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NATHAN WILDMAN, The Possibility of Empty Fictions: Wildman, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 77, Issue 1, February 2019, Pages 35–42, https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12620
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ABSTRACT
An empty fiction is a fiction with no content—that is, a fiction in which no propositions are (fictionally) true. The central question of this article is, are such fictions possible? Here, I argue that they are. More specifically, after first examining and rejecting five potential arguments for the possibility of empty fictions, I go on to develop a more successful argument. Along the way, I introduce a new method for producing fictions via complementation functions.
Become totally empty
Quiet the restlessness of the mind
Only then will you witness everything unfolding from
Emptiness
—Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (2001)
An empty fiction is a fiction within which no propositions are (fictionally) true. The central question of this article is, are such fictions possible?
While this question is interesting in its own right, settling the matter of the (im)possibility of empty fictions directly impacts a variety of interrelated questions concerning the nature of fictional truth. Consider fictional incompleteness, a phenomenon that emerges when there is a gap in what is true in a given fiction—that is, a fiction f is incomplete with respect to a given proposition P if and only if neither P nor not‐P are true‐in‐f. Fictional incompleteness is widespread in the sense that nearly every fiction is such that there are some questions about the fictional goings‐on that are left open and unresolved.1 In light of the ubiquity of fictional incompleteness, we might wonder, how open can a given fiction be? The (im)possibility of empty fictions directly impacts how we can answer this question. For an empty fiction is a fiction without any content and, as such, is wholly incomplete: for every proposition P, neither P nor P's complement are true‐in‐f. Consequently, if empty fictions are possible, then there is no lower limit to fictional incompleteness—fictions can leave as much open as we like. Alternatively, if empty fictions are impossible, then every fiction must at least settle some matters.
Similarly, there has been some recent debate about fictional nihilism, the idea that there are no fictional truths at all. Clearly, the impossibility of empty fictions entails that nihilism is false. Meanwhile, if empty fictions are possible, then nihilism is at least (epistemically) possible.2
Finally, the possible existence of empty fictions has direct implications for debates about the identity conditions of fictions. Specifically, if multiple, distinct empty fictions are possible, then the idea, advanced by Harry Deutsch, that the identity conditions for fictions are fixed solely by what propositions are true within them must be false (1985, 202).3
For these reasons, the (possible) existence of empty fictions is a question worth addressing. Here, I aim to do so. More specifically, I begin (Section I) by examining and rejecting five potential arguments for the possibility of empty fictions. I then (Section II) have a brief digression where I introduce a new method for creating fictions via complement functions. Building off this, I next (Section III) present a successful argument for empty fictions via complementation of universal fictions. Finally, I conclude (Section IV) by anticipating two objections. The general result is that empty fictions, though strange, are in fact possible.
Before proceeding, some preliminaries. First, I here remain neutral about the exact analysis of truth in fiction,4 though I assume that the content of a fiction f can be thought of as a class of propositions the members of which are those propositions fictionally true in f.
Second, I assume that there is a distinction between a fiction's primary content, which comprises those propositions that are explicitly true within the story,5 and its secondary content, which are those propositions that are true but not primary content. Further, I take secondary content to split into the imported content, which are propositions brought into the fiction from outside, and entailed content, which are those propositions that nontrivially logically follow from primary and/or imported content. For example, in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, “Abulafia is a computer” is a primary fictional truth (we are explicitly told as much in the story), while “Paris is south of Glasgow” and “Casaubon is mortal” are, respectively, imported and entailed secondary truths (1989).6
Third, for clarity, I will occasionally employ fictional operator notation: ‘Ff(P),’ where ‘f’ is a singular term denoting a particular fiction, and ‘P’ a sentence, abbreviates ‘it is true‐in‐f that P.’ Again, I remain neutral about the analysis of such operators.
Having settled these matters, we next examine five unsuccessful arguments for empty fictions.
I. FIVE UNSUCCESSFUL ARGUMENTS FOR EMPTY FICTIONS
The first two arguments are structurally similar. First, one might think that you can produce an empty fiction by generating a fiction f such that “nothing is true‐in‐f” is true‐in‐f. However, if you did so, there would be a proposition that is true‐in‐f—namely, 〈¬(∃pFf(P))〉. Consequently, f is not empty, but rather is a strange, contradictory, self‐referencing fiction.
