Italian is a well-known exception to the cross-linguistic generalization according to which `belief' predicates are indicative selectors across languages. We newly propose that languages that select the subjunctive with epistemic predicates allow us to see a systematic polysemy between what we call an expressive-`belief' (featuring only a doxastic dimension) and an inquisitive-`belief' (featuring both a doxastic and an epistemic dimension conveying doxastic certainty (in the assertion) and epistemic uncertainty (in the presupposition)). We offer several previously unseen contrasts proving this (...) distinction and offer a new analysis for mood choice cross-linguistically. We argue that the distinction between expressive and inquisitive attitudes is not an idiosyncrasy of non-factive epistemics. We provide novel data, showing that fictional predicates (dream, imagine) license the subjunctive. We explain the indicative/subjunctive alternation by again appealing to epistemic uncertainty and disentangling expressive from inquisitive-fictional meanings. We thus pave the way for a new typology of attitudes relying on this systematic polysemy and propose new criteria to explain mood distribution cross-linguistically. (shrink)

The author of this paper contrasts the account he favors for how fictions can convey knowledge with Green’s views on the topic. On the author’s account, fictions can convey knowledge because fictional works make assertions and other acts such as conjectures, suppositions, or acts of putting forward contents for our consideration; and the mechanism through which they do it is that of speech act indirection, of which conversational implicatures are a particular case. There are two potential points of disagreement (...) with Green in this proposal. First, it requires that assertions can be made indirectly. Second, it requires that verbal fiction-making doesn’t consist merely in “acts of speech”, but in sui generis speech acts. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall examine two types of assertions in literary narrative fiction: direct assertions and those I call literary assertions. Direct assertions put forward propositions on a literal level and function as the author’s assertions even if detached from their original context and applied in so-called ordinary discourse. Literary assertions, in turn, intertwine with the fictional discourse: they may be, for instance, uttered by a fictional character or refer to fictitious objects and yet convey the author’s (...) genuine assertions. The structure of the paper is twofold. The first, descriptive part is a question–answer type of discussion in which I shall introduce general philosophical arguments against assertions in fiction and present counter-arguments to them, paving the road to my account of literary assertions. In the second, argumentative part, in turn, I shall examine the nature of literary assertions, such as their semantic and ‘aspectival’ characteristics and their peculiar illocutionary force as well as the reader’s stance toward them. (shrink)

In the contemporary analytic philosophy of literature and especially literary theory, the paradigmatic way of understanding the beliefs and attitudes expressed in works of literary narrative fiction is to attribute them to an implied author, an entity which the literary critic Wayne C. Booth introduced in his influential study The Rhetoric of Fiction. Roughly put, the implied author is an entity between the actual author and the narrator whose beliefs and attitudes cannot be appropriately ascribed to the actual author. Over (...) the decades, this “the author’s second self,” a construct the actual author is seen to create in her act of writing, has gained an established place in literary theory. In the philosophy of literature, in turn, the implied author has evolved into multiple entities; it has been represented and developed as, for instance, “the postulated author” (Alexander Nehamas), “the fictional author” (Gregory Currie) and “the model author” (Umberto Eco). -/- The aim of this paper is to suggest that although the implied author, and its philosophical counterparts, sheds light on certain types of narratives, it is insufficient in approaches which emphasize the truth-claims conveyed by a work. In what follows, I try to show that, first, from an ontological point of view, actual assertions in literary fiction, if any, have to be attributed to the actual author and, second, that the question of truth-claiming in and by literary fiction is an epistemological matter concerning the actual intentions of the author. -/- . (shrink)

In analytic aesthetics, a popular ‘cognitivist’ line of thought maintains that literary works of fictional kind may ‘imply’ or ‘suggest’ truths. Nevertheless, so-called anti-cognitivists have considered the concepts of implication and suggestion both problematic. For instance, cognitivists’s use of the word ‘implication’ seems to differ from all philosophical conceptions of implication, and ‘suggestion’ is generally left unanalysed in their theories. This paper discusses the role, kinds and conception of implication or suggestion in literature, issues which have received little attention (...) in contemporary literary aesthetics. In the first part, the author shall examine classic views on implication in literature and introduce objections to the views. In the latter part, in turn, the author shall propose a definition of the ‘literary suggestion’ and discuss issues related to its interpretation. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to defend the view according to which all simple fictional sentences are meaningless. If their assertions seem to convey some truth evaluable information, and fictional sentences themselves seem to be true or false, it is because some pragmatic mechanisms are operative, enabling the expression of propositions not encoded in the semantic content of these sentences. According to some theorists, the mechanisms responsible for that process are the same as those responsible for generating (...) conversational implicatures. I argue against that claim and maintain that to comprehend the information conveyed by a fictional assertion, one must determine what kind of fictional assertion it is and only then apply the relevant interpretative rule adjusted to the fictional sentence used in that act. (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)

Fictional names pose a difficult puzzle for semantics. We can truthfully maintain that Frodo is a hobbit, while at the same time admitting that Frodo does not exist. To reconcile this paradox I propose a way to formalize the interpretation of fiction as ‘prescriptions to imagine’ (Walton 1990) within an asymmetric semantic framework in the style of Kamp (1990). In my proposal, fictional statements are analyzed as dynamic updates on an imagination component of the interpreter’s mental state, while (...) plain assertions are updates on a belief component. Proper names – regular, empty, or fictional – are uniformly analyzed as presupposition triggers. The possibility of different attitude components referentially depending on each other is what ultimately allows us to account for the central paradox mentioned above. (shrink)

