Truth in Fiction

Philosophers have argued there is a particular kind of jarring effect in certain types of narrative fiction that prevents readers from imaginative engagement and/or detracts from the author’s authority over what’s fictionally true. In this paper we argue that this so-called imaginative resistance effect does not usually prevent readers from engaging imaginatively, nor does it detract from the author’s authority over what’s fictionally true. We distinguish three possible interpretation strategies that readers can follow to overcome an initial resistance: Face Value, (...) Character Perspective, and Narrator Accommodation. We flesh out the exact workings of the three strategies by integrating them into a general formal semantic framework for interpreting fiction. (shrink)

A review of John Woods, Truth in Fiction: Rethinking its Logic. Cham: Springer, 2018.

I develop ontological pluralism about non-being, the view that there are multiple ways, kinds, or modes of non-being. I suggest that the view is both more plausible and defensible than it first seems, and that it has many useful applications across a wide variety of metaphysical and explanatory problems. After drawing out the relationship between pluralism about being and pluralism about non-being, I discuss quantificational strategies for the pluralist about non-being. I examine historical precedent for the view. Finally, I suggest (...) that pluralism about non-being has explanatory power across a variety of domains, and that the view can account for differences between nonexistent past and future times, between omissions and absences, and between different kinds of fictional objects. (shrink)

It seems true to say that Sherlock Holmes is a detective, despite there being no Sherlock Holmes. When asked to explain this fact, philosophers of language often opt for some version of Lewis’s view that sentences like ‘Sherlock Holmes is a detective’ may be taken as abbreviations for sentences prefixed with ‘In the Sherlock Holmes stories …’. I present two problems for this view. First, I provide reason to deny that these sentences are abbreviations. In short, these sentences have aesthetic (...) properties that we should not expect of abbreviations. Second, I argue that the apparent truth of these sentences would not be explained even if they were abbreviations. An alternative is presented that avoids these problems. Following Walton, talk about fiction is viewed as a game of make-believe; following Lewis, interpretations of fiction are modelled using possible worlds. (shrink)

This article explores the relation between belief-like imaginings and the establishment of imaginary worlds (often called fictional worlds). After outlining the various assumptions my argument is premised on, I argue that belief-like imaginings, in themselves, do not render their content true in the imaginary world to which they pertain. I show that this claim applies not only to imaginative projects in which we are instructed or intend to imagine certain propositions, but also to spontaneous imaginative projects. After arguing that, like (...) guided imaginative projects, spontaneous projects involve specific imaginary truths, I conclude that imaginative projects, whether spontaneous or deliberate, comprise not only imaginings, but also mental acts of determining such truths. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that more is true in a work of fiction than explicitly said. In addition to directly stipulated fictional content (explicit truth), inference and background assumptions give us implicit truths. However, this taxonomy of fictional truths overlooks an important class of fictional truth: those generated by literary formal features. Fictional works generate fictional content by both semantic and formal means, and content arising from formal features such as italics or font size are neither explicit nor implicit: not (...) explicit since formal features don’t say anything; and not implicit since content generated from formal features doesn’t rely on other truths or background assumptions. In addition to showing that our current classification is incomplete, the new class of fictional truths provides four further upshots for definitions of fictional truth, story and work identity conditions, and the relationship between literary interpretation and fictional truth. (shrink)

A fictional text is commonly viewed as constituting an invitation to play a certain game of make-believe, with the individual sentences written by the author providing the propositions we are to imagine and/or accept as true within the fiction. However, we can’t always take the text at face value. What narratologists call ‘unreliable narrators’ may present a confused or misleading picture of the fictional world. Meanwhile there has been a debate in philosophy about so-called ‘imaginative resistance’ in which we are (...) inclined to resist imagining (or even accepting as true in the fiction) what’s explicitly stated in the text. But if we can’t take the text’s word for it, how do we determine what’s true in a fiction? We propose an account of fiction interpretation in a dynamic setting (a version of DRT with a mechanism for opening, updating, and closing temporary ‘workspaces’) and combine this framework with belief revision logic. With these tools in hand we turn to modelling imaginative resistance and unreliable narrators. (shrink)

