The Logic of Fictional Discourse
Dissertation, Indiana University (
1990)
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Abstract
This dissertation examines the logical structure of fictional discourse. It begins with an attempt to give an ontological underpinning for the semantics of fictional discourse. Fictional objects are taken to be abstract zeroth level individuals. Stories are structures of propositions. It is then suggested that stories are closed under the rules of the weak relevance logic St . It is argued that this logic deals well with the problem of inconsistent stories while at the same time treating the connectives in a reasonably intuitive manner. The four valued semantics developed by Dunn and Routley is extended to a model for St with quantification and identity. In an appendix, a completeness proof is given for this system