Truth in Fiction

Truth in Fiction

Richard Woodward*University of Barcelona

Abstract

When we engage with a work of fiction we gain knowledge about what is fictionally true inthat work. Our grasp of what is true in a fiction is central to our engagement with representa-tional works of art, and to our assessments of their merits. Of course, it is sometimes difficult todetermine what is fictional – it is a good question whether the main character of American Psy-cho is genuinely psychotic or merely delusional, for instance. (And even in this case, our igno-rance itself is crucial to how we engage with the story and assess its qualities.) But in the vastmajority of cases, we have no difficulty distinguishing what is fictionally true from what is not.Every attentive reader of Bleak House knows that it is fictional that Esther is Lady Dedlock’sdaughter, but not fictional that Ada is the daughter of John Jarndyce. Moreover, we do notthink that our judgements about what is fictional are based on guesswork. We have a folk the-ory of fictional truth, in the sense that we have a relatively stable framework upon which werely when we engage with fiction, and we face the challenge of characterizing that theorysystematically.

1. Fictional Worlds

When we engage with works of fiction, we acquire information about fictional charac-ters, events, and places. It is tempting to think of these characters as populating the ‘worldof the fiction’, of fictional goings-on as being events that occur in that world, and of fic-tional places as being locations in it. For instance, it is tempting to think of Hogwarts asbeing a school located in the world of Harry Potter, of Harry, Hermione and Ron asbeing people who exist at that world and of Quidditch matches as being events thatoccur in it.

One might try to illuminate the concept of truth-in-fiction in terms of fictional worlds(Pavel). The thought is that when an author creates a representational artwork, they areprojecting or indicating a fictional world, which we subsequently explore in our imaginationwhen we engage with their work. To be fictionally true is to be true ‘at’ the relevant fic-tional world.

Whilst this imagery is attractive, simply appealing to fictional worlds leaves importantquestions unanswered. To illustrate this point, consider that merely appealing to fictionalworlds neither tells us what fictional worlds are nor how a work of fiction ‘indicates’ a fictionalworld. Just appealing to fictional worlds doesn’t answer these substantial questions, whichshows that the notion of ‘the world of the fiction’ is opaque and explanatorily impotent.In order to explain truth-in-fiction in terms of fictional worlds, we need to know whatfictional worlds are, and we need to know how a fictional world gets associated with aparticular fiction. These two problems can be called the identification problem and thegeneration problem.

Philosophy Compass 6/3 (2011): 158–167, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2010.00367.x

ª 2011 The AuthorPhilosophy Compass ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

2. The Identification Problem

The debate about fictional worlds might be seen as a special case of the debate about fic-tional characters. And just as there are those who deny the existence of fictional charac-ters, there are those who repudiate fictional worlds. (See, e.g., Walton.) Anyone whorepudiates fictional worlds will regard the identification problem as easy – since therearen’t really any fictional worlds, there is no story to tell about their nature. But ratherthan replay the moves that are made in the debate about fictional characters, I shall focusupon the viability of a particular account of fictional worlds. (For an overview of thedebate about fictional characters, see Friend.) This view assumes that talk of fictionalworlds is in good order, and attempts to reduce fictional worlds to more familiar entities.

The imagery of fictional worlds is reminiscent of another category of worlds: possibleworlds. Talk of possible worlds, ways the world might have been, has become a centraltool in contemporary philosophy, but fictional worlds cannot straightforwardly be identi-fied with possible ones. For fictions are typically incomplete: a proposition may be neithertrue-in-a-fiction nor false-in-a-fiction. It is not true according to Harry Potter that Hermi-one’s great grandfather was a miner. But it is not fictional that this is not the case: thestory is silent on this point. This entails that world of Harry Potter is also incomplete:some propositions are neither true in it nor false in it. But for any proposition p and anypossible world w, either p is true-at-w or p is false-at-w.