According to Adams and his colleagues, fictional sentences, i.e. sentences featuring fictional names, lack any truth value. To explain intuitions to the contrary, they refer to the pragmatics of fictional assertions and claim that sincere utterances of those sentences generate some conversational implicatures. They argue that all who take fictional sentences to have a truth value tend to mistake implicatures of assertions of such sentences with their literal content. The aim of the paper is to show (...) that this argument is not convincing.The challenge being that it doesn’t provide any satisfactory explanation as to what is negated in seemingly genuine disagreement cases in which fictional sentences are asserted. Sentential negation usually doesn’t affect (i.e. negate) a proposition which is conversationally implied, especially when it comes to the manner implicature. And, as I argue, an advocate of the pragmatic defence should maintain that this is the kind of conversational implicature that the assertion of fictional sentences generates. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 30.1 (2006) 299-309 [Access article in PDF] Conscious Fiction Mary Clayton Coleman Bard College Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays, by David Lodge; 320 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002, $24.95 boards, $16.95 paper. Fictional Minds, by Alan Palmer; 275 pp. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004, $45.00. Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness, by Dan Lloyd; 357 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: (...) The MIT Press, 2004, $24.95 boards, $14.95 paper. What contributions can fiction make to the representation and investigation of conscious experience? Might fiction help us to develop and advance new theories about the nature of consciousness? And might such theories, in turn, inform our understanding of the process of reading fiction? Three recent volumes—one by English critic and novelist, David Lodge; another by literary theorist, Alan Palmer; and a third by philosopher and (now) novelist, Dan Lloyd—raise these important, genre-bending questions, and they offer challenging if not always convincing answers to them. More generally, these volumes make valuable contributions to the fruitful cross-pollination that has developed between philosophers, scientists, literary theorists, and novelists who are interested in the nature of consciousness.Lodge's new collection of essays is called Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays, and like all of the criticism he has written since the late eighties, this volume is intended for a general audience, not for [End Page 299] literary theorists. The title essay, "Consciousness and the Novel," is a revised version of the Richard Ellman Lectures in Modern Literature that Lodge gave at Emory University in 2001, and the other nine essays, all previously published, cover such topics as Howards End; the novels of Evelyn Waugh; The Letters of Kingsley Amis; Martin Amis's memoir, Experience; and the relationship between literature and criticism. I will focus on "Consciousness and the Novel."Lodge's thesis in this essay is that novels play an essential role in our exploration of the nature of human consciousness. This thesis is certainly true, but it is also entirely banal. Much more interesting is what Lodge says in support of it. He argues that because of the unique representative possibilities of the novel, conscious experiences can be represented more effectively in novels than they can be in scientific writing. Taken literally, as an assertion about the relative representational power of novels and scientific discourse, this is extremely implausible. However, taken more loosely—as an invitation to those of us interested in consciousness to take a closer look at the ways conscious experiences are represented in novels—Lodge's claim is sensible and appealing. I will consider the literal reading of Lodge's claim first and then turn to the looser one.It is undoubtedly true that, as a whole, novelists devote more energy to representing conscious experiences than writers of scientific discourse do. However, science writers can use whatever techniques best serve their aims, including the aim of describing conscious experiences, so there is no reason to think that conscious experiences can, in principle, be represented more effectively in novels than in broadly scientific discourse. Given that Lodge discusses such creative science writers as Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker in the course of his essay, it is surprising and disappointing to find him caricature scientific writing in the following way: "science... is a third-person discourse. The first-person pronoun is not used in scientific papers. If there were any hint of qualia in a scientific paper... it would be edited out" (p. 11). Qualia are the supposedly subjective qualitative aspects of conscious experiences. How the plucked string of a cello sounds to you; how the rotting fish in the garbage smells to you; and how it feels for you to inch down into the smooth, almost-too-hot water of a perfect bubble bath—these are all (supposedly) examples of qualia. Lodge is simply mistaken when he says that there is no hint of qualia in scientific writing. There is no consensus about whether qualia can be explained scientifically. In fact, there is no consensus about whether they exist. [End Page... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Truthful Fiction: New Questions to Old Answers on Philostratus’ Life of ApolloniusJames A. FrancisWithin the past twenty years four extensive works have appeared treating Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana (VA) from various literary, historical, and cultural perspectives. These include E. L. Bowie’s “Apollonius of Tyana: Tradition and Reality,” Maria Dzielska’s Apollo-nius of Tyana in Legend and History, Graham Anderson’s Philostratus: Biography and Belles Lettres in the Third Century (...) A.D., and my own lengthy chapter in Subversive Virtue: Asceticism and Authority in the Second–Century Pagan World.1 The popularity of what has often been considered an “offbeat” text is striking—and largely explicable given concurrent interest in such subjects as the Second Sophistic, the novel, holy men, and asceticism. At this juncture it is thus appropriate to ask: how far have these studies advanced our appreciation and understanding of this text? In answer to this question, I propose first to critique the assumptions and methods of this body of work on VA and, second, to suggest that new insights into the nature of ancient fiction would provide both a resolution to old scholarly impasses and a more fruitful agenda for research.Little is known about the historical Apollonius. He must have been born early in the first century c.e. in Tyana in Cappadocia and died sometime during or after the reign of Nerva (96–98). So little remains of sources prior to VA that the most that can be said further both with certainty and without fear of “contamination” from posthumous representations is that Apollonius appears to have been a wandering ascetic/philosopher/wonderworker of a type common to the eastern part of the early empire.2 Philostratus’ work, which appeared a century after [End Page 419] the death of its hero, is usually thought to have been published sometime after the death of the empress Julia Domna in 217.3 For a biography VA is extraordinarily long, eight books requiring two Loeb volumes. The work begins with a description of the birth of a “greater than Pythagoras” (1.2) and one who would “approach the gods” (1.5), then follows Apollonius’ prodigious youth through his devotion to piety and learning, especially in regard to the god Asclepius. With his early training perfected, Apollonius sets out to discover the source of piety and wisdom among the Brahmans of India, which allows Philostratus to provide his reader with two and one–half books full of travel, adventure, and esoteric philosophy.4 It is at the very beginning of this journey, while in Nineveh (1.19), that Apollonius first meets his lifelong companion and disciple Damis. Philostratus asserts that Damis kept a record of Apollonius’ ideas, discourses, and prophecies and that a descendant of Damis’ family presented these to Julia Domna (1.3). The empress, in turn, gave these “tablets” (deltoi) to Philostratus with the command that he recast them in more appropriate literary style.5 It is these memoirs which, according to Philostratus, form the authoritative basis of his own work.Upon his return from India, Apollonius is acclaimed by the Greek cultural world and becomes actively involved in the affairs of the cities of Asia Minor and Greece (4.2–33), even journeying to Rome to confront Nero (4.35–47), in an episode which presages Apollonius’ climactic [End Page 420] confrontation with Domitian. He journeys throughout the Mediterranean world, discoursing on true philosophy and religion, preaching Greek cultural ideals, prophesying, and performing the occasional miracle. He visits the gymnosophists of Egypt, and reaches the height of his reputation when Vespasian summons him to Alexandria to solicit his advice and blessing upon accession to imperial dignity (5.27–41). In the final two books, Apollonius is arrested and imprisoned by the unworthy son of Vespasian. Brought before Domitian, he refutes the accusations made against him and, as proof of both his innocence and his superior philosophical nature, simply vanishes from sight and materializes at the coast, where the faithful Damis has booked passage back to Greece. The episode allows Philostratus to deliver a reprise of the entire work and a virtual apologia in the form of a formal defense speech... (shrink)

