This monograph examines truth in fiction by applying the techniques of a naturalized logic of human cognitive practices. The author structures his project around two focal questions. What would it take to write a book about truth in literary discourse with reasonable promise of getting it right? What would it take to write a book about truth in fiction as true to the facts of lived literary experience as objectivity allows? It is argued that the most semantically distinctive feature of (...) the sentences of fiction is that they are unambiguously true and false together. It is true that Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street and also concurrently false that he did. A second distinctive feature of fiction is that the reader at large knows of this inconsistency and isn't in the least cognitively molested by it. Why, it is asked, would this be so? What would explain it? Two answers are developed. According to the no-contradiction thesis, the semantically tangled sentences of fiction are indeed logically inconsistent but not logically contradictory. According to the no-bother thesis, if the inconsistencies of fiction were contradictory, a properly contrived logic for the rational management of inconsistency would explain why readers at large are not thrown off cognitive stride by their embrace of those contradictions. As developed here, the account of fiction suggests the presence of an underlying three - or four-valued dialethic logic. The author shows this to be a mistaken impression. There are only two truth-values in his logic of fiction. The naturalized logic of Truth in Fiction jettisons some of the standard assumptions and analytical tools of contemporary philosophy, chiefly because the neurotypical linguistic and cognitive behaviour of humanity at large is at variance with them. Using the resources of a causal response epistemology in tandem with the naturalized logic, the theory produced here is data-driven, empirically sensitive, and open to a circumspect collaboration with the empirical sciences of language and cognition. (shrink)

The logic of fiction has been a stand-alone research programme only since the early 1970s.1 It is a fair question as to why in the first place fictional discourse would have drawn the interest of professional logicians. It is a question admitting of different answers. One is that, since fictional names are “empty”, fiction is a primary datum for any logician seeking a suitably comprehensive logic of denotation. Another answer arises from the so-called incompleteness problem, exemplified by the fact (or (...) apparent fact) that some fictional sentences – think of “Sherlock Holmes’ mother was nick-named ‘Polly’” − are neither true nor false. These are sentences to command the attention of logicians who work on non-bivalent logics. A further spur to logical engagement is the supposed fictionality of certain kinds of ideal models in science and certain classes of mathematical objects. No doubt, there are other features of fictional discourse that provide the logician with a natural entré, but perhaps it would also be correct to say that the fiction’s biggest draw for logicians is that our quite common beliefs about the fictional constitute what Nicholas Rescher calls “aporetic clusters”, so named after the Latinized Greek aporos for “impassable”.2 An aporetic cluster is a set of claims such that.. (shrink)

The object of this paper is to study the analogy, drawn both positively and negatively, between mathematics and fiction. The analogy is more subtle and interesting than fictionalism, which was discussed in part I. Because analogy is not common coin among philosophers, this particular analogy has been discussed or mentioned for the most part just in terms of specific similarities that writers have noticed and thought worth mentioning without much attention's being paid to the larger picture. I intend with this (...) analogy (looking at others' comparisons) to shed a little light on what is going on in mathematics, how one can understand it a bit other than experientially. This intention is philosophical and the way that I am attempting to accomplish it is also philosophical. I shall conclude my attempt to explain how it is possible and even natural for mathematics and fiction to have the analogy they have, taking it for granted, as argued in part I, that they are not to be identified. To this end I shall discuss philosophers' comparisons, mainly those of Hodes, Resnik, Tharp, and Wagner, who are the writers that seem to me to have written most thoughtfully and sufficiently extensively about fiction in making the comparison and of Körner, whose comparison is different. Whether either of these comparisons or the more general analogy is of permanent philosophical interest will have to be decided by philosophers now that they have had a fuller examination. I shall mention some other writers' reference to fiction, but not all; indeed, I am sure that I have not even found all the comparisons that there are. (shrink)

Intentionality may be dealt with in two different ways: either ontologically, as an ordinary relation to some extraordinary objects, or epistemologically, as an extraordinary relation to some ordinary objects. This paper endorses the epistemological view in order to provide a model of semiotic intentionality defined as the meaning-and-cognizing process that constitutes to power of the mind to be about something on the basis of a semiotic system. After a short introduction that presents the components of semiotic intentionality (viz. sign, act, (...) content, referent) along with their division into an intending and a fulfilling side (Sect. 1), the first main part of the paper analyzes semiotic intentionality at its primary level (a.k.a. 'concrete intentionality') as a real and subjective relation between meaning-intending and meaning-fulfilling acts grounded in the manipulation of some semiotic system (Sect. 2). Then, building on such concrete intentionality, the second main part of the paper analyzes semiotic intentionality at its secondary level (a.k.a. 'abstract intentionality') as an ideal and objective relation between intentional and fulfillment contents, which in turn: (i) proceed from an abstraction performed on the intending and fulfilling acts, respectively, and (ii) retroactively categorize the intending and fulfilling acts, respectively (Sect. 3). Finally, from this combination of an act-based conception of content with a presentationalist account of intentionality, the conclusion of this paper produces the intended model of semiotic intentionality in such a way that knowledge and truth are then respectively defined in it as the subjective correspondence between the two acts of concrete intentionality and as the objective correspondence between the two contents of abstract intentionality (Sect. 4). (shrink)