## 1. The Nature of Fiction




In whatever way we characterize the fiction/non-fiction distinction,
the distinction is widely recognized as important. We care which
category a work belongs to. We read Lord Macaulay's *The
History of England* (1848) to learn about the overthrow of James
II and its aftermath, and criticize Macaulay for departures from fact
or for bias: these detract from its value as a work of non-fiction.
Historical novels such as Tolstoy's *War and Peace*
(1865-1867) or Hilary Mantel's *Wolf Hall* (2009)
also display bias and they depart in numerous ways from fact, but the
bias and inaccuracies don't lessen their value as works of
fiction. And when a writer passes off a work as a work of non-fiction,
deliberately hiding the fact that much of its content was made up, we
see that as fraudulent. (There are numerous examples. One famous case
is "Jimmy's World", written for the Washington Post
in 1980 by journalist Janet Cooke; the article won her a Pulitzer
Prize that she later returned.)




Not everyone agrees that the distinction matters. Some have argued
that all discourse is on a par, that there is no writing that is per
se fictional or non-fictional. According to Stanley Fish, for example,




> 
> 
> 
> when we communicate, it is because we are parties to a set of
> discourse agreements which are in effect decisions as to what can be
> stipulated as a fact. It is these decisions and the agreement to abide
> by them, rather than the availability of substance, that make it
> possible for us to refer, whether we are novelists or reporters for
> the New York Times. (Fish 1980: 242) 
> 
> 
> 



Other writers make much of the fact that even non-fiction writers
select and structure what they write about and how they write about
it. But even if we grant all this, we don't need to succumb to
the kind of skeptical position such authors argue for. It remains the
case that fiction writers by and large accept a distinction between
the real world and the fictional worlds they generate. The generation
of such worlds, which often contain individuals, objects, and even
kinds of objects, that are very different from those in the real
world, is not simply a consequence of broad principles about how we
always stipulate and select and structure how we see the world. In
short, even those inclined to a kind of constructivist anti-realist
metaphysics on the basis of the sorts of arguments Fish appeals to
might nonetheless still admit a robust fiction/non-fiction
distinction.


### 1.1 Semantic and Linguistic Accounts



But what might such a distinction look like? What makes a
representation like a written text a work of *fiction*?
Dictionaries often contrast fiction with fact or reality, so one
tempting thought is that something is a fiction just if it is false,
or contains falsehoods: a purely semantic characterization of
"fiction". This seems to have been Nelson Goodman's
view: "Literal falsity distinguishes fiction from true
report" (Goodman 1978: 124). As a number of authors have pointed
out, however,
*being false* may be one meaning of the word
"fiction", but it is not the only meaning, and it is not
the meaning at play when we nowadays call something a work of fiction
(Lamarque and Olsen 1994; Cohn 1999). If it were, then any work that
contains mistakes, say a physics text book, would count as a work of
fiction.



(This is not to say that there is no connection between these two
meanings of "fiction". Works of fiction typically contain
numerous falsehoods, and some have even speculated that the negative
meaning of fiction as falsehood may have "delayed the lexical
move of calling novels 'fiction' to a time when this genre
had become a well-established, highly respected literary form"
[Cohn 1999: 3].)



Even if fiction in the intended sense can't be defined in terms
of the notion of falsity alone, it might be thought that more
complicated semantic accounts will have a greater chance of success.
Thus, Cohn herself thought that fiction in the intended sense was
"a literary nonreferential narrative" (1999: 17), where
being "nonreferential" means that the work *need*
not, and does not *exclusively*, refer to the real world
outside the text, and that any references when it does "are not
bound to accuracy" (1999: 15). 



But such an account inherits one problem that also affects the simpler
view of fiction as falsehood. Not only is nonreferentiality, like
falsity, not sufficient for a text to be a work of fiction (consider a
history of science text that contains a description of a failed
scientific theory like phlogiston theory); it is also
not *necessary*. Works of fiction may be wholly true, and in
that sense refer exclusively to the real world outside the text. Imagine
a work of historical fiction written about real persons, where,
unbeknownst to the author, the parts that the author thought she was
making up capture exactly what really happened. That wouldn't
make the work a work of non-fiction (Currie 1990: 9). In addition, the
idea that references to the real world outside the text are not bound
to accuracy surely needs to be weakened. Historical novels depend on
their being more or less right about a large part of their historical
setting. 



