pleistocene values, feelings, and attitudes. History and culture give us the artistic forms (epics, novels, paintings, poems) in which we evaluate skill and virtuosity, but our admiration of skill and virtuosity itself is an adaptation derived from sexual selection off the back of natural selection.

The conflict between the function of communicative speech and decoupled imaginative speech is the source of the intentional (so-called) fallacy. In one way or another, this basic distinction—factual versus fictional speech acts—is widely recognized by theorists. What is not appreciated is the way the fitness indicator function impinges on relation between a work of literary art and its audience. In factual communication, truth matters. In fiction it does not, except normally to provide an accurate or deft backdrop for a story. But the third, fitness indicator function is an ever-present voice whispering to us that one kind of truth always matters: the truth about the sobriety, knowledge,