Even if we cannot identify fictional worlds with possible worlds, we can still think ofparticular possible worlds as being ‘story worlds.’ What qualifies a possible world as astory world? Our answer will depend on how we solve the generation problem, but theintuitive idea is that a story world is a world at which the story is realized. Each storyworld ‘fills in the gaps’ that were left open by the author, with each world filling in thegaps in different ways. With this idea in place, we might then try to identify fictionalworlds with sets of story worlds (cf. Lewis, ‘Truth in Fiction’). We can then hold that tosay that a proposition is true (false) at a fictional world is to say that it is true (false) atevery story world. This identification allows us to handle fictional incompleteness; aproposition will be neither true-in-the-fiction nor false-in-the-fiction just in case it is trueat some of the story worlds but false at others. So, e.g., given that there is a story worldat which Holmes wears size 10 shoes and a story world at which he does not, the propo-sition that Holmes wears size 10 shoes will be neither fictionally true nor fictionally false.(For criticism of this treatment of incompleteness, see Lamarque and Olsen; Levinstein.)

Lewis’s proposal faces a serious difficulty, however. The problem is that many storiesseem to be not only incomplete, but impossible. Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse concerns acharacter, Ambrose, who realizes that he is fictional. Kafka’s Metamorphosis concernsa human character, Gregor, who becomes a non-human. Alice in Wonderland describes acat’s smile existing without a bearer. In each case, it seems that we have a story whichcouldn’t be realized, meaning that there are no possible worlds at which impossible fictionsare realized. But if a proposition is true in a story iff it is true at every story world, then– since there are no impossible story worlds – every proposition is trivially true in animpossible fiction. This means that any two impossible fictions share the same fictionalworld, the empty set of story worlds.

The only way for someone who maintains Lewis’s identification to avoid this objectionis to deny the existence of impossible stories. One way to implement this strategy is toreject, e.g., that Metamorphosis is impossible on the grounds that it isn’t really true in Kaf-ka’s fiction that Gregor becomes a non-human. To illustrate how we might pursue thisstrategy, consider the following example.

Truth in Fiction 159

ª 2011 The Author Philosophy Compass 6/3 (2011): 158–167, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2010.00367.xPhilosophy Compass ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Sherlock Holmes’ assistant, Watson, has a single war wound. In Studies in Scarlet, it issaid to be on his shoulder. In Sign of Four, it is said to be on his leg. So it seems asthough Doyle’s story is inconsistent – Watson has, per impossible, a single war woundlocated on two different parts of his body. If we identify fictional worlds with sets of pos-sible worlds, we would seemingly be forced into saying that everything is true accordingto the story. In ‘Truth in Fiction,’ Lewis shows us how to avoid this result. The trick isto divide the inconsistent whole into two consistent parts, two ‘maximally consistentstory fragments.’ In the present case, we have two fragments: one in which Watson’swound is on his shoulder, and one in which it is on his leg. So we have two sets of storyworlds – one for each story fragment. But which set of story worlds is the world of thestory?

Lewis gives us two options. The first is to identify the fictional world with the intersec-tion of all the sets of story worlds i.e. the worlds that are members of both sets of storyworlds. If we go this way, we will say that p is true at a fictional world just in case p istrue at every story world in both story fragments. This move makes the Holmes storiesconsistent, thereby ensuring that not every proposition is fictionally true. But we losesome of the content of the Holmes stories: it is no longer true in the story that Watson’swar wound is on his shoulder since that proposition is not true at every world in everystory fragment. Lewis then points out that we can avoid this result if we identify a fic-tional world with the union of the sets of story worlds i.e. the worlds that are members ofeither set of story worlds. If we go this way, we will say that p is true at a fictional worldjust in case p is true at every story world of some story fragment. And since the proposi-tion that Watson’s wound is on his shoulder is true at every world in some story frag-ment, this proposition is true according to the Holmes stories. Similarly, since theproposition that Watson’s wound is on his leg is true at every world in another storyfragment, this proposition is fictionally true too. But Watson’s wound is not multiplylocated, since that is false at every world in every story fragment.

Both the method of union and the method of intersection solve the formal problemposed by impossible fictions – we no longer need to say that any proposition is triviallytrue in an impossible fiction, and we no longer need to conflate the fictional world ofone impossible fiction with the fictional world of another.