The same goes for attempting to derive an empty fiction from the (possible) existence of a fiction f such that “every proposition is incomplete‐in‐f” is true‐in‐f. Here again, f is not empty, as at least one proposition, 〈∀p(¬Ff (P) & ¬Ff (¬P))〉, is true‐in‐f.
These arguments fail for broadly the same reason: they both involve some proposition being true in some fiction. What is needed is a fiction f such that it is true off that nothing is true‐in‐f and true off that every proposition is incomplete‐in‐f.
The third argument for empty fictions emerges from a general ontology of repeatable artworks.7 Assume that fictions are identical to pure abstract structures composed of propositions. These structures exist as external abstract objects, and one such existing structure is the nul structure, the structure consisting of no propositions. By definition, the empty fiction is identical to this (existent) structure. Consequently, the empty fiction also exists and is possible. The problem here is the initial identification of fictions with propositional structure: while a fiction's content might be identical to a certain propositional structure, fictions themselves are not. For distinct authors could produce distinct fictions with the exact same content.8 Identifying fictions with propositional structures conflicts with this and hence should be rejected.
And once we ontologically distinguish fictions from their contents, it is clear that this argument no longer succeeds. For nothing guarantees that it is possible to produce a fiction that expresses the existing nul structure; left unfilled, this gap undermines the argument.
The fourth unsuccessful argument involves zero length literary works—texts that consist of exactly zero words, letters, or symbols. Examples include Ben Blumson's Metamicrofiction (2012) and Untitled (2013) and Paul Fournel's Banlieue (Suburbia) (1990), a “novel” that includes title and copyright pages, dedication, table of contents, introduction, footnotes, index, and list of errata, but lacks any body of text.9
At first glance, it seems we can leverage the existence of these works into an argument for the existence of empty fictions:
- (1)
Zero length literary works exist.
- (2)
Zero length literary works express fictions.10
- (3)
Such fictions lack content.
- (4)
Therefore, empty fictions exist.
This argument is also unsuccessful. For one, it is natural to think that a literary work that does not contain any text—any words, letters, or symbols—does not express a fiction, which suggests that (2) is dubious. But the real weak point is (3). For (3)’s truth depends upon proving that these fictions are what Kit Fine calls inert: they lack any secondary fictional truths, so are not closed under any notion of entailment and contain no imported content (1982, 116).11 And while zero length works lack any mechanism (for example, sentences, words, symbols, etc.) to express, and hence include, any primary content, nothing about them entails that they are inert. Consequently, they may include secondary content. For example, they may have all actual truths as imported secondary content, which would be the case if Stacie Friend (2017) is correct that judgments about what is true in a given fiction presuppose the reality assumption, according to which everything that is in fact true is also true in the story, unless excluded by the work.12 Relatedly, if these fictions are closed under any notion of entailment, they will also include some implied content—for example, the tautologies—as well as the conjunctions or disjunctions of whatever other imported content they include. So, without any proof of inertness, there is no reason to accept (3) or, by extension, the argument's conclusion.
The fifth and final argument turns upon a broadly Waltonian account of fiction and fictionality. According to Kendall Walton, representational artworks are props, items whose existence and features are used to guide and determine the contents of a particular game of make‐believe. And what “‘translates”’ the (relevant) features of props into the appropriate imaginative contents are principles of generation—principles that prescribe what it is we are to imagine (make‐believe). Finally, according to Walton, a proposition (p) is fictional in work (w) if and only if w has the function of being a prop in a game of make‐believe with principles of generation that entail, given the features of w, that full appreciation of w requires imagining that p. Or, more simply, “a proposition is fictional just in case there is a prescription to the effect that it is to be imagined” (Walton 2013, 9).13
One interesting consequence of adopting the Waltonian account of fictionality is that, instead of the standard “‘it is fictional that” sentential operator, we need a pair of operators: a “prescription to” operator and an “imagine that” operator.14 And the shift from a single operator to the prescription/imaging pair opens up new potential interactions with negation. Specifically, with regards to the scope of negation, the standard fictional operator permits only two possibilities: narrow scope, as in ‘Ff (¬P)’, and wide scope, as in ‘¬Ff (P)’. But, as well as capturing the above, the dual operator treatment supports a third, intermediate scope, as in “there is a prescription to not imagine P,” which is logically distinct from the other treatments.