This volume brings together new research on fiction from the fields of philosophy and linguistics. Fiction has long been a topic of interest in philosophy, but recent years have also seen a surge in work on fictional discourse at the intersection between linguistics and philosophy of language. In particular, there has been a growing interest in examining long-standing issues concerning fiction from a perspective that is informed both by philosophy and linguistic theory. Following a detailed introduction by the editors, The (...) Language of Fiction contains 14 chapters by leading scholars in linguistics and philosophy, organized into three parts. Part I, 'Truth, Reference, and Imagination', offers new, interdisciplinary perspectives on some of the central themes from the philosophy of fiction: What is fictional truth? How do fictional names refer? What kind of speech act is involved in telling a fictional story? What is the relation between fiction and imagination? Part II, 'Storytelling', deals with themes originating from the study of narrative: How do we infer a coherent story from a sequence of event descriptions? And how do we interpret the words of impersonal or unreliable narrators? Part III, 'Perspective Shift', focuses on an alleged key characteristic of fictional narratives, namely how we get access to the fictional characters' inner lives, through a variety of literary techniques for representing what they say, think, or see. The volume will be of interest to scholars from graduate level upwards in the fields of discourse analysis, semantics and pragmatics, philosophy of language, psychology, cognitive science, and literary studies. (shrink)

Quixote is a caricature of a knight errant; steeped into his fictional heroes, he undertakes to revive a tradition long dead, and in the process leaves behind some unforgettable images of knightly virtue turned sour. This caricature, however, is not simply a ploy meant to arouse laughter, but also an occasion to revisit the emphasis on knowledge and good sense with which virtue has been aligned in the Socratic/Platonic tradition. The challenge Quixote represents concerns the relation between reasoning and the (...) ability to “get it right” in practice; by sundering these apart, Cervantes forces a reconsideration of the unity of thought and action. (shrink)

It is widely believed, among philosophers of literature, that imagining contradictions is as easy as telling or reading a story with contradictory content. Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight, for instance, concerns a knight who performs many brave deeds, but who does not exist. Anything at all, they argue, can be true in a story, including contradictions and other impossibilia. While most will readily concede that we cannot objectually imagine contradictions, they nevertheless insist that we can propositionally imagine them, and regularly (...) do, simply by entertaining a text which prompts us to do so. I argue that this narrative does not bear scrutiny for two main reasons. First, because propositional imagining is beside the point, where truth in fiction is concerned; evaluating truth in fiction engages the cognitive architecture in ways that prohibit the mobilization of merely propositional imagination to that end. And second, because it is not obvious, given the strategies usually suggested, that we ever propositionally imagine contradictions in the first place—in fact, it seems we go out of our way to avoid directly imagining them. (shrink)

This paper explores the sense in which correctness applies to belief-like imaginings. It begins by establishing that when we imagine, we ‘direct’ our imaginings at a certain imaginary world, taking the propositions we imagine to be assessed for truth in that world. It then examines the relation between belief-like imagining and positing truths in an imaginary world. Rejecting the claim that correctness, in the literal sense, is applicable to imaginings, it shows that the imaginer takes on, vis-à-vis the imaginary world, (...) the first-person perspective of a believer. Imaginings, it concludes, ‘mimic’ beliefs with respect to the property of being correct or incorrect by virtue of having true or false content. (shrink)

Fictional Discourse: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics By PredelliStefanoOxford University Press, 2020. viii + 184 pp.

Many pornographic works seem to count as works of fiction. This apparent fact has been thought to have important implications for ongoing controversies about whether some pornography carries problematic messages and so influences the attitudes (and perhaps even the behaviour) of its audience. In this paper, I explore the claim that pornographic works are fictional and the significance that this claim has for these issues, with a particular focus on pornographic films. Two related morals will emerge. First, we need to (...) pay attention not merely to whether entire pornographic works should be classified as fictional, but to the way that pornographic fictions (like fictional works more generally) have both fictional and non-fictional elements. Second, we have to understand the ways that pornographic works can blur the lines between fiction and non-fiction, misleading their audiences into taking their fictional elements to be revealing truths about non-fictional reality. In the case of pornographic films, we will examine how a pornographic fiction can be portrayed by people having sex on camera, and the ways in which this portrayal can mislead viewers about sex in the non-fictional world. (shrink)

