‘Truth in Fiction’ Reprised

Abstract

The paper surveys recent appraisals of David Lewis’s seminal paper on truth in fiction. It examines variations on standard criticisms of Lewis’s account, aiming to show that, if developed as Lewis suggests in his 1983 Postscript A, his proposals on the topic are—as Hanley puts it—‘as good as it gets’. Thus elaborated, Lewis’s account can resist the objections, and it offers a better picture of fictional discourse than recent resurrections of other classic works of the 1970s by Kripke, van Inwagen and Searle. The turn that Lewis suggests and the paper recommends draws on the remaining outstanding contribution from that time: Walton’s.

The semantics of fiction

“…This requires a fictional narrator in fictions deploying fictional names—in all fictions, to prevent ad hocery . This is already highly problematic; there are fictions that appear to be directly conveyed by their fiction‐makers without the mediation of a narrator, as DR allows (García‐Carpintero, 2022, 2022a, 2022b).…”

“…A second reason to reject the view that Watson's pretend use of “Holmes” excludes Doyle's real use comes from fictions with indexicals instead of names, like Cortázar's The continuity of parks , which I have used to argue that some fictions are directly conveyed by their fiction‐makers without the pretense of a fictional telling by a fictional teller (García‐Carpintero, 2022a, see also Abell, 2020, Section 4.5). The claim that fiction‐makers are not using indexical expressions with their standard semantics looks desperate.…”

“…This means that we should allow competent authors and audiences of fictions to have adequate conceptions of their contents. Unlike Lewis's, the semantic picture briefly outlined above allows that fictions may have impossible contents (García‐Carpintero, 2022a). 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.…”

“…The relevant artifacts might ultimately be concrete psychological entities, as recent versions of conceptualist nominalism envisage (Everett & Schroeder, 2015). More decisions should be made (García‐Carpintero, 2020b): When do the relevant entities start existing, if ever? Which among the properties ascribed to them are constitutive of them?…”

“…I should add that I do not think that my acceptance of a form of realism for some uses, and the resulting nonuniformity cuts very deep. The main point I have been making here (as in the companion piece, García‐Carpintero, 2022a) is that an adequate philosophical treatment of these issues should be grounded on an account of the nature of fictions and textual uses. When we think of the commitment to fictional objects I have assumed from this viewpoint, it can be argued than the resulting form of realism is so thin as to be ultimately taken as a form of irrealism (García‐Carpintero, 2021b; Thomasson, 2021).…”