The Diversity of Fiction and Copredication: An Accommodation Problem

Abstract

The paper presents an accommodation problem for extant semantic accounts of fiction. Some accounts of fiction are designed to accommodate one or another form of fictive statement exclusively, what I shall call in-fiction (roughly, statements made within fiction) and out-fiction (roughly, statements relating fictional things and events to extra-fictional things and events). Thus, typically, the accounts fail to do justice to their respective excluded form. A natural response, entertained by Kripke (Reference and existence. The John Locke lectures. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013) and in a different fashion by latter-day Meinongians, is to let the two different kinds of fiction have their respective accounts. It is very easy, however, to mix in and out predicates, which amounts to a species of copredication, where a single nominal receives simultaneous distinct interpretations relative to distinct predicates without creating ambiguity (Bond is a killer but remains as popular as ever). Copredication is a perfectly general phenomenon that arises for any nominal (The meal was delicious, but lasted all day/Bill read then burnt every book/Brazil is at last happy after the civil unrest). The simple problem now is that copredication appears to render all extant accounts of fiction either (1) essentially partial, in dealing with one kind of simple form of fiction but not another, or (2) merely wrong in imagining that fiction comes in categorically distinct forms, for the coherence of copredication is enough to show that this is not so. The aim of the paper is to show to resolve this accommodation problem by the radical expedient of suggesting that the fiction/non-fiction distinction is not really a semantic one, but more one between different ways in which sentences are made true or false.

The case for eliminativism about words

“…One could argue that although ordinary word talk is true, it is not made true by the existence of words: instead, the truthmakers for word-talk could include many and various cultural factors. 4 Collins ( 2021b ) has defended a view along these lines to account for truths in fiction. This is distinct from a more traditional strategy, which would be to claim that ordinary word talk can be paraphrased into truths.…”

The semantics of fiction

“…There is nothing impossible or unintelligible in entertaining propositions involving the paradoxical, category‐mistake involving contents that realists envisage, and, as suggested at the end of Section 2, this is what I take the propositional imaginings of fictions to be. But they should sound as funny to reflective people as what Pirandello's Six characters in search of an author or Flann O'Brien's At swim‐two‐birds invite audiences to imagine, in ways that Emma does not (Klauk, 2014, p. 244; Collins, 2019, Section 2.4). This constitutes at least a clear cost for realism, which the form of irrealism I outlined does not incur.…”

Predicate order and coherence in copredication

“…In contrast to the above, Magidor (2017, 2019) argue that theorising about copredication requires no revisions to type systems or metaphysics (i.e. the abandoning of referential semantics, as in Chomsky 2000; see also Collins 2015Collins , 2017aCollins , 2019Murphy 2014, Vicente 2019) if it can be argued that book (PHYSICAL) and book (ABSTRACT) are separate lexical entries, hence with distinct referential scope. They claim that nominals like book are not ambiguous but encode a single sense (a form of univocity) simultaneously designating both physical and informational entities, and that it is via contextual restriction that multiple readings are permitted.…”