Impossible fictions are valuable evidence both for a theory of fiction and for theories of meaning, mind and epistemology. This article focuses on what we can learn about fiction from reflecting on impossible fictions. First, different kinds of impossible fiction are considered, and the question of how much fiction is impossible is addressed. What impossible fiction contributes to our understanding of "truth in fiction" and the logic of fiction will be examined. Finally, our understanding of unreliable narrators and unreliable narration (...) in fiction needs to accommodate stories that, on the face of it, cannot possibly be true. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that fiction is necessarily incomplete, but some recent work postulates the existence of universal fictions—stories according to which everything is true. Building such a story is supposedly straightforward: authors can either assert that everything is true in their story, define a complement function that does the assertoric work for them, or, most compellingly, write a story combining a contradiction with the principle of explosion. The case for universal fictions thus turns on the intuitive priority we assign (...) to the law of non-contradiction. My goal in this paper is to show that our critical and reflective literary practices set constraints on story-telling which preclude universal fictions. I will raise four stumbling blocks for universal fictionalists: the gap between saying and making true, our actual interpretive reactions to story-level contradictions, the criteria we accept for what counts as a story in our literary practices, and the undesirability of the universal fictionalist’s closure principles. (shrink)

This paper outlines a bicontextual account of fictional reports. A fictional report is a report on something that happens in a fiction, and a bicontextual account is an account that relativizes truth to two contexts. The proposal is motivated by two considerations. First, it explains the intuitive truth conditions of fictional reports without postulating hidden fiction operators. Second, it handles the problem of indexicals in fictional reports better than the standard accounts.

How do our engagements with fictions and other products of the imagination compare to our experiences of the real world? Are the feelings we have about a novel's characters modelled on our thoughts about actual people? If it is wrong to feel pleasure over certain situations in real life, can it nonetheless be right to take pleasure in analogous scenarios represented in a fantasy or film? Should the desires we have for what goes on in a make-believe story cohere with (...) what we want to happen in the actual world? In Apt Imaginings, Jonathan Gilmore develops a new framework to pursue these questions, marshalling a wide range of research in aesthetics, the science of the emotions, moral philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and film and literary theory. Gilmore argues that, while there is a substantial empirical continuity in our feelings across art and life, the norms that govern the appropriateness of those responses across the divide are discontinuous. In this view, the evaluative criteria that determine the fit, correctness, or rationality of our emotions and desires for what is internal to a fiction can be contrary to those that govern our affective attitudes toward analogous things in the real world. In short, it can be right to embrace within a story what one would condemn in real life. The theory Gilmore defends in this volume helps to explain our complex and sometimes conflicted attitudes toward works of the imagination; challenges the popular view that fictions serve to refine our moral sensibilities; and exposes a kind of autonomy of the imagination that can render our responses to art immune to standard real-world epistemic, practical, and affective kinds of criticism. (shrink)

An approach to the semantics of fiction that uses the tools of truth relativism provides an alternative to Meinongian and pretence-based approaches. The approach is consistent with the deep motivations of John Wood's Truth in Fiction.

Readers of fictions sometimes resist taking certain kinds of claims to be true according to those fictions, even when they appear explicitly or follow from applying ordinary principles of interpretation. This "imaginative resistance" is often taken to be significant for a range of philosophical projects outside aesthetics, including giving us evidence about what is possible and what is impossible, as well as the limits of conceivability, or readers' normative commitments. I will argue that this phenomenon cannot do the theoretical work (...) that has been asked of it. Resistance to taking things to be fictional is often best explained by unfamiliarity with kinds of fictions than any representational, normative, or cognitive limits. With training and experience, any understandable proposition can be made fictional and be taken to be fictional by readers. This requires a new understanding both of imaginative resistance, and what it might be able to tell us about topics like conceivability or the bounds of possibility. (shrink)

