Signposts of Factuality: On Genuine Assertions in Fictional Literature

Abstract

This chapter argues for compositionalism, which is the view that a fictional text can consist of both fictional and factual discourse. One reason to think compositionalism is true is that it explains why authors go to great lengths, and commit to high levels of superfluous detail, to achieve accuracy in their works. This chapter argues for compositionalism within a framework of an institution of fictionality. The conventions of this institution are detailed and provide the basis on which we can identify factual discourse in an overall fictional context: Specific signposts of factuality demand of the reader that he read the utterance as factual and consider it to be a source of knowledge. Therefore, compositionalism allows for reliable beliefs to be formed on the basis of engaging with fictions.

Fictions that Purport to Tell the Truth

“…A few philosophers believe that authors can 'pause' and 'restart' the fiction at their will, to make serious and asserted remarks, so that fictional works are often 'a patchwork of fictionmaking and assertion' (Currie 1990, 48;cf. Searle 1975, 332;Konrad 2017). On this 'Patchwork View' of fiction, an utterance can be either fictional or asserted (unless it is aimed at different audiences, cf.…”

“…13 I owe some of these examples to Sophie Grace Chappell. The first two examples are analysed in Konrad (2017).…”

“…Unlike non-fictions, realistic fictions like Les Misérables present their stories as a mixture of facts and inventions. Because of this, fiction readers can only rely on (fallible, although often plausible) inferences to reconstruct which parts are meant to be merely imagined, and which are meant to convey information about the actual 14 These are the observations most frequently brought up in support of the Assertion View (Walton 1983, 80;Currie 1990, 46-49;Konrad 2017;Dixon 2022). I discuss two further datapoints (that statements in fictions can be appropriately criticised for being false, and that they can convey knowledge if true) in section 5 and 6.…”

Modelling Speaker Attribution in Narrative Texts With Biased and Bias-Adjustable Neural Networks

“…is not yet well formalised in literary theory, we annotated three phenomena which we consider to be strong indicators for reflective passages: comment (Bonheim, 1975), non-fictional speech (Konrad, 2017) and generalisation (Leslie and Lerner, 2016). Annotators had to identify these and attribute them to one or more of the three attribution classes (character/ narrator/author).…”