Problems such as these have made semantic accounts of fiction
relatively unpopular with philosophers. The same is true of approaches
that look for textual differences between works of fiction and
non-fiction. There seems to be no feature of style or syntax that
marks off a work as fictional rather than non-fictional. For any
proposed feature, say the use of footnotes or indices in works of
non-fiction or the use of the imperfect tense in fiction (cf. Recanati
2000), one can find works from the other category that simply mimic
the feature. Certain literary scholars and linguists have suggested an
exception should be made for free indirect discourse, a literary
device whereby a character's first-person take on events is
presented via third-person narration (as in this line from
*Emma* by Jane Austen, a master of this literary device:
"He was afraid they should have a very bad drive. He was afraid
poor Isabella would not like it. And there would be poor Emma in the
carriage behind" [Austen 1815 [1841: 114]). These theorists
think free indirect discourse is peculiar to fiction (see especially
Banfield 1982). But there is substantial evidence to show that other
writing may also display this feature (see Fludernik 1993); even
Hemingway used it in his early journalistic writings (Blinova 2012),
and it is prominent in works of New Journalism, such as Truman
Capote's *In Cold Blood* (1966). At best, the appearance
of free indirect discourse *suggests* that the work is a work
of fiction; it doesn't imply it (Friend 2012). And the use of
free indirect discourse is scarcely *necessary* for being a
work of fiction. Many works show no sign of it.


### 1.2 Fiction as Making Up Stories



A more promising approach to understanding the fiction/non-fiction
distinction focuses not on semantic notions or stylistic features, but
on the author's inventiveness in producing a text, whatever its
semantic or stylistic character. The best known such account is Harry
Deutsch's "fiction as making up stories" (Deutsch
2000, 2013). Deutsch insists "we cannot be left without a sharp
distinction between fact and fiction" (2000: 149) even if we
think, as Goodman did, that facts are themselves fabricated. Crucial
to the notion of fiction, he thinks, is that, unlike fact, it is the
product of creative, imaginative activity on the author's part,
activity in which the author makes something up "out of whole
cloth". His own distinctive take on this view explains the kind
of fabrication involved in fiction-making as the author's
stipulatively ascribing properties to individuals, but where these
properties match properties possessed by pre-existing objects from the
"fictional plenitude", a domain that contains not only
every conceivable object and event but also an enormous range of
impossibilities (Deutsch 2000: 155-6). 



Deutsch is particularly critical of a contrasting view, to be
discussed later, according to which what is necessary and sufficient
for a work to be a work of fiction is specified in terms of
imaginative activity on the part of the work's readers rather
than its author (Deutsch 2013: 366ff). But focusing on the author
seems to have its own problems. First, it suggests that works like
Cooke's "Jimmy's World" and James Frey's
*A Million Little Pieces* (2003), both of which were
substantially made up although passed off as works of non-fiction,
thereby count as works of fiction, contrary to the usual
classification of such works (see Friend 2012; Friend agrees that we
might pejoratively *call* *A Million Little Pieces*
"just one long fiction", but sees this as an example of
the ambiguity of the word "fiction"). In response, Deutsch
insists that, whatever our judgment about Frey's *A Million
Little Pieces*, the case of Cooke is clear: 



> 
> 
> [she] exercised her authorial imagination. She did everything an
> author of fiction would normally do. ... If there ever was a case
> of fiction masquerading as fact, this is it. (Deutsch 2013: 369) 
> 
> 
> 



A second point, to be discussed below, is that numerous works of
non-fiction involve creative interpolations on the part of the author.
If so, Deutsch's approach faces the danger that all such works
should be classified as part fiction, part non-fiction. But Deutsch
denies that on such a "fiction as making up stories"
approach the inclusion of salient fictitious elements is sufficient to
make something a work of fiction (2013: 368)--it all depends on
the level of imaginative activity exhibited by the work.