Intermediate scope negation suggests that the normative rules governing engagement with fiction are not always positive (that is, prescriptions to imagine proposition P)—rather, they can also be negative (that is, prescriptions to not imagine P). And some existent fictions rely upon these negative rules. Consider the question of whether Deckard is a human or a nonhuman replicant in Blade Runner. Arguably, the film turns upon leaving the answer to this question open—that this issue remains unsettled is one of the features that makes the film so aesthetically interesting. This means that proper engagement with this work requires being in a state of imaginative uncertainty about this issue—in Waltonian terms, we cannot settle the matter of whether Deckard is or is not human without ceasing to play an authorized game of make‐believe. Contrast this with the question of whether Deckard has an even or odd number of hairs on his head. Here, we are permitted to settle the issue one way or the other (or even to leave the whole thing unsettled). The latter is a case of permissive fictional incompleteness, in that imaging P and imaging not‐P are both permitted, though neither is prescribed. Meanwhile, the former is a case of prohibitive fictional incompleteness, where there is not only no prescription to imagine P and no prescription to imagine not‐P, but in fact a prescription to not imagine P and a prescription to not imagine not‐P (Wildman and Woodward 2018, 118). The upshot is that a proper understanding of Blade Runner, like all other fictions that feature prohibitive fictional incompleteness, involves appealing to negative normative rules—that is, prescriptions to not imagine.15
With this in mind, one might try to produce an empty fiction by creating a work w featuring a principle of generating that states that, for all propositions P, w prescribes not imagining P. Assuming Walton's definition of fictionality, the resulting fiction would be empty.
However, this argument also fails.16 Suppose that my psychologist orders me to not imagine anything, for example, because he or she is worried that my doing so would lead to wild delusions. Plausibly, the psychologist has, for my own good, forbidden me from engaging with fiction. But, according to the above, it seems that what has happened is that he or she has created a fiction in which nothing is true. As this is clearly the incorrect diagnosis of the situation, we ought to reject the idea that there are prescriptions to not imagine.
One can respond to this objection by requiring that prescriptions to not imagine are only successful if they are offered alongside other, positive prescriptions. For example, the negative prescription in Blade Runner is acceptable because it works in concert with several prescriptions to imagine (for example, that Deckard lives in future Los Angeles, that there are replicants, etc.). Assuming this restriction, the psychologist case amounts to him or her forbidding me from engaging with fiction because the prescription to not imagine anything is not offered together with any positive prescriptions. But while this resolves the general objection to prescriptions to not imagine, it makes it impossible to derive an empty fiction from a prescription to not imagine. Given the response, such a prescription only succeeds provided that the relevant game of make‐believe features some related prescriptions to imagine, which ensures that there will be some fictional truths in the associated fiction—namely, whatever propositions we are prescribed to imagine.17 Consequently, this prima facie promising method for producing empty fictions also fails.
The general upshot is that these arguments fail to prove the possibility of empty fictions. However, this does not mean that we should give up on finding a successful route to empty fictions. To do so, we need to first have a slight digression and introduce a new way to produce fictions.
II. FICTIONS VIA COMPLEMENTATION
A familiar trope in fiction is complementation, where the (fictional) features of one character, setting, or object are used to define the features of a second character, setting, or object. For example, Bizarro, created by Binder and Papp, is explicitly described as a flawed “mirror image” of Superman. Exactly how (and in what manner) Bizarro mirrors Superman varies depending upon the writer, but typical examples include Bizarro's words meaning the opposite of their usual meaning (for example, ‘bad’ meaning ‘good,’ ‘goodbye’ being used as a greeting, etc.), Bizarro's being totally impervious to green, but vulnerable to blue kryptonite, and Bizarro's living on a (cuboid) planet called ‘Htrae.’ Similarly, the film Twins features two twins, one of which (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) is full of “purity and strength,” while the other (played by Danny DeVito) is very much the opposite. Finally, when Wario, an archrival to Nintendo's Mario, was first introduced in 1992, we were told that his personality is the inversion of Mario's: while Mario is good‐natured and self‐sacrificing, Wario is bad tempered and utterly self‐centered.18
In these cases, the complementation is merely a description: that character A has such‐and‐such properties and that B has such‐and‐such features are primary fictional truths of the relevant fiction, while B's being A's mirror is either also a primary fictional truth or is left implicit, meaning that the two standing in a complementation relation is a secondary fictional truth of the relevant fiction. Either way, to say that B complements A is really just a way to describe the relationship between two characters.