One of the vexed questions in the philosophy of wonder and indeed education is how to ensure that the next generation harbours a sense of wonder. Wonder is important, we think, because it encour- ages inquiry and keeps us as Albert Einstein would argue from ‘being as good as dead’ or ‘snuffed-out candles’ (Einstein 1949, 5). But how is an educator to install, bring to life, or otherwise encourage a sense of wonder in his or her stu- dents? Biologist Rachel (...) Carson suggests that exploring nature and specifically undertaking walks along the rocky coast of Maine would keep alive a person’s inborn sense of wonder (Carson 1984). Philosopher Jesse Prinz thinks that exposure to art will encourage wonderment because artworks, as he puts it, are “inventions for feeding the appetite that wonder excites in us” (Prinz 2013). Weird fiction (a subgenre of speculative fiction) – and in particular the work of one of its greatest exponents, the early-20th-century American author How- ard Phillips Lovecraft – is likewise a catalyst for wonder. The reason behind this is that Lovecraft’s ‘wonder-stories’ are densely packed with wonder per design; and in support of this claim I shall in what is to come 1) provide a brief introduction to Lovecraft and weird fiction; 2) present a working definition of wonder; and 3) clarify what is meant by something being ‘densely packed with wonder’ via bringing to the fore evidence of Lovecraft’s literary wonder- mongery. The paper ends with some reflections on the notion of ‘dark wonder’, why this peculiar label might be suitable for the kind of wonder we find in Lovecraft’s work, and why exposure to ‘dark wonder’ can be edifying, and in that sense educational. (shrink)

Some philosophers, like Alex Rosenberg, claim that natural science delivers epistemic values such as knowledge and understanding, whereas, say, literature and, according to some, literary studies, merely have aesthetic value. Many of those working in the field of literary studies oppose this idea. But it is not clear exactly how works of literary art embody knowledge and understanding and how literary studies can bring these to the light. After all, literary works of art are pieces of fiction, which suggests that (...) they are not meant to represent the actual world. How then can they deliver knowledge and understanding? I argue that literature and literary studies confer knowledge and understanding in at least five ways: they give us insight into the work and the world of the work of art in question, they shape our intellectual virtues, they invite us to apply various hypotheses, they deliver moral propositional knowledge, and they increase or bring about full understanding with respect to meaning, virtue, and significance. In the course of my argument, I refer at several junctures to Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Edith Wharton’s Summer, in order to illustrate each of these claims. (shrink)

This article reviews John Wood’s Truth in Fiction: Rethinking its Logic.

