Knowledge And Action

Again, I am rereading Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy for a break from blogging but Larsson's text suggests something relevant.

How often does this happen? We want to understand why someone acted as he did on a particular occasion. We know something that would have motivated his action if he had known of it. Therefore we assume that he did know of it. But could he have known of it at the time of his action?

To be more specific, a while back I contacted an author about an error in one of his novels. I cannot remember the exact details but it was something like this. It seemed both to the reader and to the other characters that character X had died. Then we the readers learned that X was in fact still alive. Then character Y acted on the knowledge that X was still alive. However, at that point in the narrative, Y could not yet have learned that X was still alive and therefore should still have thought that he was dead. The author, Col Buchanan, accepted my point and said that he would try to revise the text for the paperback edition.

And my point is that Poul Anderson's many fictional texts are free of this kind of inconsistency. Sean M. Brooks found one prima facie contradiction: Terran Intelligence learned of Aycharaych's telepathy in The Day Of their Return yet later were unaware of it in "Honorable Enemies." However, a friend of Sean's suggested a possible explanation. See here.