The Real Foundation of Fictional Worlds

Abstract

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.

Perspectives in Imaginative Engagement With Fiction

“…Where the Reality Principle is a mechanism for generating fictional truths from explicit prescriptions to imagine, Friend () defends a ‘Reality Assumption’ as an unavoidable starting point on which principles of generation then operate. While the Reality Assumption is significantly more flexible and plausible than the Reality Principle, it too is couched as an assumption about propositional contents.…”

Elucidating the Truth in Criticism

“…I have argued elsewhere for a different implementation of the principle of minimal departure, which I call the Reality Assumption : the assumption that everything that is (really) true is storified, unless excluded by the work (Friend ). Unlike the Reality Principle, the Reality Assumption (henceforth: RA) is not a rule for inferring implied story‐truths; instead, it is a starting point for specifying the input into such inferences.…”

“…Despite these considerations there are numerous objections to the RA, familiar from discussions of the Reality Principle, which may be used to motivate the rejection of a broad real‐world background for story‐truth. I have addressed these in detail in Friend (), so here I briefly consider only the most significant criticism: that the RA generates a glut of irrelevant story‐truths, unknown to both authors and readers. To reply to this objection, I must say something more about my conception of story‐truth.…”

“…On the account I prefer, what is storified is what readers are invited to imagine (Friend ). A work invites imagining P on the following condition: if the question arose and we had to choose between imagining that P and imagining that not‐P, we would be required to imagine the former .…”

“…I introduce the term storified in Friend () to limit the implication that “fictional truth” is a kind of truth and because I apply the concept to nonfiction.…”