Que diriez-vous d’une autre prise sur les riches et célèbres? Tout d’abord l’évidence - les romans de Harry Potter sont la superstition primitive qui encourage les enfants à croire en la fantaisie plutôt que d’assumer la responsabilité du monde - la norme bien sûr. JKR est tout aussi désemparé sur elle-même et le monde que la plupart des gens, mais environ200 fois plus destructeur que l’Américain moyen et environ 800 fois plus que le Chinois moyen. Elle a été responsable de (...) la destruction de peut-être 30.000 hectares de forêt pour produire ces romans trash et toute l’érosion qui s’ensuit (pas trivial car il est au moins 6 et peut-être 12 tonnes / an de sol dans l’océan pour tout le monde sur terre ou peut-être 100 tonnes par Américain, et donc environ 5000 tonnes par an pour les livres de Rowling et films et ses 3 enfants). La terre perd au moins 1% de sa terre maximale chaque année, de sorte qu’il approche de 2100, la plupart de sa capacité de culture alimentaire aura disparu. Ensuite, il ya l’énorme quantité de carburant brûlé et les déchets faits pour faire et distribuer les livres et les films, poupées en plastique, etc. Elle montre son manque de responsabilité sociale en produisant des enfants plutôt que d’utiliser ses millions pour encourager la planification familiale ou acheter la forêt tropicale, et en promouvant la stupidité libérale conventionnelle de la suprématie du 3e monde qui détruit la Grande-Bretagne, l’Amérique, le monde et l’avenir de son descendant. Bien sûr, elle n’est pas si différente des 7 autres. 8 milliards désemparés - juste plus bruyant et plus destructeur. C’est le problème de déjeuner gratuit bref grand. La foule ne peut tout simplement pas voir qu’il n’y a pas une telle chose comme aider une personne sans nuire à d’autres. Les droits ou privilèges accordés aux nouveaux arrivants dans un monde surpeuplé ne peuvent que s’affaiblir dans ceux des autres. Malgré les catastrophes écologiques massives qui se produisent partout tous les jours, ils ne peuvent pas les épingler à la maternité effrénée de "la diversité", qui explique la majeure partie de l’augmentation de la population du siècle dernier et tout cela dans celui-ci. Ils manquent d’une combinaison d’intelligence, d’éducation, d’expérience et de santé mentale nécessaires pour extrapoler les assauts quotidiens sur les ressources et le fonctionnement de la société à l’effondrement éventuel de la civilisation industrielle. Chaque repas, chaque voyage en voiture ou en bus, chaque paire de chaussures est un autre clou dans le cercueil de la terre. Il n’a probablement jamais traversé son esprit qu’un siège dans un avion de Londres à San Francisco produit environ une tonne de carbone qui fond environ 3 mètres carrés de glace de mer et comme l’un des surprivileged, elle a probablement volé des centaines de ces vols. Non seulement les riches et les célèbres, mais presque n’importe quelle personnalité publique du tout, y compris pratiquement tous les enseignants, sont poussés à être politiquement corrects, ce qui dans les démocraties occidentales, signifie maintenant social-démocrate (néomarxiste, c’est-à-dire communiste dilué) suprémacistes du tiers monde travaillant pour la destruction de leurs propres sociétés et de leurs propres descendants. Ainsi, ceux dont le manque d’éducation, d’expérience, d’intelligence (et de bon sens de base), qui devrait leur interdire de faire des déclarations publiques du tout, domine totalement tous les médias, créant l’impression que l’intelligent et civilisé doit favoriser la démocratie, la diversité et l’égalité, alors que la vérité est que ce sont les problèmes et non les solutions, et qu’ils sont eux-mêmes les principaux ennemis de la civilisation. Voir mon Suicide by Democracy 4th ed (2020). (shrink)

A critical reflection on John Woods's new monograph, Truth in Fiction – Rethinking its Logic. I focus in particular on Woods’s world-inheritance thesis (what others have variously called ‘background,’ ‘the principle of minimal departure,’ and ‘the reality assumption,’ and which replaces Woods’s earlier ‘fill-conditions’) and its interplay with auctorial say-so, arguing that world-inheritance actually constrains auctorial say-so in ways Woods has not anticipated.

We present a theory of truth in fiction that improves on Lewis's [1978] ‘Analysis 2’ in two ways. First, we expand Lewis's possible worlds apparatus by adding non-normal or impossible worlds. Second, we model truth in fiction as belief revision via ideas from dynamic epistemic logic. We explain the major objections raised against Lewis's original view and show that our theory overcomes them.

In his book Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist, Peter J. Conradi suggests that “a task for critics today would seem to be to understand the indebtedness of her demonic, tormented sinners and saints and of the curious coexistence in her work of malevolence and goodness, to the dark tragi-comedies of Dostoevski.”1 In his 1986 essay “Iris Murdoch and Dostoevskii,” Conradi goes even further to argue that Fyodor Dostoevsky has been “unnoticed by commentators, a hovering or brooding presence for (...) at least two decades.”2 Both here and in his book Fyodor Dostoevsky, Conradi demonstrates “convergence” through a number of remarkable similarities: the parallels between Dostoevsky’s holy... (shrink)

Works of fiction are alleged to differ from works of nonfiction in instructing their audience to imagine their content. Indeed, works of fiction have been defined in terms of this feature: they are works that mandate us to imagine their content. This paper examines this definition of works of fiction, focusing on the nature of the activity that ensues in response to reading or watching fiction. Investigating how imaginings function in other contexts, I show, first, that they presuppose a cognitive (...) infrastructure encompassing at least one additional kind of mental state, whose role is to determine, to some degree, truth in an imaginary world. I then discuss the implications for the definition of fiction, showing that the definition should be refined to accommodate the structure that imagining presupposes: a work counts as fiction just in case it mandates us, not only to imagine, but to engage in a more complex mental activity, an activity that in addition to imagining, involves positing a backdrop for our imaginings. (shrink)