### 1.3 Fiction as Authorial Pretense




Deutsch's view is not the only one to highlight the central role
of the author in the definition of fictionality. A number of authors
think that fiction-making involves a special kind of speech act on the
part of the author, one that differs sharply from assertion (see
especially Currie 1990, to which we return below). Unlike
Deutsch's account, such views have the capacity to classify
works like "Jimmy's World" as non-fiction on the
grounds that authors assert the content of such works; even if much of
this content is made up, authors intend readers to take it as factual.
Just how to characterize a special speech act of fiction-making or
story-telling is no easy matter, however. Take Nicholas
Wolterstorff's view that story-tellers engage in
"presenting or offering for consideration" propositions
for audiences to reflect on (Wolterstorff 1980). But even scientists
do this when putting forward speculative theories, so it is hard to
see how this sets fiction apart from non-fiction. John Searle has in
fact argued that attempts to define a special illocutionary act of
fiction-making are doomed to failure, since they entail that fictional
discourse must differ in meaning from ordinary assertoric discourse
(Searle 1975: 323-4; Predelli 2019 offers a sympathetic
reconstruction of the argument). He proposes that we should instead
understand fiction-making in terms of pretense: authors
*pretend* to assert what they are saying (1975: 324). More
generally, 



> 
> 
> the author of a work of fiction pretends to perform a series of
> illocutionary acts, normally of the representative type [such as
> assertion], (1975: 325) 
> 
> 
> 



but without any attempt to deceive. For Searle, therefore, 



> 
> 
> the identifying criterion for whether or not a text is a work of
> fiction must of necessity lie in the illocutionary intentions of the
> author 
> 
> 
> 



(that is, their presence in the case of non-fiction writing, their
absence in the case of fiction-making), and not in features of the
text (1975: 325). 




Searle's appeal to the notion of pretense has been very
influential, but as stated the account seems inadequate in a number of
ways. As he himself admits, many works of fiction contain claims that
seem to be put forward as serious assertions (he cites the opening
lines of Tolstoy's *Anna Karenina*, 1877), and so his
theory at best defines what makes a *fragment* of a work
fictional, not what makes a *work* fictional (Searle 1975:
331-2).
(Searle's account shares this feature with a number of other
accounts; we look at ways in which theorists have responded below.)
Furthermore, not only is pretense not necessary for something to be
(part of) a work of fiction, it is also not sufficient: one can
pretend to engage in an illocutionary act for all kinds of reasons
other than the fact that one is writing fiction--one might just
be engaging in mimicry or verbal irony, for example (Currie 1990: 17).




Despite the latter problem, pretense has played, and continues to
play, a large role in the way philosophers understand fiction. Kripke,
for example, claimed as early as his 1973 John Locke Lectures that
writing fiction involved pretense, a view he then used to argue
against attempts to use fiction in the defense of a descriptivist
theory of reference for names (Kripke 2013: 23). David Lewis too saw
story-telling as pretense: in his seminal work on truth in fiction he
claimed that "the story-teller [pretends] to be telling the
truth about matters whereof he has knowledge" (Lewis 1978 [1983:
266]). Neither
claimed to be *defining* fiction in terms of pretense, however.
Lewis, for example, acknowledges that sometimes one pretends in order
to deceive, unlike the story-teller (Lewis 1987 [1983: 266]).


### 1.4 Fiction as Make-Believe



The problems faced by pretense accounts of fiction that only consider
what authors do have made some philosophers look instead at the role
that readers play. Indeed, approaches that look at the role of readers
(or, more generally, consumers) of fiction have now become standard in
the literature. Kendall Walton's version of such a view appeared
in his ground-breaking *Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations
of the Representational Arts* (Walton 1990). Walton focuses on the
way a text can be used as a resource in games of make-believe in which
participants pretend, imagine, or make believe that the world is as
the text represents it as being. (Walton's view, it should be
stressed, applies to representational entities in general: dolls,
globs of mud, paintings, sculptures, and so on, not just literary
texts.) Just as children use tree stumps as props in a game of
make-believe in which the stumps count as bears, so a community of
readers can use a text as a prop in a game of make-believe in which
the text is treated as a record of events, situations, conversations,
etc. Any text whose function is to serve as a prop in a game of
make-believe, thereby prescribing imaginings about its content, counts
as a work of fiction for Walton. (Function is determined by a number
of factors such as author's intentions and views about how the
work can be appropriately used; Walton 1990: 91.) If readers let their
imaginings be directed in this way, they are then participating in a
game of make-believe that is *authorized* by the work.



