Doing philosophy with fictions and games: a regulatory account of bracketed engagement

Philosophers increasingly use fictions and games as instruments of inquiry, and the practice faces two boundary problems. A thought experiment or a story is entertained without being asserted: how can anything warranted come out of it? A game sets up an end that stops mattering when play ends: how can pursuing such an end leave anything behind? This paper proposes that both practices are kept in order by the same three regulative functions. Source-tagging (C1) keeps the subject aware that the scenario or the game is not the real world. Target-fixing (C2) keeps track of the question the exercis