But complementation can be more. In particular, one way it might be so is when, instead of being explicitly told what properties B has, readers are given a complementation function that spells out a “rule” for deriving B's (fictional) features from A's (fictional) features. These functions can take several forms, varying how many of the features are mirrored (for example, merely some or all) and exactly how the mirroring goes (for example, one function might specify that if A likes eating sweet things, B likes eating sour things, another that B likes excreting sweet things, a third that B hates eating sweet things, and so on), but they all do the same basic thing: provide a rule for mapping from features of an initial entity to different features, characteristic of a second entity.
Used in this way, complementation functions, together with relevant primary fictional truths (about A, for example), serve as a kind of generator for implicit secondary fictional content. Suppose that A's having property G is a primary fictional truth of fiction f1, as is that B stands in some particular complementary relation, characterized by a particular complementation function, to A. From these two primary fictional truths, readers are able to derive implicit, secondary fictional content—for example, that B has property H.
This is readily modeled using a Waltonian approach to fiction, which treats complement functions as conditional principles of generation: they are principles that prescribe what we are to imagine, given certain things are the case. In the above example, the conditional principle is something like, if we are prescribed to imagine that A is G, then we are prescribed to imagine that B is H. Adopting a Waltonian understanding of fictionality, this principle, together with the fact that 〈A is G〉 is true‐in‐f1, entails that 〈B is H〉 is an implicit secondary fictional truth of f1. In this way, complementation functions can be used to intra‐fictionally “generate” secondary content by operating on primary content of a given fiction.
And this process can also be done inter‐fictionally: what character A is like in fiction f1 can, together with a specific complementation function, determine what character B is like in distinct fiction f2. This most obviously occurs when writers describe a character by appealing to what readers are already be familiar with—for example, a hack writer produces a knock‐off noir detective story, The Bolivian Condor, that includes the line, “Fam Fade was Sam Spade, but blonde, with blue eyes, and lacking all the qualities that made the latter a good private detective.” Similarly, this looks to also be a frequent occurrence when it comes to parodies like Bored of the Rings (Beard and Kenney 1969).
These inter‐fictional generation cases are similar to, but importantly distinct from, intra‐fictional ones. One major difference is that, unlike in the intra‐fictional case, the antecedent and consequent of the relevant conditional principle of generation specifies different fictions; that is, they look something like, “if work w1 prescribes imaging that P, then work w2 prescribes imagining that Q.” Another difference is that the proposition in the antecedent need not be true in the second fiction. For example, while it is true in The Maltese Falcon that Sam Spade is witty and confident and has an unshakable nerve, it need not be true in The Bolivian Condor (indeed, Spade might not even exist in the world of The Bolivian Condor).
Cases of inter‐fictional complementation again feature a kind of content generation—part of the content of one fiction, together with a complementation function, encoded in a conditional principle of generation, serves to determine part of the (implicit, secondary) content of another fiction.
Building on this, I would like to suggest that we can extend this process even further: instead of determining part of a given fiction's content, complementation can be used to fix the whole of it. That is, would‐be authors can use inter‐fictional complementation to produce novel fictions. To do so, authors begin by first selecting a literary work (say, a text) that expresses a particular fiction, f1. This work is then prefaced with a statement of the particular complement function—that is, conditional principle of generation—to be applied to f1. These functions can be partial, only applying to a limited range of f1’s fictional truths, or total, applying to all of f1’s fictional truths. They can also take a variety of forms, encoding various ways of determining what is true or false in the output fiction via what is true in the original fiction f1. Regardless of which function is specified, the resulting work—that is, the original work preceded by a statement of the relevant complement fiction—will indicate, in Jerrold Levinson's sense, a complement fiction f2, whose content is those propositions specified by the application of the complement function to f1 (1980, 79).
Obviously, this complementation method is quite different from traditional approaches to fiction production (that is, writing out a fixed text intended to express the fiction). But this difference does not render the method illegitimate.
One can see the complementation method as an extension of the ambitions of cut‐up and fold‐in fiction writers as well as the method of fiction production that characterizes Saporta's Composition No. 1.21 These methods produce new fictions by manipulating—rearranging—texts, in order to indirectly create new content (and hence new fictions). The complementation method leaves the text as it stands and instead directly manipulates fictional content. But the manipulation is not (necessarily) merely rearrangement. Instead, by allowing for the mapping from old to new content, a wide range of novel fiction production possibilities emerge.
