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Whether contradictions could be “true in fiction” has become an unavoidable topic in the debates on the bounds of fictionality. This paper claims that genuine contradictions in fiction are far more infrequent phenomena than is usually claimed. The majority of cases that have been put forward as examples of contradictory fictions can be convincingly understood either as instances of rhetorical pseudo-contradictions or (in the case of the so-called “forking-path“ narratives) as disjunctions of possible outcomes rather than contradictory conjunctions of simultaneously enacted exclusive scenarios. The only philosophically interesting category of contradictory fiction would be the one in which a single “root” contradiction is explicitly affirmed as the central element of the story (in the third-person, authoritative narrative voice). The paradigmatic example would be the revised version of Graham Priest’s “Sylvan’s Box” this paper presents. However, it could be argued that the problem with such narratives is that they unsuccessfully attempt to perceptually code what remains exclusively propositional content. They are, thus, fatally under-described, and the truth of the contradictory proposition fails to be adequately established in fiction. The idea that one can posit contradictions as fictional facts is based on oversimplified notions of narrative conventions and truth in fiction.

Some things that we take to be the case in a fictional work are never made explicit by the work itself. For instance, we assume that Sherlock Holmes does not have a third nostril, that he wears underpants and that he has never solved a case with a purple gnome, even though neither of these things is ever mentioned in the narration. This article argues that examples like these can be accounted for through the same content-enriching reasoning that we employ when confronted with non-fictional discourse, with the important difference that fictional discourse essentially involves pretence. Fictional discourse works in much the same way as non-fictional discourse, and what is conveyed without being stated can accordingly be explained through familiar pragmatic mechanisms. It is argued that this account carries some distinct advantages over competing views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that David Lewis's possible world semantics for counterfactual discourse and for fictional discourse are apparently inconsistent and in need of revision. The problem emerges for Lewis's account once one considers how to evaluate ambifictional counterfactuals. Since this is likely not a concept familiar to most, and since it does not appear that the problem has been previously recognized in the critical literature, I will begin by rehearsing Lewis's possible worlds semantics for counterfactuals and fiction. Then I will explicate the distinction between intrafictional, extrafictional, interfictional, and ambifictional propositions. Next, I will state what an ambifictional counterfactual proposition is, and explain why this kind of discourse confounds Lewis's system. I will conclude, finally, with a brief discussion of how the Lewisian would be best advised to resolve the paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Italian author Elena Ferrante has been described as the "master of the unsayable". By examining two of her novels, namely My Brilliant Friend (New York: Europa Editions, 2016) and The Lying Life of Adults (London: Europa Editions, 2020), I attempt to explore her realist methodology and depiction of female friendship as a means of creating a sense of truth-telling. Both novels focus on friendships set in Naples, although My Brilliant Friend is set in the post-World War II era and The Lying Life of Adults in the 1990s. I examine Ferrante's use of content, characterisation, the theme of friendship, and writerly style. By comparing the novels and her techniques in this way I identify what are classically realist methods as well as the means by which Ferrante sets herself apart by using language and subject matter in unique ways to achieve a sense of truthfulness. The article concludes with the proposition that both novels address unsayable or taboo issues in a stark denotative style. However, in My Brilliant Friend Ferrante achieves a deeper sense of this through a particular metaphorical technique that she terms frantumaglia, or fragmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

About ten years ago, a blogger writing under a pseudonym set out to prove that Ophelia, in Shakespeare's Hamlet, does not die, but metamorphoses into a "floral being [être floral]" (Jazzthierry, 2010). In order to elaborate this improbable possible text, which has not had a great posterity, the blogger summons a very personal "probablibrary [probabliothèque]" (William Marx, Les Étoiles nouvelles, 2021), which he opposes to "the finest of specialists [la fine fleur des spécialistes]" and to "four centuries [quatre siècles]" of misinterpretation. In the light of this hypothesis of singular (and playful) reading, this article proposes to reflect on the "liberties of the reader [libertés du lecteur]" (Michel de Certeau, L'Invention du quotidien, 1980) and on the various calculations of probability that we routinely engage in to identify what David Lewis has called "truth in fiction" ("Truth in fiction", 1978).

