ABSTRACT

For characterizing Cartesian discovery, one might immediately turn to René Descartes's works on mechanics, optics, mathematics, or even metaphysics. In each of these cases, the object of discovery would be something actual, something that, theoretically at least, obtained in Descartes's early-modern world. To date, literary theorists have used possible-worlds theory as a way to develop theories of functionality. In The World it is God's ability, in principle, to bring a given paper world into material being that gives such a world a text its epistemological value. According to modern theories of possible worlds, writing the possible entails creation in thought and language: stipulation rather than discovery. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mimetic theories generally operated along either the Aristotelian or Platonic axis. For Aristotle, language faithfully simulates phenomena, and is firmly grounded in experience of the actual.