In this way, the complementation method for producing fiction is a powerful tool, allowing us to generate a wide variety of interesting new fictions—including empty fictions.
III. EMPTY FICTIONS VIA UNIVERSAL FICTIONS
The genuine route to empty fictions uses the complementation method. But it also relies upon universal fictions, fictions within which every (possible) proposition is true.22 Specifically, to produce an empty fiction, first take some universal fiction, like Nathan Wildman and Christian Folde's (2017: 76) Ohle's Amazing Adventure (OAA for short), and then apply the following complementation function:
For all propositions P, if work w1 prescribes imaging that P, then w2 does not prescribe imagining that P.
Applying this function to OAA, we thereby indicate the complement fiction, Comp‐OAA. The nature of the function, together with the Waltonian account of fictionality, guarantees that the propositions that are true in Comp‐OAA are all and only those propositions that are not true‐in‐OAA.23 Because OAA is a universal fiction, every proposition is true‐in‐OAA. Consequently, no propositions are true‐in‐Comp‐OAA. In other words, Comp‐OAA is an empty fiction.
More generally, to produce an empty fiction, one need only produce a complement of a universal fiction, using the above complementation function. This can be accomplished, for instance, by writing a text (with the relevant fiction‐making intent) that expresses a universal fiction prefaced by a statement indicating that we are to apply the relevant complement function to said universal fiction. The resulting work will express an empty fiction. Since it is possible (easy, even!) to produce such a work, it follows that empty fictions are possible.
By using universal fictions, we guarantee that the resulting complementary fiction will be genuinely inert. Further, because all primary fictional truths are also guaranteed to not be true in the resulting fiction, it must be totally empty. Similarly, this result is achieved without appealing to potentially problematic prescriptions to not imagine. In this way, this method avoids the problems with the previous arguments and, I contend, is a successful method for producing empty fictions.
IV. OBJECTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS
Before concluding, I would like to preempt two potential objections. The first begins with the idea that standardly, complementation functions, like Waltonian principles of generation, generate fictional content from other fictional content. But instead of generating fictional content, the function in the argument for empty fictions is used to not generate fictional content: it determines what is not fictional in the output fiction f2 from what is fictional in the input fiction f1. But what motivates thinking that complementation functions can operate in this “negative” manner, when it is so different from how they typically do?
This objection loses much of its bite once we recognize that (1) as noted above, the rules governing fictional engagement can be negative, and (2) there are numerous existing fictions, especially fan fictions, composed using “negative” principles of generation. For example, AdamaGirl's (2017) About Time takes something true in one work (Eduardo Gaff's humanity in Blade Runner) and makes it ambiguous in order to produce a new fiction that involves an essential ambiguity (namely, whether Inspector Gaff is human or a replicant).24 In this way, About Time was at least partially produced by using a partial true‐to‐incomplete principle coupled with the addition of new material.
The second objection is more global. In its bluntest form, the objection is that there cannot be empty fictions because we cannot make sense of what it would be like to engage with them. What do we imagine? What is the phenomenology of engaging with an empty fiction like?
An initial point in response is that the empty fictions generated via the above method are permissively fictionally incomplete in the sense that, while they are genuinely empty, readers may, for all that has been said, resolve the open questions about the fiction in whatever way they like. That is, a reader engaging with the empty Comp‐OAA is permitted to imagine that, for example, Holmes is a detective in the (otherwise rather vacuous) world of the fiction. However, that readers can “fill in” the story in this way does not render the fiction nonempty: strictly speaking, there are no propositions that are true in this fiction.
Another point is that this is not just a problem for empty fictions. There are several weird kinds of fiction the phenomenology of which is difficult to explicate. For example, what is it like to properly engage with an impossible fiction, like Graham Priest's (1997) Sylvan's Box? Or a universal fiction, like the above‐mentioned Ohle's Amazing Adventure?
Of course, spreading the problem around does not make it go away. So, what can we say in this particular case? What is it like to properly engage with an empty fiction? As a tentative suggestion, perhaps the experience is that of suññatā—an all‐encompassing emptiness in which perception and feelings cease.25
REFERENCES
The qualification is necessary because universal fictions—fictions within which all propositions are true—are complete. See Wildman and Folde (2017, 76).