Both of Lewis’s methods are problematic, however. Lewis’s methods seem workablewhen we apply them to inconsistent stories: stories where it seems as though a contradic-tion – a proposition of the form p and not-p – is fictionally true. But not all impossiblestories are inconsistent in this way (Currie; Phillips; Proudfoot; Le Poidevin; Byrne). Forinstance, it is intuitively fictionally true in Metamorphosis that Gregor turns into a non-human. This doesn’t obviously entail that Kafka’s story is inconsistent – what claim ofthe form p and not-p is fictionally true? – but it does establish that Kafka’s story is impossi-ble, at least given that humans cannot change into non-humans. But given there are nopossible worlds at which humans change into insects, it turns out, whether we employthe method of intersection or the method of union, that it isn’t true according to Meta-morphosis that Gregor turned into an insect. Gregor’s transformation seems to be essentialto the plot of Kafka’s story, however, and it’s very difficult indeed to accept that it isn’tfictionally true that Gregor transformed.

What options are available to the proponent of Lewis’s identification? One option is toembrace not only possible worlds but impossible ones. The status of the latter is muchmore controversial than the status of the former, but an impossible worlds treatment offictional worlds seems promising (Priest; Woods; Berto). If we accept impossible worldswe can say that there are worlds, albeit impossible ones, at which Gregor becomes a

160 Truth in Fiction


non-human, and we can appeal to those worlds in order to ensure that it is fictionallytrue that Gregor becomes a non-human. Another option is to try to explain away ourintuitions. The thought would be that whilst it isn’t fictionally true that Gregor becomesa non-human, our intuitive judgements are nonetheless correct. Nolan pursues this strat-egy, suggesting that our intuitive judgements about what is fictional don’t track the factsabout what is fictional, but instead track the facts about what is believed to be true by astory’s narrator (cf. Hanley, p.125).

Whatever we say about fictional worlds, the generation problem remains, and it is tothis problem that I shall now turn.

3. The Generation Problem

The generation problem is the problem of identifying the ways in which works of fictiongenerate fictional truths. We should distinguish two sub-problems here, because it is verynatural to think that things are true in a story because other things are. We think thatHermione’s mother has friends, drinks water, and so on, because it is fictional that she is ahuman being. Fictional truths, as Walton (p.142) puts its, ‘breed like rabbits.’

Let’s say that a proposition p is an implied fictional truth if there is some fictional truthq such that p is fictionally true because q is fictionally true. And let’s say that a fictionaltruth is primary if it is not implied. Implied fictional truth are thus dependent on, andhold in virtue of, primary fictional truths. In order to solve the generation problem, wethus need to know how an artwork generates its primary fictional truths, and how it gen-erates its implied ones. I’ll begin by looking at the second of these sub-problems, beforelooking at the first in the next section.

Suppose that you learn that it is fictionally true in a given work that a character ishuman. Perhaps you are explicitly told that this is the case. You aren’t told, however,that the character has lungs. But it is fictionally true that the character has lungs nonethe-less. How come?

One thought is that implied fictional truths are generated because we hold fixed arange of background propositions when engaging with fiction. But which ones? Themost obvious answer is the actually true propositions. We cannot hold every true proposi-tion fixed, of course, since some will be inconsistent with a fiction’s primary fictionaltruths. But the idea is that we should hold as many true propositions fixed as the primaryfictional truths permit.

These ideas motivate a particular ‘principle of generation’, a rule specifying the condi-tions under which implied fictional truths are generated. We can call it the reality princi-ple (RP), and formulate it as follows:

Where p1... pn are the primary fictional truths of a fiction F, it is true in F that q iff the follow-ing holds: were p1... pn the case, q would have been the case.

(This principle is discussed by Beardsley, Lewis, Walton, Wolterstorff, and Woods, andWoodward.) RP builds a counterfactual element into our account of truth of fiction. Howdoes this relate to the idea that fictional worlds should be as similar as possible to theactual one? The relationship is very tight if we understand counterfactuals along the linesof Lewis and Stalnaker, who hold that a counterfactual ‘if p were the case, q would bethe case too’ is true just in case q is true at all the closest (i.e. most similar) possibleworlds to actuality at which p is true. This means that we must minimize differencesbetween fictional worlds and the actual world when assessing what is true in a story.



RP generates many fictional truths. To establish that it is true in Harry Potter thatBrixton is south of the River Thames, it suffices to note that none of the story’s primaryfictional truths are inconsistent with Brixton’s being south of the Thames. Since we areconstrained to hold fixed as many facts about actuality as we can, we know that one ofthe actual facts that will survive this test is the fact that Brixton is south of the Thames.By RP, this proposition is one of Harry Potter’s implied fictional truths. Similarly, RPensures that it is true in Bleak House that Ada has a heart, true in The Cherry Orchard thatEarth has a single moon, so on and so forth.