Singular terms used in fictions for fictional characters raise well-known philosophical issues, explored in depth in the literature. But philosophers typically assume that names already in use to refer to “moderatesized specimens of dry goods” cause no special problem when occurring in fictions, behaving there as they ordinarily do in straightforward assertions. In this paper I continue a debate with Stacie Friend, arguing against this for the exceptionalist view that names of real entities in fictional discourse don’t work (...) there as they do in simple-sentence assertions, but rather as fictional names do. (shrink)

ABSTRACT“The first meaning of true and false”, writes Spinoza in a neglected passage of the Metaphysical Thoughts, “seems to have had its origin in stories”. Ideas are true when they “show” us things as they are; they are false when they do not, when they are fictional. In this essay, I argue that what appears at first sight to be a simple assertion of a correspondence theory of truth in fact opens onto broad historical transformations in the nature (...) of meaning that reshaped the very atmosphere of truth: the emergence of a new kind of fictionality, transformations in the sense of logical interpretation, and ultimately transformations in the structures and sources of the natural light, that “clarity” which constitutes for Spinoza, as for Descartes, an indispensable criterion for certainty. (shrink)

Some philosophers of fiction – most famously Jerold Levinson1 - have tried to argue that fictional narrators can never be identified with real authors. This argument relies on the claim that narration involves genuine assertion (not just the pretense of assertion that lacks truthfulness) and that real authors are not in a position to assert anything about beings on the fictional plain - given that they don’t rationally believe in their existence. This debate on the status (...) of narrators depends on the idea that fictional beings and beings in the real worlds reside, as it were, at different levels. The assumption that there is a gap separating the levels of fiction and reality serves as a rationale for the claim that real authors could not possibly be en rapport with the fictional characters that they create (e.g. entertain beliefs about them, etc.). (shrink)

The main aim of this dissertation is to model the different ways in which we use language when we engage with fiction. This main aim subdivides itself into a number of puzzles. We all know that dragons do not exist. Yet, when I read the Harry Potter novels, I do accept the existence of dragons. How do we keep such fictional truths separate from ‘ordinary’ non-fictional truths? What is the difference between Tolkien writing down all sorts of falsities, (...) and a liar who also says all sorts of untrue things? How can it be true that Frodo was born in the Shire while it is also true that he was invented by Tolkien? Given that a fiction such as Pride and Prejudice is not about the actual world, how can I learn things about 19th century etiquette in England by reading this novel? -/- I develop a coherent semantic analysis of these different puzzles: the ‘workspace account’. This theory is an extension of Stalnaker’s famous pragmatic ‘common ground’ framework. In this framework, assertions are modelled as proposals to update the ‘common ground’ (the set of shared assumptions) between conversational interlocutors. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall sketch a preliminary ground for a cognitivist theory of fiction and argue that theories which align fiction-making with (aesthetically valuable) story-telling consider the act of fiction-making too narrowly. As a paradigmatic example of such anti-cognitivist theories, I shall examine Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen’s influential theory of fiction, which suggests that recognizing the author’s fictive and literary intentions manifested in the text would lead to dismissing her aims to make genuine claims and suggestions. I (...) shall illustrate my argument concerning the act of fiction-making by showing that there are sub-genres of fiction, for instance, so-called philosophical fiction, in which the author’s intention to advance genuine points and to invite the reader to entertain the beliefs expressed can reasonably be argued to be as important for understanding the work as is her aim to create an aesthetically valuable and/or entertaining fictional narrative. Leaning on Noël Carroll’s theory of literary thought experiments, I shall suggest that philosophical fictions convey assertions or suggestions in a way similar to philosophers’ fictional thought experiments and are aimed to be understood as such. (shrink)

Fictional truth is commonly analyzed in terms of the speech acts or propositional attitudes of a teller. In this paper, I investigate Lewis’s counterfactual analysis in terms of felicitous narrator assertion, Currie’s analysis in terms of fictional author belief, and Byrne’s analysis in terms of ideal author invitations to make-believe—and find them all lacking. I propose instead an analysis in terms of the revelations of an infelicitous narrator.

The statement “Mr. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth” seems true in Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice (even though it may not actually appear in the text) while the statement “Mr. Darcy is a detective” seems false. One explanation for this intuition is that when we read or talk about fictional stories, we implicitly employ the fictional operator “It is fictional that” or “It is part of the story that.” “It is fictional that Mr. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth” (...) expresses a true proposition while “It is fictional that Mr. Darcy is a detective” does not. Fictive statements can be abbreviated as “In F, P”. Determining what statements are fictionally true in a story requires providing truth conditions for statements of the form “In F, P.” This paper proposes an analysis of truth in fiction and examines the notion of make-believe. (shrink)

In this paper I outline an alternative to hermeneutic fictionalism, an alternative I call indifferentism, with the same advantages as hermeneutic fictionalism with respect to ontological issues but avoiding some of the problems that face fictionalism. The difference between indifferentism and fictionalism is this. The fictionalist about ordinary utterances of a sentence S holds, with more orthodox views, that the speaker in some sense commits herself to the truth of S. It is only that for the fictionalist this is truth (...) in the relevant fiction. According to the indifferentist, by contrast, we are simply non-committal – or indifferent – with respect to some aspects of what is literally said in our assertive utterances. (shrink)

