Consider the opening sentence of Tolkien’s The Hobbit: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. By writing this sentence, Tolkien is making a fictional statement. There are two influential views of the nature of such statements. On the pretense view, fictional discourse amounts to pretend assertions. Since the author is not really asserting, but merely pretending, a statement such as Tolkien’s is devoid of illocutionary force altogether. By contrast, on the alternative make-believe view, fictional discourse prescribes that (...) the reader make-believe the content of the statement. In this paper, we argue that neither of these views is satisfactory. They both fail to distinguish the linguistic act of creating the fiction, for instance Tolkien writing the sentence above, from the linguistic act of reciting it, such as reading The Hobbit out loud for your children. As an alternative to these views, we propose that the essential feature of the author’s speech act is its productive character, that it makes some state of affairs obtain in the fiction. Tolkien’s statement, we argue, has the illocutionary force of a declaration. (shrink)

Can fictions make genuine assertions about the actual world? Proponents of the ‘Assertion View’ answer the question affirmatively: they hold that authors can assert, by means of explicit statements that are part of the work of fiction, that something is actually the case in the real world. The ‘Nonassertion’ View firmly denies this possibility. In this paper, I defend a nuanced version of the Nonassertion View. I argue that even if fictions cannot assert, they can indirectly communicate that what is (...) recounted as fictional is actually true. I show that this view is supported by independent linguistic data, and that it is able to defuse the objections that are typically raised against the Nonassertion View. I conclude by showing that this position has some interesting implications for testimonial cognitivism about fiction. (shrink)

Importation in fictional discourse is the phenomenon by which audiences include information in the story over and above what is explicitly stated by the narrator. This paper argues that importation is distinct from generation, the phenomenon by which truth in fiction may outstrip what is made explicit, and draws a distinction between fictional truth and fictional records. The latter comprises the audience’s picture of what is true according to the narrator. The paper argues that importation into fictional records operates according (...) to principles that also govern ordinary conversation. An account of fictional records as a species of common ground information is proposed. Two sources of importation are described in detail, presupposition accommodation and conversational implicatures. It is shown that presuppositions are both mandatorily imported and mandatorily generated. By contrast, conversational implicatures are neither mandatorily imported nor mandatorily generated. The paper distinguishes conversational implicatures from contextual inferences. Both rely on background assumptions, yet conversational implicatures moreover depend on assumptions concerning Gricean cooperation. (shrink)

This article lies at the intersection of two problems: the one concerning the potential of fictional works to inform us about our social reality and foster our understanding of its various aspects, and the one concerning their potential to engage with philosophical issues. I bring these two together by analyzing the hit television series Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. According to my interpretation, the series is informative about our social world, and it raises philosophical concerns about it. This makes (...) it well-equipped to fulfill the educative function attributed to mass art by Noël Carroll, and to stand out as an example of what he calls popular philosophy. To support this interpretation, I rely on contemporary views regarding the nature of our engagements with fictional narratives. I then explore how philosophical concerns are generated and I elaborate on the role they have in deepening one’s understanding of one’s social circumstances. I further show how the series provides innovative and independent philosophical knowledge by means specific to the medium of generic serialized fiction. The central part of my argument is an analysis of the narrative strategies which enable the informative and philosophical aspects of the series to generate the series’ educative function. (shrink)

This chapter identifies and explains several primary functions of the fictional use of metalinguistic devices and considers some difficult cases. In particular, this chapter argues that when real persons are quoted in a storyworld they are ‘storified’ as near-real fictions. In cases of the misquotation of real persons, near-real fictions and near-real quotations must adequately exploit resemblances between the real and the fictional. This concludes with a discussion of the similarities between fictional and nonfictional uses of metalinguistic acts, and how (...) they bear on our understanding of imagination and make-believe. (shrink)

This article explores the relation between belief-like imaginings and the establishment of imaginary worlds (often called fictional worlds). After outlining the various assumptions my argument is premised on, I argue that belief-like imaginings, in themselves, do not render their content true in the imaginary world to which they pertain. I show that this claim applies not only to imaginative projects in which we are instructed or intend to imagine certain propositions, but also to spontaneous imaginative projects. After arguing that, like (...) guided imaginative projects, spontaneous projects involve specific imaginary truths, I conclude that imaginative projects, whether spontaneous or deliberate, comprise not only imaginings, but also mental acts of determining such truths. (shrink)

