Creative Supplementation and the Meta-Rule of Authority Distribution

What is it for something to be “true in” a fiction? Most proposals begin with a work of fiction, and specify factors augmenting or fixing what it states or depicts. But they leave out creative engagement with the work. I argue that understanding creative engagement with works of fiction is of central importance to defining truth in fiction. When it comes to literature, this means understanding that readers have a role analogous to that of a movie or stage director. It follows that the locus of fictional truth in these cases is not the text plus some social background, but the particular reader’s engagement with the text on some occasion. The only universal constraint on creative engagement is what I call the “meta-rule of authority distribution,” which expresses a division of truth-making labour between creative engagement with a work and the work itself.