This paper examines the relation between philosophy and literature through an analysis of claims made by Martha Nussbaum regarding the contribution novels can make to moral philosophy. Perhaps her most controversial assertion is that some novels are themselves works of moral philosophy. I contrast Nussbaum’s view with that of Iris Murdoch. I discuss three claims which are fundamental to Nussbaum’s position: the relation between writing style and content; philosophy’s inadequacy in preparing agents for moral life because of its reliance (...) on rules; and the usefulness of the moral work engaged in by readers of novels. The evaluation of these claims requires a discussion of the nature of philosophy. I find that Murdoch and Nussbaum agree on the ability of literature to contribute to moral understanding, but disagree on the issue of what philosophy is. Therefore, they disagree on the question of whether certain works of fiction are also works of philosophy. I argue that the task Nussbaum assigns philosophy is too broad. Through the use of critical and reflective methods, philosophy should examine and sort moral claims. Literary, philosophical and religious texts contribute to moral eduction; keeping them separate helps us appreciate their distinct contributions, as well as respect their distinct aims and methods. Therefore, I conclude that Nussbaum’s inclusion of certain novels in philosophy cannot be sustained. (shrink)

Discussion of Frege’s theory of fiction has tended to focus on the problem of empty names, and has consequently missed the truly problematic aspect of the theory, Frege’s commitment to the view that even fictional sentences that contain no empty names fail to refer. That claim prima facie conflicts with his commitment to the cognitive transparency of sense, and the determination of reference by sense. Resolving this tension compels us to recognize that fiction for Frege is a special kind (...) of force, and that words express a sense capable of picking out a referent only in the presence of the appropriate assertoric force. In effect, Frege’s theory of fiction reveals his commitment to an act-centered rather than an expression-centered semantics. (shrink)

Many who think that some abstracta are artefacts are fictional creationists, asserting that fictional characters are brought about by our activities. Kripke (1973), Salmon (1998, 2002), and Braun (2005) further embrace mythical creationism, claiming that certain entities that figure in false theories, such as phlogiston or Vulcan, are likewise abstracta produced by our intentional activities. I here argue that one may not reasonably take the metaphysical route travelled by the mythical creationist. Even if one holds that fictional (...) characters are artefact one ought not further hold that mythical objects are, too. (shrink)

The essays collected in this volume are all concerned with the connection between fiction and truth. This question is of utmost importance to metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophical logic and epistemology, raising in each of these areas and at their intersections a large number of issues related to creation, existence, reference, identity, modality, belief, assertion, imagination, pretense, etc. All these topics and many more are addressed in this collection, which brings together original essays written from various points of view (...) by philosophers of diverse trends. These essays constitute major contributions to the current debates that the connection between truth and fiction continually enlivens, and give a sense of the directions in which research on this question is heading. Contributors: Fred Adams, Frederick Kroon, Robert Howell, Brendan Murday, Terence Parsons, Graham Priest, Erich Rast, Manuel Rebuschi, Marion Renauld, R.M. Sainsbury, Grant Tavinor, Alberto Voltolini. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:WORKS OF FICTION AND ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS by Gregory Currie ii O peech act theory is remarkably unhelpful in explaining what ficOtion is." So says Kendall Walton.1 My purpose here is to showjust how wrong diis judgment is. Not that I want to endorse all die attempts there have been to connect fiction with the notion of a speech act. Elsewhere I have argued diat the most prominent attempt at (...) such a theory, the one due to John Searle, fails.2 But my complaint is not mat Searle employs the idea of a speech act; rather it is that he employs it in too half-hearted a fashion. The idea of Searle and odiers is diat to write fiction is not to perform a speech act, but rather to pretend to do so. I, on the odier hand, take the view that the writer of fiction engages in an act of speech diat is distinctively fictional, and distinctively different from speech acts such as asserting, requesting, questioning, and so forth. What follows is a much simplified account of this idea.3 Following die program of Strawson and Grice, I believe diat the different kinds of speech acts are to be individuated in terms of the utterer's intentions.4 The intention of the one who asserts is to get a certain kind of response; perhaps to get the audience to believe the proposition asserted.5 The one who commands wants the audience to obey, die requester wants the audience to answer, etc. And in all these cases the utterer intends to get the response partly as a result of the audience's recognition of diat very intention. (This is the familiar Gricean mechanism.) The utterer of fiction, on the odier hand, wants to get the audience to make-believe die proposition uttered.6 Thus we have an act structurally similar to 304 Gregory Currie305 paradigmatic speech acts like asserting, commanding, and requesting (die structural similarity being given by the use in all cases of the Gricean intention ), but differing from diese odiers with respect to die content of the utterer's intention. Let us call such an act a.fictive illocutionary act. Pursuing this line in more detail leads to an intuitively satisfactory taxonomy of speech acts which places the uttering (usually writing) of fiction fully widiin die purview of the theory, rather dian shutting it off to one side as a pseudo-performance, as widi Searle. Is such a theory susceptible to the objections diat Walton brings? Walton is quite right to say (and here I suppose he has Searle in mind) that fiction is not simply the absence ofillocutionary force: "it is something positive, something special" (p. 79). As already indicated, my theory gives a positive account of fiction as a special kind of speech act. But Walton presses the issue further by suggesting that the essence of fiction has nodiing to do with die absence of assertive force. It is possible, he says, "to make an assertion by writing fiction." His point is not merely that fictional stories are sometimes told in order to get across some serious but not explicit point — everyone can agree to that. It is rather diat fictional works contain explicit assertions — e.g., some of Tolstoy's sentences about Napoleon in War and Peace — and that a fiction might contain nothing but assertions. He imagines a genre of historical fiction in which "authors are allowed no liberties with the facts, and in which they are understood to be asserting as fact whatever they write" (p. 80). Let us grant that this is a possibility. What, dien, would distinguish a piece of fiction belonging to this genre from, say, a work of historical scholarship? The answer comes when we see that the same utterance can be used to perform more than one illocutionary act. Thus if I say to someone "I have no money" it may be that I want him both to believe that I have no money and to give me the goods on credit. And in both cases I intend to get die desired responses via his recognition of my intentions. The same utterance can count both as an assertion... (shrink)

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)