Unfortunately, RP seems to generate the wrong fictional truths (Currie; Lewis; Phil-lips; Walton; Wolterstorff). One problem is that a huge variety of actually true proposi-tions are consistent with any story’s primary fictional truths. But if the primary truthsdon’t rule out p, then RP will entail that p is fictional if it’s actually the case that p. Forinstance, RP entails that it is true in Pnin that there are exactly two trillion stars in thenight sky (if there are), simply because nothing the story says is inconsistent with thatfact. Similarly, RP entails that it is true in Pnin that every mathematical truth holds, nomatter how complicated, simply because none of its primary fictional truths are inconsis-tent with the mathematical facts. Finally, RP entails that it is true in Pnin that Napoleonhad exactly one million hairs on his head (if he did), simply because nothing the storysays is inconsistent with this fact.

These results are highly counterintuitive: they imply that not even the story’s authorcould’ve known what is fictionally true in his work. (That said, there is a debate to behad when it comes to the question of why the consequences refute RP. See Walton fordiscussion.) Moreover, these results can be avoided if we retreat from the reality principleto the mutual belief principle (MBP). Whereas RP told us to hold fixed the actually truepropositions, MBP asks us to hold fixed those propositions that were mutually and openlybelieved in a story’s community of origin. (Something is mutually and openly believed tobe the case just in case just about everyone believes it, just about everyone believes thatjust about everyone believes it, and so on.) MBP can then be formulated as follows:

Where p1... pn are the primary fictional truths of a fiction F, it is true in F that q just in casethe following was mutually and openly believed in the society from which F originated: werep1... pn the case, q would have been the case.

This principle tells us to maximize similarities between fictional worlds and the world asit was mutually believed to be in a story’s community of origin. MBP does not entail that it istrue in Pnin that there are exactly 2 trillion stars in the night sky, since this propositionwas not mutually believed to be true in the community from which Nabokov’s storyoriginated. But since it is mutually believed in our community that humans have lungs,MBP ensures that is true in the story that Timofey Pnin has two lungs.

Unfortunately, MBP, like its predecessor, seems to generate the wrong results. Forwhilst it prevents certain facts about the actual world from becoming true in fictions,MBP does not prevent certain beliefs that were overt in a fiction’s community of originfrom becoming fictionally true. MBP seems to entail that it is true in Bleak House thatGod exists, simply because Victorian Britain was overtly theistic (and Dickens didn’t tellus otherwise). MBP also seems to smuggle into fictional worlds many of the prejudicesthat prevailed when a fiction was created. But surely it’s not true in many, many fictionsthat non-whites are inferior to whites, or that women are worse at mathematics thanmen, if these things are incidental to the fiction. In this setting, whilst it seems to do bet-ter than RP, MBP doesn’t seem to generate the right results.



A further problem afflicts both principles: neither principle can accommodate cases inwhich genre conventions generate fictional truths (Lewis, p.268; Walton, pp.161–9).1 Aconvention governing the genre of ‘zombie’ stories is that zombies do not run. Theykind of stumble along, typically stretching their arms towards their victims. This is neverexplicitly stated, however: it’s a stereotype that has evolved with the development of thegenre to the point where some aficionados refuse to classify stories involving ‘runningzombies’ as genuine members of the genre. (There are stories – The Return of the LivingDead being an example – in which zombies do run, but this is self-consciously anti-con-ventional. 28 Days Later is a trickier case.) The problem is that even if we take the bodyof primary fictional truths that are directly generated by a story, it is probably neither truenor mutually believed that, were they all true, zombies do not run. But it is nonethelessfictionally true that they do not.

Secondly, a convention governing the genre of ‘slasher’ stories is that people shouldnever leave their homes to escape the clutches of the slasher. (Think of the way that filmslike Scream play on exactly these conventions.) The problem is that even if we take thebody of fictional truths that are directly generated by a slasher story – the victims are inthe house, the slasher is trying to get in, etc. – it is probably both true and mutuallybelieved in our community that, were they all true, the victims should try to flee theclutches of the slasher. But it is nonetheless fictionally true that they shouldn’t.

