I argue that judgements 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 realworld 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.
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.
Standard theories define fiction in terms of an invited response of imagining or make‐believe. I argue that these theories are not only subject to numerous counterexamples, they also fail to explain why classification matters to our understanding and evaluation of works of fiction as well as non‐fiction. I propose instead that we construe fiction and non‐fiction as genres: categories whose membership is determined by a cluster of non‐essential criteria, and which play a role in the appreciation of particular works. I claim that this proposal captures the intuitions motivating alternative theories of fiction.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.