Lying and fiction both involve the deliberate production of statements that fail to obey Grice’s first Maxim of Quality (“do not say what you believe to be false”). The question thus arises if we can provide a uniform analysis for fiction and lies. In this chapter I discuss the similarities, but also some fundamental differences between lying and fiction. I argue that there’s little hope for a satisfying account within a traditional truth conditional semantic framework. Rather than immediately moving to (...) a fully pragmatic analysis involving distinct speech acts of fiction-making and lying, I will first explore how far we get with the assumption that both are simply assertions, analyzed in a Stalnakerian framework, i.e. as proposals to update the common ground. (shrink)

I once attended a writing conference for aspiring authors of books for children, at which one speaker enraged the audience by making the pronouncement that, in his view, parents were disqualified to be authors of children's fiction. His reason: parents have to protect themselves from the reality of their children's pain and so wouldn't be able to write about childhood traumas with sufficient awareness and honesty. To this the audience, largely composed of mothers, shot back that parents are especially qualified (...) to write for children, for precisely the opposite reason: they live with children in a relationship of great intimacy and so know children in a way that non-parents 1 do not. But, assuming, as I am inclined to do (as myself a writer of books for children who is also a parent), that the parents are correct here, or at least correct in asserting that they have a distinctive avenue of access to children on which they can draw to enrich the writing of their books, what ethical problems, if any, arise? If children do indeed provide their author-parents with "material," is this material the parents are entitled to use? If the children grow up themselves to be authors some day, will they be able to draw on their own childhoods -- and their relationships with parents and siblings -- to craft their own novels, or memoirs? (Flannery O'Connor is quoted as saying that no author need ever be at a loss for subject matter to write about: "All you need is a childhood.") Can friends write about friends, while still remaining friends and being true to the expectations and obligations of friendship? In this essay I want to highlight -- and then partially seek to dissolve, or resolve -- the particular tensions that arise between the obligations of friendship (or family relationships) and the necessity for an author (of either fiction or memoirs) to draw on her own life -- that is to say, her own relationships with friends and family -- in her work.. (shrink)

John Searle argues that fictions are constituted by mere pretense—by the simulation of representational activities like assertions, without any further representational aim. They are not the result of sui generis, dedicated speech acts of a specific kind, on a par with assertion. The view had earlier many defenders, and still has some. Stefano Predelli enlists considerations derived from Searle in support of his radical fictionalism. This is the view that a sentence of fictional discourse including a prima facie (...) empty fictional name like “Emma Woodhouse” in fact “is not a sentence, and it encodes no proposition whatsoever.” His argument is broadly abductive; he claims that this view affords compelling explanations of features of fictions he finds well-established, among them that fictions without explicit narrators nonetheless have covert ones. Here I take up his arguments, in defense of the dedicated speech act view. I thus address pressing issues about the status of fictional names and the nature and ubiquity of narrators in fictions. (shrink)

The idea that fictions may educate us is an old one, as is the view that they distort the truth and mislead us. While there is a long tradition of passionate assertion in this debate, systematic arguments are a recent development, and the idea of empirically testing is particularly novel. Our aim in this chapter is to provide clarity about what is at stake in this debate, what the options are, and how empirical work does or might bear on (...) its resolution. We distinguish between merely influencing people’s opinions and providing genuine learning, where the latter requires that the source of the change in opinion should be reliable. Other important ideas here are the extent to which authors of fiction may be considered to provide testimony, or something like it, and the possibility of recognizing an unstated purpose in the project of the fictional work. We ask whether fictions can furnish us not merely with ideas but with reasons for believing them, perhaps by constituting thought experiments. We consider whether the focus should be on understanding rather than on knowledge, and whether fictions can inform us about the qualities of another’s experiences. We briefly describe some experimental work of recent decades and suggest that the evidence for learning from fiction is currently meagre. (shrink)

This paper discusses a puzzle, the heart of which is this question: How is it that real individuals can resemble fictional individuals? It seems that any answer given by one who has taken a stand on the ontology of fictional individuals will come with significant drawbacks. An Anti-Realist will have to explain, or explain away, the apparent truth of our positive assertions of resemblance, while a Realist will have to explain how we are to understand resemblance in light (...) of either the further claim that fictional characters are not associated with properties in the same way real individuals are, or that fictional characters are nonexistent or nonactual. I here survey the different Realist and Anti-Realist strategies in hopes that reflection on (mainly the drawbacks of) each will aid those who are curious about ontologies which may include fictionalia. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that fiction is necessarily incomplete, but some recent work postulates the existence of universal fictions—stories according to which everything is true. Building such a story is supposedly straightforward: authors can either assert that everything is true in their story, define a complement function that does the assertoric work for them, or, most compellingly, write a story combining a contradiction with the principle of explosion. The case for universal fictions thus turns on the intuitive priority we assign (...) to the law of non-contradiction. My goal in this paper is to show that our critical and reflective literary practices set constraints on story-telling which preclude universal fictions. I will raise four stumbling blocks for universal fictionalists: the gap between saying and making true, our actual interpretive reactions to story-level contradictions, the criteria we accept for what counts as a story in our literary practices, and the undesirability of the universal fictionalist’s closure principles. (shrink)

This paper delves into Jody Azzouni's ideas on the ontology of fictional characters. Azzouni interestingly maintains that even though fictional characters like Hermione Granger, Sherlock Holmes, and Mickey Mouse do not exist in reality, assertions about them can still be true. However, Azzouni dismisses the necessity of these characters to be ontologically real to validate the truth of sentences concerning them. Instead, Azzouni proposes that truth in speech and thought corresponds with the world, but not necessarily by attributing (...) properties and relations to tangible things in it. This stance opposes the conventional philosophical notion that every true statement must directly represent an aspect of reality. This paper scrutinizes Azzouni’s argument and appreciates his attempt to dissociate ontology from the truth in fictional discourse. Nonetheless, it also recognizes certain gaps in this perspective. The paper endeavors to refine and extend Azzouni's approach by introducing the concept of 'metaphysical explanation', which explains the truth of statements about fictional characters by correlating them to relevant acts of fiction, rather than positing the reality of fictional entities. This extension preserves the essence of Azzouni’s view while addressing its limitations, thus paving the way for a more comprehensive understanding of how we can talk truly about fictional characters without holding that such entities are real in any sense. (shrink)