Can fictions make genuine assertions about the actual world? Proponents of the 'Assertion View' answer the question affirmatively: they hold that authors can assert, by means of explicit statements that are part of the work of fiction, that something is actually the case in the real world. The 'Nonassertion' View firmly denies this possibility. In this paper, I defend a nuanced version of the Nonassertion View. I argue that even if fictions cannot assert, they can indirectly communicate that what is recounted as fictional is actually true. I show that this view is supported by independent linguistic data, and that it is able to defuse the objections that are typically raised against the Nonassertion View. I conclude by showing that this position has some interesting implications for testimonial cognitivism about fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the character of the “lady detective” is a staple of the cozy mystery genre, we contend that there are no great lady detectives to rival Holmes or Poirot. This is not because there are no clever or interesting lady detective characters, but rather because the concept of greatness is socially constructed and, like coolness, depends on public acclaim and perception. We explore the mechanics of genre formation, arguing that the very structure of cozy mysteries precludes female greatness. To create a “great” character, the author cannot just endow her with certain attributes; she must actively work to overcome her audience’s tendency to import structures of oppression into the story, and she must wrestle against the conventions of the genre. In doing so, however, authors risk setting their stories in a wholly different genre.

Although the character of the "lady detective" is a staple of the cozy mystery genre, we contend that there are no great lady detectives to rival Holmes or Poirot. This is not because there are no clever or interesting lady detective characters, but rather because the concept of greatness is socially constructed and, like coolness, depends on public acclaim and perception. We explore the mechanics of genre formation, arguing that the very structure of cozy mysteries precludes female greatness. To create a "great" character, the author cannot just endow her with certain attributes; she must actively work to overcome her audience's tendency to import structures of oppression into the story, and she must wrestle against the conventions of the genre. In doing so, however, authors risk setting their stories in a wholly different genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper provides an account of truth in interactive fiction. Interactive fiction allows the audience to make choices, resulting in many different possible fictions within each interactive fiction, unlike in literary fiction where there is just one. Adequately capturing this feature of interactive fiction requires us to address familiar issues regarding impossible fiction and the nature of time in fiction. Truth in interactive fiction thus requires a complex account to capture its multitude of fictions. It is argued that a full account of truth in interactive fiction requires distinguishing two works for each interactive fiction, which contain distinct fictional truths. The actual work encompasses what is in fact represented as fictional (hence mistakes can be fictionally true in this work), whilst in the implied work, truth in fiction is governed by authorial intention, hence mistakes are not fictionally true. This dual account best captures our aesthetic evaluation of interactive fictions, for which we often need to distinguish how the work actually is from how it was intended to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I present an overview of the key positions and insights within the philosophical debate on the cognitive value of literary fiction. First, I discuss the various ways in which attempts have been made to align literature with the traditional philosophical and scientific concept of truth (propositional truth). Second, I consider a number of alternative concepts of knowledge and truth that have been put forward to understand the conceptual value of literature, such as ethical knowledge and self-knowledge. Then I address the ways in which empirical literary theory engages with these philosophical theories and attempts to support them through psychological experimentation. Fourth, I discuss the idea that literature provides us with a certain form of conceptual knowledge, followed by a discussion of the no-truth theory of literature, the idea that a work's cognitive value is irrelevant to our valuation of a literary work as a work of art. Finally, I try to show an alternative to the problems that arise with the theories discussed and the lessons that can be learned from those theories, by focusing on Paul Ricoeur's ideas about the workings of fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the truth values of modal sentences within fictional discourse. I investigate the consequences of (im)possible worlds–based theories of truth in fiction for the truth, in fiction, of (explicit) modal sentences. I elaborate on the consequences of explicit reliable (modal) sentences within the truth-in-fiction operators if we embed the normal modal logics. I prove that the current main possible worlds theories of truth-in-fiction make explicit reliable sentences within fiction truth-value equivalent to their possibility. This has non-intuitive consequences if we employ normal modal logics. These consequences are shown to be contradictory. The main argument of the paper thus concerns the inconsistency of embedding the systems of normal modal logics within the truth-in-fiction operators provided in the discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 (1962), 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary debate in the philosophy of literature is strongly shaped by the anti-cognitivist 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 fictions work like 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 will suggest that both sides in the debate focus too narrowly on semantic features of the works in question that are tied to what I will call the “referential picture” of language. A shift of 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 in works of literary fiction – and the interplay between them.