For Walton, then, what is necessary for a text to count as a work of
fiction is that it is supposed to serve as a prop in a game of
make-believe, one that requires readers of the text to make believe
its content. Note that this does not exclude the author from having a
similar attitude to the work. Authors too may imagine or make believe
or pretend that what they are saying is true (cf. Searle), but what is
crucial to a work of fiction is that this is a requirement on
*consumers* of fiction. (For this reason, day-dreaming out loud
does not count as fiction.) Walton argues that this make-believe view
prevents most biographies, textbooks, newspaper articles, and the
like, from being works of fiction, since it is 



> 
> 
> not [their] function, as such, to serve as props in games of
> make-believe. They are used to claim truth for certain propositions
> rather than to make propositions fictional. (1990: 70) 
> 
> 
> 



But there is a complication. Walton intends the account to provide a
sufficient condition for being a work of fiction, not just a necessary
condition. In proposing this, he self-consciously departs from our
ordinary, intuitive concept of fiction, which he sees as only "a
rough everyday classification" (Walton 1990: 72) in urgent need
of refinement (among other problems, the ordinary concept of fiction
is liable to treat certain works, for example, didactic dialogues like
Berkeley's *Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous*
(1713), as both non-fiction and fiction; Walton 1990: 72). But that
means that his new way of construing the fiction/non-fiction
distinction does not align with the usual way of understanding it,
since many works of apparent non-fiction--many newspaper
articles, biographies, real-life adventure tales, and so on--are
written in a way that is designed to engage readers' imagination
and so satisfy the conditions for being works of fiction. Thus, he
writes



> 
> 
> Some histories are written in such a vivid, novelistic style that they
> almost inevitably induce the reader to imagine what is said,
> regardless of whether or not he believes it. (Indeed, this may be true
> of Prescott's *History of the Conquest of Peru*.) If we
> think of the work as prescribing such a reaction, it serves as a prop
> in a game of make-believe. (Walton 1990: 71) 
> 
> 
> 



Similarly, there is 



> 
> 
> no doubt that [Norman Mailer's *The Executioner's
> Song*--a novelistic retelling of the execution of Gary
> Gilmore] ... has the function of prescribing imaginings (Walton
> 1990: 80) 
> 
> 
> 



and so counts as fiction for Walton. Walton even thinks that any
metaphor is a fiction since a metaphor prescribes imagining (Walton
1993), and that objects that were not produced to function in this
way, such as naturally produced cracks in a rock, could be treated as
props that prompt imaginings, and so could turn out to be a work of
fiction (Walton 1990: 87).


### 1.5 Speech-Act Accounts



For many critics (e.g., Currie 1990: 36; Lamarque & Olsen 1994,
48; Davies 2001: 264; Stock 2017) these are unwanted consequences for
an account of fiction. Excitingly told histories are still histories
and so should be classified as non-fiction; and the fact that cracks
in a rock might prompt imaginings just shows that the rock could be
*treated* as a work of fiction, not that it could turn out
to *be* a work of fiction. These critics worry that
Walton's conception of fiction is far broader than the
traditional one (to mark this point, Friend 2008, 152, distinguishes
what she calls "walt-fiction" from fiction in the usual
sense), and insist that it is the latter notion that needs analysis or
explication. In the case of this traditional notion, they think we
should let the author's *intentions* determine
fictionality, just as Searle proposed, but, unlike Searle, they
propose that this be done by focusing on how the author intends an
audience to respond to a text rather than on the author's own
attitude to the text. One influential proposal of this type, defended
by Greg Currie in *The Nature of Fiction* (1990), holds that
authors engage in a special illocutionary act of fictive utterance,
which Currie then proceeds to describe in terms of Gricean reflexive
intentions (cf. Grice 1957). In a fictive utterance, the author
produces a text with fictive intent, in the sense that he 



> 
> 
> intends that we make-believe the text (or rather its constituent
> propositions) and he intends to get us to do this by means of our
> recognition of that very intention. (Currie 1990: 30) 
> 
> 
> 



We can then say that 



> 
> 
> a work is fiction iff (a) it is the product of a fictive intent and
> (b) if the work is true, then it is at most accidentally true. (1990:
> 46) 
> 
> 
> 



The second clause is added because Currie thinks that truth alone does
not disqualify a text from being fiction; an author may write a story
that, quite by chance, ends up correctly describing actual events. But
if it is no accident that the work is true--if the work is
somehow the result of the represented facts being the way they are
(for example, by the author recording these facts from memory, even
repressed memory)--then the work is non-fiction rather than
fiction (Currie 1990: 47).