Narrative theories of personal identity have traditionally taken literary characters as models to better understand how our identities are constituted through the narratives of our lives. However, there have been several recent criticisms of these comparisons, showing that philosophers of personal identity paid no attention to the nature of literary characters, and consequently, these philosopher’s comparisons were under-motivated. In the present article, I rely on a cognitive framework to define literary characters. From that point of view, I assert that it (...) is fruitful to compare ourselves with literary characters to understand the role that the narratives told by others about ourselves play in the constitution of our own personal identities. (shrink)

The orthodox view in analytical film theory is that the difference between fiction and nonfiction is anchored in communicative practice. Whereas the creator of nonfiction can be seen as asserting something as true, the creator of fiction merely asks of its spectators that they imagine the work’s content. This could be labelled an intention-response theory of the difference between fiction and nonfiction. While watching Supersize Me I am as a spectator very much aware of director Morgan Spurlock making an argument (...) about the state of affairs in the real world, and I assess the truth-value of this argument. While watching Avatar I imagine that there is a population of humanoids, the Na’vi, on the planet Pandora, fighting for survival: I assess what is fictional (true in the fiction). -/- However, when it comes to truth claims the difference between the many varieties of fiction and nonfiction is not as straightforward as this. For example, one may argue that the spectator can and commonly does perceive even a prototypical fiction film such as Avatar as laying claims to truth in the sense that she may read the film allegorically, and search for the filmmaker’s agenda. Is not Avatar a critique of Western imperialism, and our non-environmental lifestyle, for example? It is not fully accurate to claim that fiction film does not make truth claims – there are several ways in which fiction films are taken as asserting something that the spectator is asked to believe. -/- Among the many difficult issues this counterargument raises, I will concentrate on only one here, namely on the case of social realism in fiction. Social realism arguably asserts that something is true in our actual world and asks its spectators to believe this – although works of social realism are also classified as fiction. The solution is not to dismiss the basic theory, but to make finer distinctions. I argue that one difference between prototypical nonfiction and social realist fiction is that nonfiction asserts that its contents (characters and events) are true as tokens, e.g., this person experienced this. As fiction, a work of social realism calls for imagining. However, such a work also asserts that its contents are true as types, e.g., these types of persons experience these types of events. -/- I argue that this can explain what the difference is between the truth claims made in the nonfictional The Corner and The Wire as social realist fiction, respectively. Creator David Simon emphasizes that The Wire’s portrayal of Baltimore city life is true, and is to be taken as making assertions about American inner city decay. The background for the show is found in Simons and co-author Ed Burns’s nonfiction book The Corner, written after extensive ethnographic observation of a group of drug dealers in Baltimore. Their intention to assert something as true is reflected in the academic reception of the series, in which it is celebrated for its authenticity and realism. Studying the style, narration and content of The Wire carefully further illustrates how these truth-telling intentions are communicated to the spectator. Its documentary-like style mimics observational nonfiction film, and its cyclical narrative structure, focused on an ensemble cast of characters typically marginalized in mainstream popular culture by virtue of status and ethnicity, is typical of works of social realism. The spectator picks up on these clues and expects a certain accuracy and authenticity in the type representations in The Wire, although she is aware that the depictions of these token characters and these token events are not true, but only to be imagined. -/- In conclusion, the theory presented in this paper may not be able to neatly categorize any given film as either fiction or nonfiction, as some nonfiction films make type claims and some fictions make token claims. I do not claim that the difference between type and token claims is sufficient for categorizing any given work as either fiction or nonfiction. More work is needed in order to categorize and describe the various types of fiction and nonfiction, paying special attention to the particular blend of imagining and belief prescribed by each, as evident in what the creators say about their intentions, textual features of the work itself, and critical reception. However, difficult borderline cases such as social realism in fiction do not collapse the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, as demarcated by the intention-response theory. Rather, such difficult cases should compel us to investigate more closely the communicative intentions and conventions at work. In the case of social realism, it is still correct to say that the spectator merely imagines that these fictional characters experience various events; however, she also perceives a double invitation to believe that these events and experiences are typical, and as such representative, of a larger group about which the work intends to assert something as true. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to consider an answer to the question whether Searle’s idea of sentence in a literary text is still relevant. Understanding literary utterances as specific speech acts, pretended illocutions, is inherent in the process of considering the sentence in a literary text in broader terms. Accordingly, it appears necessary to outline it. Reference to other ideas formulated both in the theory of literature as a speech act [R. Ohmann, S. Levin] as well as in logic, (...) ontology and the theory of literature [J. Pelc, H. Markiewicz, R. Ingarden] will render it possible to adequately place and assess Searle’s theory. Confronting Searle’s theory with the order in a literary work (the relation between the text and the literary work, the status of the presented world, the issue of reference and fiction) will in turn render it possible to determine how empirically adequate Searle’s theory is. (shrink)

A common approach to drawing boundary between fiction and non-fiction is by appeal to the kinds of speech acts performed by authors of works of the respective categories. Searle, for example, takes fiction to be the product of illocutionary pretense of various kinds on the part of authors and non-fiction to be the product of genuine illocutionary action.1 Currie, in contrast, takes fiction to be the product of sui generis fictional illocutionary action on the part of authors and non-fiction (...) to be the product of assertion and other familiar kinds of illocutionary action.2 The central thesis of this paper is that the speech act approach to fictionality is simply a non-starter. Now it is, of course, commonplace to note that approaches of this kind run into difficulty accommodating nonliterary fictions3 and uncomposed or authorless fictions. What will be argued here, however, is that speech acts analyses are inadequate even understood narrowly as accounts of composed literary fiction. And the reason is that they fail to adequately attend to the distinction between composition and storytelling. (shrink)

Ingarden distinguishes four strata making up the structure of the literary work of art: the stratum of word sounds and sound-complexes; the stratum of meaning units; the stratum of represented objectivities (characters, actions, settings, and so forth); and the stratum of schematized aspects (perspectives under which the represented objectivities are given to the reader). It is not only works of literature which manifest this four-fold structure but also certain borderline cases such as newspaper articles, scientific works, biographies, and so forth. (...) Ingarden specifies what is characteristic of a work of literature by asserting that all declarative sentences appearing in the stratum of meaning units of such work possess what he calls a quasi-judgmental character. We discuss here Ingarden’s theory of quasi-judgments and draw out its implication that all works of literature are works of fiction through and through. (shrink)