In both of these cases, genre conventions generate fictional truths in ways that neitherprinciple can handle. What does this show? Walton suggests that the moral to draw isthat there is no single, overarching and general principle which implicitly governs thepractice of critics and appreciators of fiction (p.139). That is not to say that RP and MBPare unimportant. Rather, they are rules of thumb, which only give us defeasible warrantsfor drawing inferences from a story’s primary fictional truths. RP is important because itgives a sense of objectivity to truth-in-fiction by making fictional worlds similar to thereal world, making our engagement with a fiction ‘richer and more natural’ (p.160).MBP is important because it allows an author greater control over what is true accordingto a story, since the mutual beliefs in his community are easily accessible to him, makingit easier for the author to direct the imaginings of his audience (p.161). Both principlesare seriously inadequate when measured against the complexities of fictional generation,but both principles have their place.

Both RP and MBP require us to associated a body of primary fictional truths witheach work of fiction. Neither principle is capable of explaining the source of all of a fic-tion’s fictional truths, then, and we must ask: how are primary truths generated?

4. Generating Primary Truths

Consider the following description of Holmes’ nemesis, Moriarty:

He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature with a phenomenalmathematical faculty. At the age of twenty-one he wrote A Treatise on the Binomial Theorem,which has had a European vogue. On the strength of it he won the mathematical chair at oneof our smaller universities, and had, to all appearances, a most brilliant career before him. (FromThe Final Problem.)

The passage tells us much about Moriarty. We learn that he is an intelligent man whoonce held a university chair in mathematics, for instance. One might think that these areamongst The Final Problem’s primary fictional truths precisely because we are told thatthese things are the case. On this view, a fiction is a story told by a storyteller on a



particular occasion. This raises the question of what goes in when an act of storytellingoccurs. Lewis’s answer is that storytelling is pretense – the author ‘purports to be telling usthe truth about matters whereof he has knowledge’ (cf. Searle). So the idea appears to bethat an author is pretending to be the narrator of the story, so that when Doyle tells theHolmes stories, he is pretending to be Watson providing accurate information aboutHolmes’ cases. So perhaps the primary fictional truths of a story are those things that itsfictional narrator tells us. Since Watson tells us that Moriarty had an excellent education,this proposition will count as a primary fictional truth. But because he doesn’t tell us thatHolmes has a heart, this won’t count as a primary fictional truth.

A simple phenomenon shows that this proposal cannot be right: many stories haveunreliable narrators. Watson clearly believes Holmes to be more intelligent than he fiction-ally is, for instance. But if an unreliable narrator tells us that p is the case, our proposalimplies that p is one of the story’s fictional truths. This is the wrong result: unreliablenarrators get the fictional facts wrong.

Gregory Currie develops an account of truth-in-fiction that might help us solve thisproblem. Currie believes that each story has a fictional author, who is neither the realauthor nor the narrator. Currie’s fictional author is a perfectly reliable ‘fictional character’whom we construct and whom ‘we take to be telling us the story as known fact’ (p.76;cf. Kaplan; Lewis). And because he is a fictional character whom we construct wheninterpreting a novel, he ‘has no private beliefs’ so that ‘his beliefs are not discovered byreading but constructed by it’ (p.80). Interpreting a story is, for Currie, a matter of buildingup a picture of its fictional author’s beliefs. So, developing this proposal, we might holdthat the storyteller is pretending to be the story’s fictional author.

What does the distinction between primary and implied fictional truths amount to onthis account? To answer this question, one might appeal to the distinction between occur-rent beliefs and tacit beliefs (cf. Currie, p.75). Let’s say that p is one of a fictional author’soccurrent beliefs iff she tells that p is the case when she tells the story, and one of hertacit beliefs iff she believes that p is the case but does not tell us that p is the case. Thenone might think that a story’s primary fictional truths are those things that its fictionalauthor occurrently believes, and its implied truths are those that its fictional author tacitlybelieves. The principles of generation discussed in §3 would then be seen as principles forinferring tacit beliefs on the basis of occurrent ones.