Kathleen Stock has recently argued that Gregory Currie’s account of fiction is beset by two patchwork puzzles. According to the first, Currie’s account entails that works of fiction end up being implausible heterogenous complexes of utterances that furnish a fictional world and utterances that aim at representing the actual world. According to the second, competent engagement with a fiction can implausibly result in switching from one mental attitude to another – namely, belief and make-belief. In this paper, I argue for (...) two main claims. First, that a few alterations to Currie’s account make it immune to Stock’s puzzles. And, second, that such a modified account presents clear advantages over the alternative one offered by Stock. (shrink)

Camus is defined by many as an absurdist philosopher of revolt. The Plague, however, shows him working rigorously through a well-known division between ancient and modern ethics concerning the relation of reason, feeling and happiness. For Aristotle, the virtues are stable dispositions including affective and intellectual elements. For Kant, one’s particular feelings are either that from which we must abstract to judge moral worth, or are a constant hindrance to proper moral activity. Further, Kant claims “habit belongs to the physical (...) nature of the determination of the will,” which seems to imply habit cannot be a moral determination at all. A related disagreement regards virtue and happiness. Aristotle’s happiness is “an activity of the soul in accord with virtue.” For Kant and other moderns, happiness is an ideal of imagination, “a maximum of well-being in my present, and in every future, state,” all the elements of which “are without exception empirical.” Thus happiness seems more the constant counterweight to moral action than its fulfillment. Kant and Aristotle agree, however, in their judgment of many characters and actions, as is illustrated in The Plague. The novel provides realistic insights into a philosophical agreement between these supposed oppositions. In particular, I show how both philosophers would agree in their judgements concerning both the relative goodness and relative happiness of Joseph Grand and Raymond Rambert. The illustration of this agreement proves Camus is valorizing a traditional ethic. (shrink)

Only Imagine is a wonderful book. Clear and tersely written, it provides a compelling defence of a rather unpopular view : namely, extreme intentionalism about the determination of fictional content and the nature of fictionality. It thus unquestionably advances the philosophical debate. It is also a pleasure to read for those of us who like fictions and not just the philosophy thereof: Stock discusses for her arguments many examples from real fictions, systematically making perceptive remarks. Here I will respond to (...) an objection that she makes to the normative account that I have defended in previous work, arguing that it has explanatory advantages grounded on the subordination on that account of author-intentions to fictional contents independently determined by social practices. (shrink)

The author of this paper contrasts the account he favors for how fictions can convey knowledge with Green’s views on the topic. On the author’s account, fictions can convey knowledge because fictional works make assertions and other acts such as conjectures, suppositions, or acts of putting forward contents for our consideration; and the mechanism through which they do it is that of speech act indirection, of which conversational implicatures are a particular case. There are two potential points of disagreement with (...) Green in this proposal. First, it requires that assertions can be made indirectly. Second, it requires that verbal fiction-making doesn’t consist merely in “acts of speech”, but in sui generis speech acts. (shrink)

Mitchell Greenʼs conception of the thesis of Literary Cognitivism states that literary fiction can be a source of knowledge that depends crucially on its being fictional. By a modal argument the authors show that the criterion of fictionality cannot be crucial to the epistemic value of literary fiction. Rather, it lays in a certain kind of distance, e.g. a temporal, cultural, or interpersonal one. This will be motivated by drawing parallels to Gadamerʼs hermeneutics, especially his conception of fusion of horizons. (...) In doing so, we agree with Green’s characterisation of knowledge that can be gained from engaging with literary fiction, but present a different approach to the source of this knowledge. At the same time, this approach enables us to extend the epistemic value of literary fiction both quantitatively and qualitatively. (shrink)