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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: (1) the gap between saying and making true, (2) our actual interpretive reactions to story-level contradictions, (3) the criteria we accept for what counts as a story in our literary practices, and (4) the undesirability of the universal fictionalist's closure principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-actualist theories promise straightforward accounts of meaning, truth and reference of fictional discourse but are ostensibly saddled with a Selection Problem, that multiple possible candidates satisfy the role-descriptions associated with names used in fictions and no principled way to distinguish between them; yet if names are referential, there can only be one referent. The problem is often taken to be a serious—even decisive—obstacle for non-actualism, and the aim of this article is to show that the challenge can be met. I suggest that storytellers and authors fix the referents of referential terms they use by arbitrary selecting referents through simple acts of stipulation, and then determine which of the worlds containing the relevant individuals serve as truth-makers for the story by adding properties to the characters. The resulting view of reference is consistent with reasonable, foundational requirements on reference, such as a causal-historical theory (properly understood), and can moreover be used to support plausible theories of truth in fiction and facilitate elegant models of fiction as a type of discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is usually taken for granted that a necessary condition for knowing that P is the truth of P. It may therefore be claimed that if we assume that we gain some kind of knowledge through fiction (let us call it fictional knowledge) of P*, then P* should be true--in at least a certain sense. My hypothesis is that this assumption grounds the different ways adopted by philosophers for attributing truth-conditions to fictional sentences. My claim in this work is that fictional sentences do not have truth-values and truth-conditions, but I want to maintain that we gain some kind of knowledge through fiction: to this aim, I will characterize the objective content of fictional sentences not in terms of truth-conditions (which are usually described by appealing to rules of the language or rules of interpretation of language independent of the actual users), but in dispositional terms and I will define a necessary condition for fictional knowledge accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 (make-believed) 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If novels can be arguments, that fact should shape logic or argumentation studies as well as literary studies. Two senses the term ‘narrative argument’ might have are (a) a story that offers an argument, or (b) a distinctive argument form. I consider whether there is a principled way of extracting a novel’s argument in sense (a). Regarding the possibility of (b), Hunt’s view is evaluated that many fables and much fabulist literature inherently, and as wholes, have an analogical argument structure. I argue that a better account is that some novels inherently exhibit a transcendental argument structure.

The orthodox view in analytical film theory is that the difference between fiction and nonfiction is anchored in communicative practice. Whereas the creator of nonfiction can be seen as asserting something as true, the creator of fiction merely asks of its spectators that they imagine the work's content. This could be labelled an intention-response theory of the difference between fiction and nonfiction. While watching Supersize Me I am as a spectator very much aware of director Morgan Spurlock making an argument about the state of affairs in the real world, and I assess the truth-value of this argument. While watching Avatar I imagine that there is a population of humanoids, the Na'vi, on the planet Pandora, fighting for survival: I assess what is fictional (true in the fiction). However, when it comes to truth claims the difference between the many varieties of fiction and nonfiction is not as straightforward as this. For example, one may argue that the spectator can and commonly does perceive even a prototypical fiction film such as Avatar as laying claims to truth in the sense that she may read the film allegorically, and search for the filmmaker's agenda. Is not Avatar a critique of Western imperialism, and our non-environmental lifestyle, for example? It is not fully accurate to claim that fiction film does not make truth claims - there are several ways in which fiction films are taken as asserting something that the spectator is asked to believe. Among the many difficult issues this counterargument raises, I will concentrate on only one here, namely on the case of social realism in fiction. Social realism arguably asserts that something is true in our actual world and asks its spectators to believe this - although works of social realism are also classified as fiction. The solution is not to dismiss the basic theory, but to make finer distinctions. I argue that one difference between prototypical nonfiction and social realist fiction is that nonfiction asserts that its contents (characters and events) are true as tokens, e.g., this person experienced this. As fiction, a work of social realism calls for imagining. However, such a work also asserts that its contents are true as types, e.g., these types of persons experience these types of events. I argue that this can explain what the difference is between the truth claims made in the nonfictional The Corner and The Wire as social realist fiction, respectively. Creator David Simon emphasizes that The Wire's portrayal of Baltimore city life is true, and is to be taken as making assertions about American inner city decay. The background for the show is found in Simons and co-author Ed Burns's nonfiction book The Corner, written after extensive ethnographic observation of a group of drug dealers in Baltimore. Their intention to assert something as true is reflected in the academic reception of the series, in which it is celebrated for its authenticity and realism. Studying the style, narration and content of The Wire carefully further illustrates how these truth-telling intentions are communicated to the spectator. Its documentary-like style mimics observational nonfiction film, and its cyclical narrative structure, focused on an ensemble cast of characters typically marginalized in mainstream popular culture by virtue of status and ethnicity, is typical of works of social realism. The spectator picks up on these clues and expects a certain accuracy and authenticity in the type representations in The Wire, although she is aware that the depictions of these token characters and these token events are not true, but only to be imagined. In conclusion, the theory presented in this paper may not be able to neatly categorize any given film as either fiction or nonfiction, as some nonfiction films make type claims and some fictions make token claims. I do not claim that the difference between type and token claims is sufficient for categorizing any given work as either fiction or nonfiction. More work is needed in order to categorize and describe the various types of fiction and nonfiction, paying special attention to the particular blend of imagining and belief prescribed by each, as evident in what the creators say about their intentions, textual features of the work itself, and critical reception. However, difficult borderline cases such as social realism in fiction do not collapse the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, as demarcated by the intention-response theory. Rather, such difficult cases should compel us to investigate more closely the communicative intentions and conventions at work. In the case of social realism, it is still correct to say that the spectator merely imagines that these fictional characters experience various events; however, she also perceives a double invitation to believe that these events and experiences are typical, and as such representative, of a larger group about which the work intends to assert something as true. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that judgments of what is ‘true in a fiction’ presuppose the Reality Assumption: the assumption that everything that is (really) true is fictionally the case, unless excluded by the work. By contrast with the more familiar Reality Principle, the Reality Assumption is not a rule for inferring implied content from what is explicit. Instead, it provides an array of real-world truths that can be used in such inferences. I claim that the Reality Assumption is essential to our ability to understand stories, drawing on a range of empirical evidence that demonstrates our reliance on it in narrative comprehension. However, the Reality Assumption has several unintuitive consequences, not least that what is fictionally the case includes countless facts that neither authors nor readers could (or should) ever consider. I argue that such consequences provide no reason to reject the Reality Assumption. I conclude that we should take fictions, like non-fictions, to be about the real world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gendler reformulated the so-called imaginability (or imaginative) puzzle in terms of authorial breakdown. The main idea behind this move was to isolate the essential features displayed by the alleged problematic cases and to specify a puzzle general enough to be applied to a variety of different types of imaginative resistance. I offer various criticisms of Gendler's approach to imaginative resistance that also raises some more general points on the recent literature on the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term 'virtual reality' was first coined by Antonin Artaud to describe a value-adding characteristic of certain types of theatrical performances. The expression has more recently come to refer to a broad range of incipient digital technologies that many current philosophers regard as a serious threat to human autonomy and well-being. Their concerns, which are formulated most succinctly in 'brain in a vat'-type thought experiments and in Robert Nozick's famous 'experience machine' argument, reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the way that such technologies would probably have to work. They also considerably underestimate the positive contributions that virtual reality (VR) technologies could make to the growth of human knowledge. Here, we examine and critique Nozick's claim that no reasonable person would want to plug into his hypothetical experience machine in light of a broadly enactivist understanding of how future VR technologies might be expected to function. We then sketch out a tentative theory of the phenomenon of truth in fiction, in order to characterize some of the distinct epistemic opportunities that VR technologies promise to provide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The statement 'Mr. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth' seems true in Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice (even though it may not actually appear in the text) while the statement 'Mr. Darcy is a detective' seems false. One explanation for this intuition is that when we read or talk about fictional stories, we implicitly employ the fictional operator 'It is fictional that' or 'It is part of the story that.' 'It is fictional that Mr. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth' expresses a true proposition while 'It is fictional that Mr. Darcy is a detective' does not. Fictive statements can be abbreviated as 'In F, P'. Determining what statements are fictionally true in a story requires providing truth conditions for statements of the form 'In F, P.' This paper proposes an analysis of truth in fiction and examines the notion of make-believe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Statements about fictional characters, such as 'Gregor Samsa has been changed into a beetle,' pose the problem of how we can say something true (or false) using empty names. I propose an original solution to this problem that construes such utterances as reports of the 'prescriptions to imagine' generated by works of fiction. In particular, I argue that we should construe these utterances as specifying, not what we are supposed to imagine-the propositional object of the imagining-but how we are supposed to imagine. Most other theories of thought and discourse about fictional characters either fail to capture the intentionality of our imaginings, or else obscure the differences between imaginings directed toward fictional characters and those directed toward real individuals. I argue that once we have an account of prescriptions to imagine about real individuals, we can adapt the same framework to specify the contents of prescriptions to imagine about fictional characters, and thereby to account for the truth (or falsity) of statements about fictional characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most scientific models are not physical objects, and this raises important questions. What sort of entity are models, what is truth in a model, and how do we learn about models? In this paper I argue that models share important aspects in common with literary fiction, and that therefore theories of fiction can be brought to bear on these questions. In particular, I argue that the pretence theory as developed by Walton (1990, Mimesis as make-believe: on the foundations of the representational arts. Harvard University Press, Cambridge/MA) has the resources to answer these questions. I introduce this account, outline the answers that it offers, and develop a general picture of scientific modelling based on it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The canonical version of possible worlds semantics for story prefixes is due to David Lewis. This paper reassesses Lewis's theory and draws attention to some novel problems for his account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]