Phillips argues that Currie’s account cannot handle fictions which end with thedestruction of the world, since that would leave no-one left to tell the tale. Phillips sug-gests that Currie could either ignore such fictions or make ad hoc changes to accommo-date them. But Currie could classify such fictions as impossible ones, since we’re asked toimagine that there is no-one around to tell the tale, and we’re required to postulate theexistence of a fictional thinker. This appears to what Currie wants to say in the case of‘mindless’ fictions, fictions in which we are told that no thinkers exist (pp.125–6;pp.155–8). (For more discussion of mindless fictions, see Byrne, who develops a furtherapproach to truth-in-fiction based on what the story’s ‘ideal author’ intends her audienceto imagine.)

Another problem relates to the phenomenon of unreliable narrators. Suppose that astory’s narrator, Billy, presents a distorted picture of his own fictional world. We, as read-ers, imagine there is a mismatch between the world of the story and Billy’s statementsabout it. But Currie thinks that this isn’t quite what is going on. We are rather construct-ing a hidden, reliable fictional author, and imagining that they only ‘acting out’ Billy’srole. But if we realize that a narrator is unreliable, it seems wrong, as Matravers puts it,to ‘postulate some shadowy meta-narrator who has all the true beliefs but is choosing not



to reveal himself.’ (See Currie ‘On Being Fictional’ and ‘Unreliability Reconfigured’, fordiscussion.)

A third problem lies in the fact that Currie’s account entails that any fiction has a fic-tional author. Even if we are happy with them in the case of literary fictions (and noteveryone is) it is worth remembering that there seems to be a good sense in which thingstrue in the world of a painting. But it seems implausible to hold that we construct a fic-tional author when we engage with visual fictions. (For more discussion of visual fiction,see Currie §2.9 and Walton §4.4.)

A final problem is that whilst it offers a specification of which fictional truths are a fic-tion’s primary fictional truths, it does not tell us how primary fictional truths are gener-ated. And remember that our question is this: how does a work of fiction generateprimary fictional truths p1... pn? And simply appealing to occurrent beliefs of a fictionalauthor is of no help here, unless we can explain what makes it the case that a fictionalauthor occurrently believes p1... pn.

It’s noticeable in this regard that Currie refrains from specifying substantial principlesthat govern the practice of constructing fictional authors. In constructing fictionalauthors, Currie suggests that we are guided primarily by the text, since this is the onlydirect evidence we have about a fictional author’s beliefs and character traits. We haveother guides too, including the beliefs and character traits of the real author since ‘it isquite likely that the kind of person the fictional author is will depend in some way orother on the kind of person the author is’ (p.78). We may also be guided by the beliefsthat were prominent in the real author’s community, since ‘we usually assume we aredealing with a fictional author of that period and place’ (p.78). The stylistic properties ofa story are also important, since the style in which a story is written helps to express thefictional authors personality (p.122; cf. Robinson).

Ultimately, then, Currie’s account does not provide a substantial answer to the ques-tion of how primary fictional truths are generated. All of the ‘strategies of interpretation’that Currie mentions are defeasible, and he doubts that we can specify, once and for all,principles governing the generation of fictional truths. Perhaps this is as it should be.Walton (p.174) compares primary fictional truths to the foundations of fictional worlds,and implied truths to the superstructures erected on these foundations. But he tells us thatthe pouring of the foundation is no less orderly than the erection of superstructures: ‘themechanics of generation are soggy to the core.’ So whilst the distinction between primaryand implied fictional truths is an intuitive one, it is elusive.

5. Conclusion

Our focus here has been upon accounts of fictional truth that take seriously the idea thatour talk of what is truth-in-a-fiction can be illuminated by reference to fictional worlds.This idea raises two important problems: we want to know what fictional worlds are, andhow a fictional world gets associated with a particular work of fiction. These questionsare difficult and multifaceted, and located at the intersection of areas such as aesthetics,the philosophy of language, metaphysics, critical theory, and formal semantics. It isn’t sur-prising, then, that answering them turns out to be much more difficult than one mighthave imagined it to be. How we should theorize of truth-in-fiction remains an openquestion, but the issues are rich and exciting, and illustrate the ways in which our overallphilosophy fits together. How we should solve generation problem, and how we shouldunderstand the distinction between primary and implied fictional truths, are two particu-lar issues upon which future work on this topic would do well to focus.