The contemporary debate in the philosophy of literature is strongly shaped by the anticognitivist challenge, according to which works of literary fiction (that contain propositions that are neither literally true nor affirmed by the author) cannot impart (relevant) knowledge to the readers or enrich their worldly understanding. Anti-cognitivists appreciate works of literary fiction for their aesthetic values and so risk to reduce them to mere ornaments that are entertaining, but eventually useless. Many philosophers have reacted to this challenge by pointing (...) at ways in which works of literary fiction can be informative even though they lack worldly reference: it has been argued, for example, that works of fictions are thought experiments; that they add not to our theoretical knowledge, but to our know-how or to our phenomenal knowledge; or that that they help readers to understand the perspectives of others. A stubborn defense of literary cognitivism, however, risks to collapse into an instrumental understanding of literature. In my paper I suggest that both sides in the debate focus too narrowly on semantic features of the works in question that is tied to what I will call the “referential picture” of language. A shift perspective is needed: for one, we ought to fully appreciate that the term “literature” does not refer to a homogeneous phenomenon, but rather to a very heterogeneous and multifarious set of works that are read by many different readers for many different reasons in many different ways. Second, we need to understand that these works have in common much more than the semantic peculiarity of lacking worldly reference: they are a unique means of communication between authors and readers – and in particular the role of the latter is often neglected in contemporary debate. These two points should help us to get a more comprehensive understanding of the practice of literature and the vast range of values we can find works of literary fiction – and the interplay between them. (shrink)

Taking inspiration from Searle’s ‘The Logic of Fictional Discourse’, this essay presents an argument against different versions of the so-called ‘speech act theory of fiction’. In particular, it argues that a Uniformity Argument may be constructed, which is additional to the Determination Argument commonly attributed to Searle, and which does not rely on his presumably controversial Determination Principle. This Uniformity Argument is equally powerful against the ‘Dedicated Speech Act’ theories that Searle originally targeted, and the more recent, Grice-inspired versions of (...) speech-act approaches to fictional discourse. (shrink)

In his 2014 book Fiction and Narrative, Derek Matravers mounts a concerted attack on what he terms the ‘post-Walton consensus’ as to the features that distingui.

This paper considers some uses of Free Indirect Discourse within non-fictional discourse. It is shown that these differ from ordinary uses in that they do not attribute actual thoughts or utterances. I argue that the explanation for this is that these uses of Free Indirect Discourse are not assertoric. Instead, it is argued here that they are fictional uses, that is, they are used with fictional force like utterances used to tell a fictional story. Rather than making assertions about the (...) actual world, these occurrences of Free Indirect Discourse introduce localized fictional scenarios from which audiences are meant to learn factual information. As such, they exhibit some of the ways in which the involvement of perspective in historical fiction has been shown to facilitate learning and retention of information. (shrink)

This paper argues that no instances of acquiring knowledge from works of literary fiction are instances of the way we ordinarily learn from the testimony of others. The paper argues that the fictional status of a work is a defeater for the justification of beliefs formed on the basis of statements within that work, which must itself be defeated for such beliefs based on fiction to amount to knowledge. This marks a fundamental difference with learning from testimony, since regardless of (...) one's views on testimony and testimonial knowledge, the fact that your belief that p was based on someone's testimony that p is not in and of itself a defeater for your justification for believing that p. (shrink)

In this paper, first of all, I want to try a new defense of the utterance approach as to the relationship between fictional and nonfictional works on the one hand and between fictional and nonfictional utterances on the other hand, notably the idea that the distinction between fictional and nonfictional works is derivative on the distinction between fictional and nonfictional utterances of the sentences that constitute a text. Moreover, I want to account for the second distinction in minimally contextualist semantic (...) terms. Finally, I want to hold that what makes a fictional utterance, hence a fictional work, properly fictional is the contextually pre-semantic fact that its utterer entertains an act of make-believe, where such an act is accounted for in metarepresentational terms. This ultimately means that the fiction/nonfiction distinction is not clarified in terms of the fictional works/nonfictional works distinction, for things rather go the other way around. (shrink)

According to the dominant theory of intentionalism, fiction and non-fiction are in a “mix-and-match” relationship with truth and falsity: both fiction and nonfiction can be either true or false. Intentionalists hold that fiction is a property of a narrative that is intended to elicit not belief but imagination or make-belief in virtue of the audience’s recognizing that such is the intention of the fiction-maker. They claim that in unlikely circumstances these fictions can turn out to be accidentally true. On the (...) contrary, I argue in this paper that fictionality and truth are incompatible. I distinguish narratives based on whether they contain invented characters or not, and offer respective sets of arguments to the effect that there is no case when a fiction is accidentally true. A narrative is either fiction or accidentally true but not both. (shrink)