This volume presents new essays on the propositional imagination by leading researchers. The propositional imagination---the mental capacity we exploit when we imagine that everyone is colour-blind or that Hamlet is a procrastinator---plays an essential role in philosophical theorizing, engaging with fiction, and indeed in everyday life. Yet only recently has there been a systematic attempt to give a cognitive account of the propositional imagination. These thirteen essays, specially written for the volume, capitalize on this recent work, extending the theoretical picture (...) of the imagination and exploring the philosophical implications of cognitive accounts of the imagination. The book also investigates broader philosophical issues surrounding the propositional imagination. The first section addresses the nature of the imagination, its role in emotion production, and its sophistication manifestation in childhood. The essays in the second section focus on the nature of pretence and how pretence is implicated in adult communication. The third section addresses the problem of 'imaginative resistance', the striking fact that when we encounter morally repugnant assertions in fiction, we seem to resist imagining them and accepting them as fictionally true. In the final section, contributors explore the relation between imagining, conceiving, and judgements of possibility and impossibility. The Architecture of the Imagination will be an essential resource for the growing number of philosophers and psychologists studying the nature of the imagination and on its role in philosophy, aesthetics, and everyday life. (shrink)

“Fearless, illuminating” criticism from a New York Times–bestselling author and legendary teacher, “proving... that true art is moral and not trivial” (Los Angeles Times). Novelist John Gardner’s thesis in On Moral Fiction is simple: “True art is by its nature moral.” It is also an audacious statement, as Gardner asserts an inherent value in life and in art. Since the book’s first publication, the passion behind Gardner’s assertion has both provoked and inspired readers. In examining the work of his (...) peers, Gardner analyzes what has gone wrong, in his view, in modern art and literature, and how shortcomings in artistic criticism have contributed to the problem. He develops his argument by showing how artists and critics can reintroduce morality and substance to their work to improve society and cultivate our morality. On Moral Fiction is an essential read in which Gardner presents his thoughtfully developed criteria for the elements he believes are essential to art and its creation. This ebook features an illustrated biography of John Gardner, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Gardner family and the University of Rochester Archives. (shrink)

Can literary fictions convey significant philosophical views, understood in terms of propositional knowledge? This study addresses the philosophical value of literature by examining how literary works impart philosophy truth and knowledge and to what extent the works should be approached as communications of their authors. Beginning with theories of fiction, it examines the case against the prevailing ‘pretence’ and ‘make-believe’ theories of fiction hostile to propositional theories of literary truth. Tackling further arguments against the cognitive function and value of literature, (...) this study illustrates how literary works can contribute to knowledge by making assertions and suggestions and by providing hypotheses for the reader to assess. Through clear analysis of the concept of the author, the role of the authorial intention and the different approaches to the ‘meaning’ of a literary work, this study provides an historical survey to the cognitivist—anti-cognitivist dispute, introducing contemporary trends in the discussion before presenting a novel approach to recognizing the cognitive function of literature. An important contribution to philosophical studies of literature and knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the claim that the act of writing a work of fiction consists in the performance of a sui generis speech act, and propose a dynamic treatment for acts of fiction-making. Recently, speech act theories of fiction have become targets of the uniformity argument. According to it, in order to account for the myriad of speech acts present in works of fiction, speech act theories of fiction need to propose a similar amount of fiction-related illocutionary forces. (...) When uttered in the same context, these illocutionary forces give rise to the same relations raised by their non-fictional counterparts. While not a knock-down argument, this warrants an explanation. In order to defend speech act theories of fiction, I argue that the claim that speech act theories of fiction need more than one fiction-related sui generis illocutionary force is misguided and rests on an erroneous account of the content of an act of fiction-making. I take that the content of an act of fiction-making is more akin to a speech report than to a regular assertion. Following, I propose a dynamic treatment to the speech act of fiction-making. Concluding, I explore some related topics in order to distinguish my proposal from pretenseapproaches to fictional discourse. (shrink)

Andrei Pop argues that Frege's distinction between sense and reference, concept and object, and asserted and unasserted thought provides a superior account of the overlapping categories of fiction and art. This book also tackles case studies in Fregean art history and theory.

Socrates is an flusive figure, Sarah Kofman asserts, and he is necessarily so since he did not write or directly state his beliefs. Kofman suggests that Socrates' avowal of ignorance was meant to be ironic. Later philosophers who interpreted his text invariably resisted the profoundly ironic character of his way of life and diverged widely in their interpretations of him. Kofman focuses especially on the views of Plato, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.

JOHN YOLTON HAS CONTRIBUTED A Locke Dictionary as a recent addition to his many works on the life and philosophy of John Locke. In the entries on “abstraction” and on “abstract or general ideas ” in that text, Yolton makes some rather bold assertions. He argues that, despite Berkeley’s attack on Locke’s theory of abstract or general ideas, Locke’s theory is in fact quite similar to Berkeley’s own account. In the course of this discussion, Yolton concludes that, for Locke, abstract (...) or general ideas are fictions and that they exist only as “modes of mind.” In this paper I discuss the Lockean theory of abstraction and explain the meaning Locke gives to the term “fiction,” showing that, for Locke, to call an idea a fiction is by no means to say that the idea exists only as a mode of mind. I also show why Locke’s theory of abstraction cannot be understood to be similar to Berkeley’s account in the way Yolton suggests, focusing on the central point of Berkeley’s criticisms of Locke and emphasizing the essential difference between the two accounts. (shrink)