Short Biography

Richard Woodward wrote his doctoral thesis on fictionalist accounts of merely possibleentities at the University of Sheffield. He went on to hold two postdoctoral positions atthe University of Leeds, funded respectively by the Analysis Trust and the Centre for Meta-physics and Mind. He then spent a year at the University of Cambridge, before taking upa Juan de la Cierva fellowship at the University of Barcelona. Richard’s research interestsare located in metaphysics (esp. modality; fictionalisms; indeterminacy; metaontology),the philosophy of language (esp. vagueness; conditionals; metasemantics), the philosophyof logic (logical consequence; the semantic paradoxes) and aesthetics (metaphor; fiction;the imagination). His research has been published in journals including Nous, Analysis,Philosophical Studies and Oxford Studies in Metaphysics. For more information, please visithis website: http://sites.google.com/site/richwoodward.

Notes

* Correspondence: LOGOS, Facultat de Filosofia, Universitat de Barcelona, c ⁄ Montalegre 6, Barcelona 08001,Spain. Email: [email protected].

1 Strictly speaking, the problem here doesn’t just arise due to genre conventions, since there are analogous problemsraised by other kinds of convention – conventions associated with particular actors or directors, for instance. SeeWalton (ch.4) for discussion.

Works Cited

Beardsley, Monroe. Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism, 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1980.

Berto, Francesco. ‘Impossible Worlds.’ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 Edition). ed. Edward N.Zalta. 8 Jan. 2011 <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/impossible-worlds/>.

Byrne, Alex. ‘Truth in Fiction: The Story Continued.’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71 (1993): 34–25.Currie, Gregory. The Nature of Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1990.——. ‘Unreliability Refigured: Narrative in Literature and Film.’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1995a):

19–29.——. ‘On Being Fictional.’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55 (1995b): 425–7.Friend, Stacie. ‘Fictional Characters.’ Philosophy Compass 2 (2007): 141–56.Hanley, Richard. ‘As Good As It Gets: Lewis on Truth in Fiction.’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (2004):

112–28.Kaplan, David. ‘Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice.’ Approaches to Natural Language. Ed. J. Hintikka Dordrecht: D

Reidel, 1973. 490–518.Lamarque, Peter and Stein Haugom Olsen. Truth, Fiction and Literature, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1994.Le Poidevin, Robin. ‘Worlds within Worlds? The Paradoxes of Embedded Fiction.’ The British Journal of Aesthetics

35 (1995): 227–38.Levinstein, Ben. ‘Facts, Interpretation and Truth in Fiction.’ The British Journal of Aesthetics 47 (2007): 64–75.Lewis, David. Counterfactuals. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973.——. ‘Truth in Fiction.’American Journal of Philosophy 15 (1978): 37–46. Reprinted with an added postscript in his

Philosophical Papers 1, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. 261-80.Matravers, Derek. ‘Beliefs and Fictional Narrators.’ Analysis 55 (1995): 121–2.Nolan, Daniel. ‘Impossible Worlds: A Modest Approach.’ Notre Dame Journal for Formal Logic 38 (1997): 535–72.——. ‘A consistent reading of Sylvan’s Box.’ The Philosophical Quarterly 67 (2007): 667–73.Pavel, Thomas. Fictional Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.Phillips, John. ‘Truth and Inference in Fiction.’ Philosophical Studies 94 (1999): 273–93.Priest, Graham. ‘Sylvan’s Box: A short story and ten morals.’ Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 38 (1997): 573–

82.Proudfoot, Diane. ‘Possible Worlds Semantics and Fiction.’ Journal of Philosophical Logic 35 (2006): 9–40.Robinson, Jenefer. ‘Style and Personality in the Literary Work.’ Philosophical Review 94 (1985): 147–58.Searle, John. ‘The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse.’ New Literary History 6 (1975): 319–32.



Stalnaker, Robert. ‘A Theory of Conditionals.’ Studies in Logical Theory. Ed. N. Rescher Oxford: Blackwell, 1968.98–112.

Walton, Kendall. Mimesis and Make-Believe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Worlds and Works of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.Woods, John. The Logic of Fiction: A Philosophical Sounding of Deviant Logic. The Hague: Mouton, 1974.Woodward, Richard. ‘The Mechanics of Generation.’ Unpublished manuscript.



Documents

Truth in Fiction