Superhero Thought Experiments by Chris Gavaler Nathaniel Goldberg

Author:Chris Gavaler, Nathaniel Goldberg [Chris Gavaler, Nathaniel Goldberg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, General, Social Science, Popular Culture
ISBN: 9781609386559
Google: ge-oDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2019-01-15T02:44:12+00:00

SIX

MINDING THE SWAMP

The previous chapter analyzed the meaning of superhero names according to the rebooted, retconned, or multiversed story worlds they appear in. This is the meaning the names have to a reader. But what do those or any other words mean to the characters themselves? Do those characters even have minds in which their words mean anything? More importantly, what makes our own words meaningful in our thoughts? In this chapter we treat the character type of swamp creatures and their subgenre of horror and superhero comics as a series of thought experiments answering those questions.

Because they concern meaning, the questions that we’re asking fall under the philosophy of language. Because they also concern thought, they overlap with the closely related philosophy of mind. One of the most famous philosophers of language, who himself dabbled in this philosophical overlap, was twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosopher Donald Davidson. Davidson explored interconnections among language, thought, and reality more deeply and systematically than perhaps any other analytic philosopher. Because Davidson introduced two different thought experiments—one involving a swamp creature, the other not—bringing his academic thought experiments to bear on these comic book ones illuminates both.

There’s another reason to appeal to Davidson in the context of comic book swamp creatures. Tracing back in the non–comic book literature to Theodore Sturgeon’s 1940 short story “It,” the swamp creature subgenre culminates in Alan Moore’s Saga of the Swamp Thing, a comic book series that ran from

1984 to 1987. In 1986, the third year of its run, Davidson delivered “Knowing One’s Own Mind” as the Presidential Address for the Sixtieth Annual Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Davidson there introduced his own swamp creature:

Let me tell my own science fiction story—if that is what it is. [. . .] Suppose lightning strikes a dead tree in a swamp; I am standing nearby. My body is reduced to its elements, while entirely by coincidence (and out of different molecules) the tree is turned into my physical replica. My replica, The Swampman, moves exactly as I did; according to its nature it departs the swamp, encounters and seems to recognize my friends, and appears to return their greetings in English. It moves into my house and seems to write articles on radical interpretation. No one can tell the difference. (“Knowing One’s Own Mind” 18–19)

Did Davidson come up with The Swampman while reading Moore? Davidson gave his address on March 28, 1986, and it was published in the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association in 1987—five months before DC released the first compilation of Saga of the Swamp Thing issues #21 (February 1984) to #27 (August 1984). If Davidson knew Moore’s work before writing “Knowing One’s Own Mind,” then he had to have read Swamp Thing in its original format.

We can’t know whether Davidson read Moore’s comics, but we do know that Moore read philosophy. Though Moore is not an academic philosopher, the Guardian’s Stuart Kelly writes, “One underestimates Moore at one’s peril: yes, he may have written Swamp Thing, but he did so while reading continental philosophy.

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