Currie is aware that as it stands this account needs finessing, since
many fictional works have a basis in actual fact. But for the most
part Currie has remained true to this fictive utterance account of
fiction. Later work changes some of the scaffolding of the theory, but
not its essential structure. For example, Currie (1995a) introduces a
broader philosophical conception of
imagination--simulation--that covers both mental imagery and
propositional imagining; he further suggests that "readers of
fiction simulate the state of a hypothetical reader of fact"
(Currie 1997: 144), and in doing so may also simulate the mental
states of the characters with whom they (as simulators of the
hypothetical reader of fact) are emotionally engaged. (Matravers 2014:
ch. 3 criticizes the view that such simulation is distinctive of
fiction.) 




Other authors offer variations on Currie's fictive utterance
account. Lamarque and Olsen, for example, think that in the case of
fiction an author presents sentences, aiming 



> 
> 
> for the audience to make-believe (imagine or pretend) that the
> standard speech act commitments associated with the sentences are
> operative even while knowing they are not. (Lamarque & Olsen 1994:
> 43) 
> 
> 
> 



To attend to the sentences in this way is to adopt the *fictive
stance* towards them, and it is an author's invitation that
readers adopt the fictive stance that makes something a work of
fiction rather than non-fiction. Readers who adopt the fictive stance
towards the sentences can infer neither that the author believes them
nor that they are true.



Lamarque and Olsen thus retain Currie's view that there is a
negative association between awareness that certain sentences are true
and their status as fiction. But as we already saw when discussing
semantic accounts of fictionality and, later, Searle's pretense
account, any such negative association highlights a further problem.
Some works of fiction, perhaps most, make authorial pronouncements
that are taken by both author and readers to be true (historical
novels are an obvious example). Works of fiction often contain true
descriptions of their geographical, historical, political, and social
setting, while works that belong to particular genres require true
descriptions of this kind if they are to be successful instances of
the genres (consider the setting of historical fiction like
Vidal's *Lincoln* (1984) or social-political fiction like
Sinclair's *The Jungle* (1906), or the descriptions of
the practice of policing and forensic science in
Cornwell's *Scarpetta* series, for example; see also Gibson
2007: ch. 5; Matravers 2014). So there are parts of many, if not most,
works of fiction that are non-accidentally true, and so the works
should not straightforwardly count as fiction according to the
criteria set out by Currie and by Lamarque and Olsen. 



Those in the fictive utterance tradition have responded to this
problem in different ways. One response is to invoke a further
distinction between the fictionality of statements contained in the
work and the fictionality of the work itself, taking the former as
fundamental. Currie, for example, claims that his account is primarily
an account of the fictionality of statements contained in a work, with
the fictionality of the work depending on the status of such
statements "in some perhaps irremediably vague way"
(Currie 1990: 49). Most fictional works, Currie thinks, are "a
patchwork of fiction-making and assertion" (1990: 48-9).
(For criticisms of such a "patchwork" theory of fiction,
see, for example Friend 2008, 2011; Stock 2011, 2017.)



The second kind of response to this issue is more holistic. David
Davies, for example, thinks that the primary focus of the
fiction/non-fiction divide should be on narratives rather than whole
works (works might contain a series of narratives). What makes a
narrative fictional or non-fictional are the author's purposes
and the constraints she works under (Davies 2007). If, for example,
she feels herself bound by the "fidelity constraint"
(roughly, that one should only mention events that one believes to
have occurred, in the order in which they occurred), she is writing
non-fiction, whereas if she is motivated by some more general purpose
in story-telling such as the desire to entertain her audience she is
writing fiction. As a result, even a narrative that tracks actual
events can be fiction if the author's story-telling purposes
override the fidelity constraint (Davies 2007: 47). (For criticism of
Davies's narrative view of fiction, see Friend 2008, Stock
2017.)



By contrast, Kathleen Stock's account of fiction allows that
fictions may include propositions that are put forward simply because
they are important truths, and so material that should be believed and
not just imagined (e.g., the comments on slavery and Christianity in
Beecher Stowe's *Uncle Tom's Cabin* (1851)). For
Stock, such beliefs are not outliers, for she thinks that even if a
person imagines something that she also *believes*, she will
(be disposed to) conjoin this in thought with other propositions that
she does *not* believe (Stock 2011; 2017, 147). Stock then
defines a fiction as, roughly, as a collection of fictive utterances
in Currie's sense that are subject to the condition that where
there is more than one fictive utterance present, the author must also
intend the reader or hearer to imagine them conjunctively. A
fictional *work*, she thinks, is different. It is something
usually carefully constructed and usually either written down for
posterity, or performed publicly. By contrast, a fiction may be
uttered only once, in a brief conversation with a single interlocutor
(Stock 2017: 169-74).



