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Fictional reports

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. This paper is exclusively concerned with the tradition that treats fictional reports as genuine statements—something that may be true or false. By ‘the standard account’, I mean the position that most discussions within this tradition use as their starting point. Another tradition, inspired by Walton (1990), treats fictional reports as a kind of utterances under pretense that are neither true nor false.

  2. See e.g. Field (1973, p. 471), Lewis (1978, pp. 37–38), Devitt (1981, p. 174), Currie (1986, p. 184), Byrne (1993, p. 24), Lamarque and Olsen (1994, p. 83), Phillips (1999, p. 287), Krasner (2002, p. 241), Hanley (2004, p. 62).

  3. Borrowing a term from Yalcin (2007), I have chosen a domain semantics for the fiction operator. That is not essential, I just happen to think it makes for a smoother presentation than representing ‘in the fiction’ as a relational operator (Predelli 2008), or using fiction-specifying operators (Lewis 1978).

  4. Lamarque and Olsen (1994, p. 83) go even further: ‘The notion of ‘in the fiction\(\ldots \)’ as an intensional operator governing reports of fictive content is now so common in theoretical writing that appeal to it does not need special defence’.

  5. I am using ‘fictions invite the audience’ as shorthand for ‘when an author performs an act of fiction-making, they invite the audience to imagine the information conveyed’. Cf. Currie (1990), Walton (1990) and Stock (2011).

  6. See e.g. Bach (1987), Bertolet (1984), Predelli (1997) Predelli (2005), Borg (2005), Reimer (2005) and Cappelen and Hawthorne (2009).

  7. Roughly, ‘I\(_c\)’ picks out the speaker, and ‘I\(_i\)’ picks out the avatar.

  8. This is just another way of saying that fictions are indeterminate. If we happen to live in an indeterminate universe as well, the context of use won’t determine a unique world either, only the set of worlds compatible with past events. Cf. MacFarlane (2008).

  9. Although I am using MacFarlane’s machinery, the context of assessment is playing a different role here. First, a context of assessment is always imagined, so we can never be in one. Second, the context of imagination is tied to the speaker. When another person evaluate a fictional report, they treat it as the speaker’s context of assessment, not their own.

  10. Lewis (1970, p. 83), Kaplan (1989, p. 451n12), Smith (1989, p. 87), Ninan (2010, pp. 337–338).

  11. I should briefly add two clarificatory comments. First, I don’t think it’s metaphysically possible for Teddy to be Jane. I’m only saying that he talks about the fiction from Jane’s perspective in a first person way. Second, I am not taking a stance on whether fictional worlds ultimately have to be understood in terms of metaphysically possible worlds either.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Paal Fjeldvig Antonsen

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The work leading to this paper was funded by the Research Council of Norway, as part of the ‘Anti-exceptionalism about logic’ project located at the University of Bergen, Norway.

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Antonsen, P.F. Fictional reports. Synthese 198, 5675–5688 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02427-y

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