Abstract

The thesis I maintain is that works of fiction can and sometimes do give us genuine knowledge or information about the real world and the fact that they do is aesthetically relevant. I argue against Joseph Margolis and Monroe Beardsly who claim that truth has no place in our concern for work of fiction qua work of art as well as against Dorothy Walsh and John Hospers who claim that only a special kind of truth, namely, artistic truth, is relevant to a work of fiction and to our appreciation of it. Against the latter I present arguments showing that these special kinds of truth either collapse back into the ordinary notion of truth or present a picture of truth so alien in character as to make use of the word "truth" grossly misleading. The former theorists are shown to depend essentially on the notion that work of fiction cannot refer to the real world and hence cannot be seen as containing any assertions about that world. I demonstrate that the arguments used in support of such positions fail due to certain confusion about the notion of reference and the nature of works of fiction. ;Developing ideas suggested by Keith Donnellan's work, I consider the idea of "mixed reference" whereby an author of a work of fiction can be seen as accomplishing, through a referential use of certain descriptions, a dual reference and predication to both the world of the work and the world of ordinary experience. Through brief analyses of some examples taken from contemporary works of fiction, I demonstrate both how it is that some works of fiction can assert truths about the real world and why such truths about the real world are relevant to both our appreciation and our evaluation of such works of fiction