This is because the possibility of empty fictions is a necessary but not sufficient condition of the truth of nihilism. For further discussion of nihilism, see William D'Alessandro (2016) and Christian Folde's “Against Nihilisms about Fictional Truth” (unpublished manuscript).
See Lewis (1978), Currie (1990), and Walton (1990). Notably, on David Lewis's original possible worlds account of fictional truth, empty fictions are impossible: tautologies are true in every fiction, so no fiction could be totally empty. However, sophisticated world‐based accounts, like the one developed in Christopher Badura and Francesco Berto's 2018 article, are more accommodating, as they include maximally incomplete worlds.
‘Explicit,’ while fine for this rough characterization, is not really the best term, as it conflicts with phenomena like figurative speech, irony, and unreliable narration.
Thanks to Lee Walters for suggesting this.
A similar but not quite appropriate case is Man Ray's Untitled (1924). Ray's poem does not quite work because, while it contains no words or letters, it contains symbols—specifically, black bars—that readers can interpret as telling us something about what is true in the associated fiction.
I use the weaker ‘express’ rather than the ‘are’ of identity here in order to accommodate views that distinguish fictions from works; nothing in particular hinges upon this point.
Fine suggests that such fictions “might have their own peculiar charm and merit,” though he suggests that such fictions are rather unlikely (1982, 117).
Similarly, Blumson, discussing his Metamicrofiction, says that it is “about something” (2015, 123n.11), which strongly suggests that at least some propositions are fictionally true in it.
Credit to Richard Woodward for this insight. These points are explored in more detail in Wildman and Woodward (2018, 116–123) and in Robbie Williams and Richard Woodward's “The Cognitive Role of Fictionality” (unpublished manuscript).
Another potential example is Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. A natural way to make sense of this story's genre ambiguity is to see it as a kind of prohibitive incompleteness. Fully appreciating the work requires not settling the matter of the story's genre but rather “being in a state where one's imaginative responses are carefully poised between the competing options” (Wildman and Woodward 2018, 124).
Thanks to two anonymous referees for pushing me on this matter.
An alternative response is to insist that the psychiatrist and Walton are invoking different senses of prescription. However, pursuing this line would take us too far afield, so I will set it aside for now.
Wario's name even highlights this, being a portmanteau of ‘Mario’ and the Japanese word ‘warui,’ meaning ‘bad.’
I use a zero‐length work simply due to space restrictions, though any length work would serve equally well.
Assuming Vacuum has no primary fictional truths (a plausible claim), then Plenum turns out to be a universal fiction. Consequently, this complementation method provides a recipe for producing universal fictions distinct from those discussed in Routley (1979), Deutsch (1985), and Wildman and Folde (2017).
Cut‐up fictions are produced by cutting an existing text into pieces which are rearranged to generate a new text, while fold‐in fictions are made by taking facing pages of an existing text, folding them in half vertically, then reading straight across the resulting pages. Saporta's “novel”—really more of a fiction generator—consists of 150 unbound pages, prefaced with a note from the author instructing readers to shuffle the pages “comme un jue de cartes,” then read through.
In this way, what follows is an argument for a conditional conclusion: if universal fictions are possible, then so too are empty fictions. However, as there have been several who have argued for the existence of universal fictions—see, for example, Routley (1979), Deutsch (1985), Wildman and Folde (2017), and Estrada‐González (2018)—it is plausible that the antecedent is in fact true.
One upshot is that the following principle is true:
For all propositions P, Ff2 (P) iff ¬Ff1 (P).
This helps to clarify that the relevant function is distinct from a more narrow “false‐to‐true” function, which entails:
For all propositions P, Ff2 (P) iff Ff1 (¬P).
Assuming that f1 is a universal fiction, the latter entails that f2 is another universal fiction, the former that f2 is an empty fiction.
The story also turns on an essential ambiguity over whether Gaff is identical to Battlestar Galactica’s Admiral Adama (both characters were played by the actor Edward James Olmos).
Thanks to Alfred Archer, Amanda Cawston, Christian Folde, Richard Woodward, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments, as well as audience members at the 3rd Philosophy Meets Literary Studies Workshop in Göttingen (2016) and the Semantics of Fictional Discourse conference in Bratislava (2016).