These accounts all take authorial intention to be essential to being a
fiction. For Walton, by contrast, the emphasis on authorial intention
mistakes what are at best *consequences* of the author's
having constructed a fiction for an essential feature of fiction
(Walton 1990: 87). He thinks that this is borne out by the fact that




> 
> 
> [o]ne may well read a story or contemplate a picture (which is a
> fiction) without wondering which fictional truths the author or artist
> meant to generate. (1990: 88) 
> 
> 
> 



All this confirms, he thinks, that the basic concept of a fiction is
best thought of as attaching to objects whose function is to serve as
a prop of a certain sort in games of make-believe rather than to
illocutionary actions (1990: 87). (For further discussion of
Walton's arguments on this point, see Stock 2017: ch. 7.)


### 1.6 Fiction, Pretense, and Cognitive Psychology



In the previous subsection we considered views, beginning with
Currie's, that take awareness that certain sentences are true to
count against their status as fiction, or that look to more holistic
features of the text to show why this awareness does not compromise
their status as fiction. These views
all hold that merely appealing to the imagination does not capture
what is essential to fiction; they attempt in different ways to
identify what else is necessary. In the next section we look at some
influential new challenges to these views, but in the present section
we adopt a different orientation. In order to narrow down the sense in
which fiction on the ordinary, intuitive understanding prompts
imaginings we describe some work on make-believe or pretense in the
cognitive sciences. As we will see, there are some clear points of
contact between this work and some of the views considered above. 



Consider in particular the popular "multiple models"
theory according to which an agent engaging in make-believe entertains
a representational model--the *pretend* (or, more
broadly, *imaginary*) *model*--that is different
from the representational model she normally
uses--the *reality model*. The reality model in this
set-up represents how the agent believes things actually unfold, while
the pretend model represents how things unfold in an imaginary world,
a world of make-believe (Perner 1991). Nothing, however, prevents the
pretend model from also storing actual beliefs, as may happen with
fictions that import representations of the real world. The point is
simply that once they are stored in the pretend model, those beliefs
have to be evaluated with respect to the imaginary rather than the
real world. The pretend model thus becomes part of an offline
reasoning mechanism in which beliefs are disconnected from actions
occurring in the real world. In particular, such beliefs don't
lead to the sort of actions that would result if they were part of an
online reasoning mechanism, which is what the reality model is
(Nichols & Stich 2003).



But there is a problem with seeing the availability of a two-model
account as a sufficient condition for the relevant kind of
make-believe. There are people suffering from various clinical
syndromes who also activate distinct models of this kind, prompting
them to exhibit incoherent patterns of behavior. Thus, consider people
affected by the Capgras syndrome. While saying that a close relative
has been replaced by an impostor, they also behave in a friendly
manner towards this "impostor". Such people are perhaps
best interpreted as people whose odd beliefs are not integrated into a
single belief system (Young 2000).



A friend of the two-model account may say that people affected in this
way are to be classified differently from those engaging with fiction:
their "imaginary" beliefs are not quarantined from their
"real" ones. But note that the simultaneous yet distinct
activation of the imaginary and reality models also accounts for the
cognitive situation of agents who are somehow
dissociated--subjects who experience a world of their own and
still do not lose their grip on the real world. Sleepwalkers are a
clear case. A sleepwalker may mobilize both the reality model,
allowing her to avoid obstacles while walking, and an imaginary model,
in which she represents the world she is dreaming about. Despite this,
she is not engaged in make-believe (Meini & Voltolini 2010).



One way of answering this challenge is to invoke Leslie's
identification of fiction with metarepresentation (Leslie 1987). On
this view, the required quarantining of imaginary beliefs involves a
metarepresentational level. The difference between a subject who
engages in make-believe and a dissociated subject lies in the fact
that the former *acknowledges* that the representations
entertained in the pretend model are not to be lumped together with
the representations that she entertains in the reality model.
Following a line of thought that can already be found in Vaihinger,
who originally drew a connection between fiction and awareness (1911
[1924]: 80, 98-9), Lillard writes: 



> 
> 
> a pretender must be aware of the actual situation and the nonactual,
> represented one, or else (s)he is mistaken, not pretending. (2001:
> 497) 
> 
> 
> 



Proponents of such a view construe this kind of awareness as a
second-order representation that operates on first-order
representations; it involves a recognition that, insofar as the
imaginary representations are stored in the pretend model, it
can't be inferred that they represent the real world. Note that
Currie himself moves in this direction when arguing that
metarepresenting is required for pretending, as a way of combining his
intentionalist account of fiction with simulationist accounts (Currie
1998).