This book is about politics, political theory, and political philosophy. Although these disciplines are often conflated because they interact, they actually are distinct. Political theory is part of political science, whereas political philosophy is a hybrid of political theory and philosophy. The former discipline is descriptive and explanatory, whereas the latter is prescriptive--to the point that it is often called "normative theory." It is in fact the evaluative study of political societies. Whereas political theorists describe and explain politics, political philosophers (...) examine it critically and venture to suggest improvements and, on occasion, radically different social futures. Political philosophers propose scenarios and dreams where political scientists offer snapshots of existing polities. While these disciplines are distinct, Mario Bunge asserts that they must inform each other. Political philosophy is not yet a well-defined field: it hovers between political theory and utopian fantasizing. Few, if any earlier thinkers could have anticipated any of the most pressing political issues of our time, such as the need to stop global warming, reduce nuclear armaments, stop the rise of inequality between individuals and nations, and fight authoritarianism, particularly when it comes disguised as democracy or as socialism. Not even more recent social thinkers had much to say about such topical issues as environmental degradation, gender and race discriminations, participative democracy, nationalism, imperialism, the North-South divide, resource wars, the industrial-military complex, or the connections between poverty and environmental degradation, and between inequality and bad health. Beyond ideological divergences, most political philosophers have been nearly unanimous in their indifference to the plight of the Third World. Bunge does not share that indifference. He also believes that political philosophers should pay more attention to numbers, such as the standard index of income inequality and the more comprehensive United Nations human development index for the various nations. It is pointless to write about redistributive policies unless we have some of idea of current wealth distribution. This is, in short a modern treatise of inherited concerns. (shrink)

Some of us have suggested that what fiction makers do is offer us things to imagine, that this is what is distinctive of fiction and what distinguishes it from narrative-based but assertive activities such as journalism or history. Some of us hold, further, that it is the maker's intention which confers fictional status. Many, I think, feel the intuitive appeal of this idea at the same time as they sense looming problems for any proposal about fiction's nature based straightforwardly (...) on the identification of fiction with the to-be-imagined. I formulate a very weak version of the proposal which is not vulnerable to some objections recently presented. My formulation is in terms of supervenience. But while this version is weak, it is also quite precise, and its precision brings into view certain other problems which have not so far been attended to. To the extent that these problems are serious, the prospects for an intentional theory of fiction look, I am sorry to say, poor; the version susceptible to the objections is weak, and anything weaker still but not so susceptible could hardly be thought of as a theory of fiction, though it might supplement such a theory. (shrink)

I have three aims in this essay. I want to offer an example of an interdisciplinary historical inquiry combining literary criticism with the relatively new field of critical legal studies. I intend to use this historical inquiry to argue that the ambiguity of literary texts might better be understood in terms of an era’s social contradictions rather than in terms of the inherent qualities of literary language or rhetoric and, conversely, that a text’s ambiguity can help us expose the contradictions (...) masked by an era’s dominant ideology. I try to prove my assertion by applying my method to Herman Melville’s three most famous short works—“Benito Cereno,” “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and Bill Budd, Sailor—works dealing with the law and lawyers and widely acknowledged as ambiguous.1 I will base my critical inquiry into these stories on Melville’s relationship with his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, who, while sitting as the chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts from 1830 to 1860, wrote some of the most important opinions in what Roscoe Pound has called “the formative era of American law.”2Before I get started, I should clarify what this study does not entail. By using Shaw and his legal decisions in conjunction with Melville’s fiction, I am not conducting a positivistic influence study. My method will not depend on the positivist assumption that Shaw’s legal opinions can be used to illuminate Melville’s texts only when his direct knowledge of Shaw’s opinions can be proved. Nor will I limit myself to a traditional psychoanalytic reading: my emphasis is on political and social issues, and too often these issues are deflected by translating them into psychological ones. At the same time, I recognize that critics concerned with political and social issues too often neglect questions raised by a writer’s individual situation. I compare Shaw to Melville not to reduce Melville’s politics to psychology but to prevent a political study from neglecting the political implications of psychology, to remind us—as the title of Fredric Jameson’s book The Political Unconscious reminds us—that psychological questions always have political implications. 1. See Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno,” “Bartleby,” and Billy Budd, Sailor, “Billy Budd, Sailor” and Other Stories, ed. Harold Beaver ; all further references to these works will be included in the text.2. See Roscoe Pound, The Formative Era of American Law . For discussions of Melville and Lemuel Shaw, see Charles Roberts Anderson, Melville in the South Seas, Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Literature, no. 138 , pp. 432-33; Charles H. Foster, “Something in Emblems: A Reinterpretation of Moby-Dick,” New England Quarterly 34 : 3-35; Robert L. Gale, “Bartleby—Melville’s Father-in-Law,” Annali sezione Germanica, Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli 5 : 57-72; Keith Huntress, “ ‘Guinea” of White-Jacket and Chief Justice Shaw,” American Literature 43 : 639-41; Carolyn L. Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race and Violence in Melville’s America , pp. 9-11 and 40; John Stark, “Melville, Lemuel Shaw, and ‘Bartleby,’ “ in Bartleby, the Inscrutable: A Collection of Comentary on Herman Melville’s Tale “Bartleby the Scrivener,” ed. M. Thomas Inge , all further references to this work, abbreviated JA, will be included in the text. Brook Thomas teaches English and American literature at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. He is the author of James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: A Book of Many Happy Returns and is at work on a study of the relations between law and literature in antebellum America. (shrink)

We argue that Russell’s treatment of propositions containing non-existent denotations is the prelude of a strategy for discerning the predictive content of any proposition with descriptions (and incomplete symbols), insofar as its indeterminacy is classifiable as a possible extension. We argue, further, that Russell’s theory of propositional functions is dedicated to explaining the discernibility of hypothetical propositions, through representing (what we call) the superextension of assertoric modal propositions. The indeterminacy of the truth of hypothetical propositions is thus paired with a (...) second- order classification condition, expressing its conjectural content as the projected scope of instantiation of a propositional function; which in turn is the superextension of a modal predicate. Russell’s theory is his non-pragmatic answer to the problem of assertability in unstable and uncertain conditions. It involves a sophisticated thesis about the discernibility of complex contents, such as those represented by analogical and approximate denotations (descriptions, fictions, etc.), which classify more than one possibility of instantiation in different modal and intensional contexts. We will conclude this article by testing the assumption that Russell’s theory favors a coherentist theory, seeing that as it admits assertability conditions that are super-mapped in a system, or that derive from different orders of referential layers. (shrink)