The contemporary debate in the philosophy of literature is strongly shaped by the anticognitivist challenge, according to which works of literary fiction (that contain propositions that are neither literally true nor affirmed by the author) cannot impart (relevant) knowledge to the readers or enrich their worldly understanding. Anti-cognitivists appreciate works of literary fiction for their aesthetic values and so risk to reduce them to mere ornaments that are entertaining, but eventually useless. Many philosophers have reacted to this challenge by pointing (...) at ways in which works of literary fiction can be informative even though they lack worldly reference: it has been argued, for example, that works of fictions are thought experiments; that they add not to our theoretical knowledge, but to our know-how or to our phenomenal knowledge; or that that they help readers to understand the perspectives of others. A stubborn defense of literary cognitivism, however, risks to collapse into an instrumental understanding of literature. In my paper I suggest that both sides in the debate focus too narrowly on semantic features of the works in question that is tied to what I will call the “referential picture” of language. A shift perspective is needed: for one, we ought to fully appreciate that the term “literature” does not refer to a homogeneous phenomenon, but rather to a very heterogeneous and multifarious set of works that are read by many different readers for many different reasons in many different ways. Second, we need to understand that these works have in common much more than the semantic peculiarity of lacking worldly reference: they are a unique means of communication between authors and readers – and in particular the role of the latter is often neglected in contemporary debate. These two points should help us to get a more comprehensive understanding of the practice of literature and the vast range of values we can find works of literary fiction – and the interplay between them. (shrink)

In her recent book, Only Imagine, Kathleen Stock promotes extreme intentionalism with respect to fictional content. She writes, ‘the fictional content of a particular text is equivalent to exactly what the author of the text intended the reader to imagine’. There are at least three separate points here: the author’s intentions determine the fictional content; the fictional content is identical with the content of what the reader imagines; reading fiction necessarily entails imagining. The first two points are normative; they are (...) concerned with truth in fiction. The third point takes for granted that fiction necessarily involves imagining on the part of the reader; the main debates here focus on the kind of imagining that is involved in reading fiction. In the following discussion, I leave aside the normative issues marked by the first two points and concentrate on the third point—namely, the relation between fiction and imagining. (shrink)

D. H. Lawrence famously wrote that “art-speech is the only truth.” If we are to give credibility to these words, we must know what Lawrence means by “truth.” Here is the passage in which this expression occurs:Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. Truth lives from day to day, and the (...) marvellous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.... Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.1One thing is made clear by the passage: “truth” here is not used in the sense of absolute truth, something that can never be falsified.... (shrink)

The text aims to explain Radichkov's special magical capaЬility of creating imaginary worlds. His words do not mean any external reality to which they refer. Тhеу themselves are reality. Radickov's language consists of "ontological quanta". Any ontological quantum means both reality and а certain image of it, indivisiЫe and indistinguishaЫe from each other. Here we сап also involve non-Saussurean semiotics. The signifier and the signified are indivisiЫe and complementary in any sign. The meanings are areas of agreement between human beings. (...) Language generates that agreement between people. Its uncertainness and unclearness are not disadvantages. They allow for the people to agree with each other. The opacity of language is not Iess important than its transparency. The opacity means its aЬility to create fictions and literature and to replace reality with them. The basis of that opacity is ontological quanta: they allow апу average human being to use language successfully. Saussurean semiology considers Ianguage as а "Ыасk Ьох" averaged Ьу huge ensemЫes ofuses and only in terms ofthe past: language as well-ordered in ideality. The semiotics of ontological quanta is temporal: it сап refer both to the past and future oflanguage as well as to its present. lt describes how the indistinguishaЫe signs ofthe future are transformed in the well-ordered signs ofthe past Ьу means of choices in the present. The semiotics of ontological quanta сап Ье presented as that modification of the classical semiotic scheme where the signified and the signifier are complementary. (shrink)

In order for true beliefs acquired from reading fiction to count as knowledge proper, they must survive ‘the challenge from luck’. That is, it must be established that such beliefs are neither luckily true, nor luckily believed by readers. The author considers three kinds of true belief a reader may, she assumes, get from reading fiction: a) those based on testimony about empirical facts; b) those based on ‘true in passing’ sentences; and c) those beliefs about counterfactuals one may get (...) from reading a ‘didactic’ fiction. The first group escape the challenge from luck relatively easily, she argues. However, things turn out to be more complicated with the second group. The author examines Mitchell Green’s suggestion, effectively, that knowledge of fictional genre may see off the challenge from luck here, but rejects this in the form presented by Green, adapting it substantially to offer beliefs of this kind a more promising escape route. The author finishes by following Green’s lead once again, and discussing the category of ‘didactic’ fiction, as he calls it. She argues that any true beliefs about counterfactuals gained from such fictions are likely to be lucky. The author concludes however that things are much more promising for any true beliefs gained about oneself as a result of engaging with what Green calls an ‘interrogative’ fiction. (shrink)