Some critics, however, think this idea is too demanding, that it
presupposes too intellectualist a view of pretending and hence of
fiction (see Perner 1991: 19-20, 35). For in order to have a
metarepresentation of a representation, one surely needs to represent
it to oneself *as* a representation, and young children in
particular do not possess a notion of representation (1991:
19-20, 35). Others think this criticism presupposes a disputable
conceptualist account of representing, and hence also of
metarepresenting (Meini & Voltolini 2010). Perner himself
recognizes that merely simultaneously entertaining distinct
representations in different models is not sufficient for
make-believe, and suggests that the two models have to be integrated
into a single all-encompassing model which nests both the pretend and
the reality models. It is far from clear, however, that this account
is any less intellectualist than the metarepresentational one that
Perner criticizes, given the way it appeals to the idea of
nesting. Leslie had already pointed out that we invoke a nesting of
this kind when, from outside of a fiction *F* and typically from
the perspective of reality, we speak of *F* itself when we say
"In fiction *F*,
*p*" (Leslie 1987). Doing so, however, requires possession
of a notion that is even more conceptually demanding than the notion
of representation, namely the notion of fiction itself, so this appeal
to nesting should not be seen as unproblematic (Meini & Voltolini
2010: 50). 


### 1.7 New Challenges



The various accounts of fiction discussed so far in this section
disagree on numerous points, and, although pretense or
imagination-based accounts are probably the most widely supported,
each one faces challenges and there is no consensus as to which
version is correct. But perhaps the most radical challenge to all of
these attempts to specify the nature of fiction has come from
theorists who think that the enterprise of finding necessary and
sufficient conditions for what it takes to be a work of fiction should
be abandoned. Such theorists think that there are genuine borderline
cases and cases that are, in some sense, admixtures of fiction and
non-fiction, and that such cases show that it is wrong to try to
capture the notion of fiction in terms of necessary and sufficient
conditions. (Note that the main target for this challenge are
theorists who think that there are intuitive concepts of fiction and
non-fiction that are worth articulating in the first place. As we saw
earlier, Walton's approach is different: he urges replacement of
the traditional distinction.)



While Walton proposes replacing the intuitive fiction/non-fiction
distinction, Derek Matravers urges another path (Matravers 2014): the
philosophy of fiction should simply stop caring about this distinction
and shift its focus to the distinction between
"confrontations" (situations that involve our immediate
environment, and thereby afford the possibility of action) and
"representations" (situations represented to us as
happening at other times or in other places, thereby denying us the
possibility of action). On the surface, it is hard to see this way of
cashing out representations as particularly illuminating, since it
puts fictional representations in the same basket as some scientific
representations (2014: 53) and even historical representations. But
Matravers discerns one significant difference among representations:
where they lie on the "thin" to "thick"
continuum. Thin representations (say, a physics text) merely aim to
pass on information and do not stimulate the imagination, while thick
representations, such as exciting histories and vivid novels, do. But
Matravers insists that nothing in the way we engage with thick
representations separates fiction from non-fiction, and that this is
amply borne out by empirical studies of text-processing by
psychologists (see, for example, Green & Brock 2000):



> 
> 
> The experience of reading de Quincey's "The Revolt of the
> Tartars" is the same whether we believe it is non-fictional,
> believe it is fictional, or (as is most likely) we are ignorant of
> whether it is non-fictional or fictional. (2014: 78)
> 
> 
> 



Because of this, Matravers finds 



> 
> 
> [t]he traditional distinction, between representations that are
> fiction and representations that are non-fiction, ... entirely
> unhelpful. (2014: 47)
> 
> 
> 



A number of commentators, however, have denied that such empirical
studies really do have the implications that Matravers sees in them.
For Lamarque, for example, the modes of reading of literary critics
and historians involve different normative practices that determine
what questions are asked and where attention is directed (Lamarque
2016). And Stacie Friend argues that even ordinary readers approach
works of fiction and non-fiction with different expectations (Friend
forthcoming). 