Lying and fiction both involve the deliberate production of statements that fail to obey Grice’s first Maxim of Quality (“do not say what you believe to be false”). The question thus arises if we can provide a uniform analysis for fiction and lies. In this chapter I discuss the similarities, but also some fundamental differences between lying and fiction. I argue that there’s little hope for a satisfying account within a traditional truth conditional semantic framework. Rather than immediately moving to (...) a fully pragmatic analysis involving distinct speech acts of fiction-making and lying, I will first explore how far we get with the assumption that both are simply assertions, analyzed in a Stalnakerian framework, i.e. as proposals to update the common ground. (shrink)

The first, easiest answer to the question "What do novels speak about?" is D. H. Lawrence's conviction that novels are about "man alive," as quoted at the beginning of Guido Mazzoni's recent book on the theory of the novel.1 In a slightly more explicit accounting, one could say that novels speak about human actions and passions. These answers are the first, because they are plausible and general. They are the easiest, because they state the obvious. And yet, precisely because they (...) are so obvious, such answers often tend to be overlooked in our search for better, more complete explanations.One can improve these answers by noting that, culturally and historically, the novel has been divided into older, therefore... (shrink)

У статті розглянуто, як у сучасній літературі фентезі (на прикладі циклів «Відьмацька сага» Анджея Сапковського, «Пісня Льоду й Полум’я» Джорджа Мартіна та «Зворотний бік» Дари Корній) висвітлюється проблема релігії. Увага автора статті головно зосереджується на таких питаннях: як на висвітлення проблеми релігії у згаданих творах вплинула секуляризація суспільства, які саме релігійні образи та мотиви, образи релігійних інституцій наявні в творах, яке значення автори творів надають релігії у житті людини.

Recently, Xhignesse has argued that the principle of poetic licence, which roughly states that any class of propositions is true in some possible fiction, ought to be rejected. Here, we defend PPL from Xhignesse’s objection by demonstrating that, properly understood, his purported counter-example case is either irrelevant or unproblematic. The upshot is that Xhignesse has given us no reason to reject PPL.

En su discusión “Obras de ficción, formas de conciencia y literatura”, Josep Corbí formula una serie de críticas certeras a mis ideas sobre la distinción que he hecho entre ficción y no ficción en Relatar lo ocurrido como invención. En esta nota de respuesta expongo primero de forma sucinta el núcleo de esas ideas y después proporciono las que considero las razones más decisivas para adoptarlas, a pesar de las dificultades que señala Corbí.

It seems that we are not willing to give up the intuitions that works of fiction are free from the constraints of historical truth and historical inaccuracies sometimes count against the artistic value of works of fiction. Christopher Bartel calls this the puzzle of historical criticism. I argue that this puzzle extends beyond historical facts. While it is especially salient that historical accuracy at times appears relevant to the evaluation of fictional works, such relevance appears to be a feature of (...) facts in general. I then propose a partial strategy for resolving the puzzle. (shrink)

According to the dominant theory of intentionalism, fiction and non-fiction are in a “mix-and-match” relationship with truth and falsity: both fiction and nonfiction can be either true or false. Intentionalists hold that fiction is a property of a narrative that is intended to elicit not belief but imagination or make-belief in virtue of the audience’s recognizing that such is the intention of the fiction-maker. They claim that in unlikely circumstances these fictions can turn out to be accidentally true. On the (...) contrary, I argue in this paper that fictionality and truth are incompatible. I distinguish narratives based on whether they contain invented characters or not, and offer respective sets of arguments to the effect that there is no case when a fiction is accidentally true. A narrative is either fiction or accidentally true but not both. (shrink)