Friend agrees, however, that our engagement with works of fiction and
non-fiction alike involves a combination of imagining and belief. Some
works of non-fiction contain striking invented and hypothetical
elements (e.g., Tacitus's *Histories*, which contains
made-up battle scenes; *Dutch* (1999), Edmund Morris's
authorized biography of Ronald Reagan, in which Morris inserts himself
into the story as the fictional narrator; and works of history that
actively countenance the implications of certain counterfactuals). At
the same time, facts about what actually happened are the dominant
focus of some works of fiction such as Vidal's *Narratives of
Empire* series. Friend thinks that such cases undermine accounts
of the fiction/non-fiction distinction by theorists like Currie,
Lamarque & Olsen, Davies, and Stock (see Friend 2008, 2011, 2012,
forthcoming). 



To deal with these and other hard cases, Friend recommends against
trying to find necessary and sufficient conditions for being a work of
fiction, although not by relinquishing the emphasis on *works*
in favor of more basic units like fictional statements and narratives.
Instead, fiction and non-fiction should be regarded as very broad
genres in which particular works are embedded, where a genre is a way
of classifying representations that guides appreciation. Borrowing
from ideas in Walton's "Categories of Art" (Walton
1970), Friend argues that classifying a work as a work of fiction or
non-fiction depends on a range of features. A feature is standard for
a genre if possession of the feature tends to place the work in that
genre; contra-standard if possession tends to exclude the work from
the genre. (Features are *variable* if works can have or lack
them without this affecting membership in the genre, such as the
number of chapters a work contains). Thus, containing made-up material
counts as standard for the genre of fiction but contra-standard for
non-fiction, while being faithful to the facts counts as standard for
non-fiction but contra-standard for fiction. (As Friend notes, such a
classification may itself change over time; the kind of inventive
embellishment found in Tacitus's *Histories*, for
example, was once regarded as standard for historical non-fiction, but
is now regarded as contra-standard [Friend 2012: 192-3].)




A crucial claim of the ensuing genre theory of fiction/non-fiction is
that having contra-standard features for a genre does not simply
exclude a work from that genre. Capote's *In Cold Blood*,
for example, is a striking piece of non-fiction precisely because it
possesses certain features that were, at the time of its writing,
contra-standard for non-fiction. What explains the fact that we
nonetheless class it as non-fiction has much to do with other features
of the work, including the reliance we place on authorial intention:
Capote took himself to be writing a kind of literary journalism
(Friend 2012: 194), just as Tacitus took himself to be writing history
after the fashion of his time. (Friend is somewhat unclear about the
content of such intentions, however. Presumably they can't be
understood as intentions to write a certain kind of fiction or
non-fiction, on pain of circularity, although it is hard to see how
else to construe them.)



For Friend, then, the classification of a work as fiction or
non-fiction may depend heavily on context: a weighing up of various
standard and contra-standard features that is strongly, but
defeasibly, influenced by authorial intentions. This opens the view to
the objection that the classification is too subjective for the
distinction to count as theoretically important (Voltolini 2016).
Friend's answer is that placement of a work in either the genre
of fiction or non-fiction directs our attention to different aspects
of the work, and even influences us to adopt a specific reading
strategy appropriate to works in the genre (Friend 2012: 202ff.;
Friend forthcoming)--a very different view from that of
Matravers, who discerned no interesting way in which our engagement
with fictional representation differs from our engagement with
non-fictional representations. 



Those who favor other accounts have not been quiet in their opposition
to Friend's proposal. Both Currie and Davies, for example, have
defended their versions of the fictive utterance theory by offering
more nuanced accounts of the way the fictional status of a work
depends on the fictional status of its parts (Currie 2014; Davies
2015). Thus, Currie argues that a work's fictional status
supervenes on its intentional profile, which specifies the
communicative intentions behind the utterances that produce the work
(Currie 2014). One consequence of this view is that if a work uses as
much imaginative reconstruction and invention of events as a
*fictional* work does (on our current understanding of this
notion), then all else being equal we should also count the first work
as fiction. Currie takes this to imply that Tacitus's
*Annals* and *Histories*, with their many made-up
elements, count as fiction rather than non-fiction--despite the
fact that Tacitus took himself to be writing non-fiction history (for
objections, see Friend 2012). By contrast, Davies again emphasizes
that the fictional status of a work depends on the fictional
narrative(s) found in a work, which he now construes as the fictive
content readers are asked to make-believe of a real setting: if the
narrative serves to comment on something *asserted* in the work
then it is a work of non-fiction; if what is asserted serves to
comment on the narrative the work is fiction (Davies 2015, esp. 54).
On this criterion, he thinks, Tacitus wrote non-fiction. 



Stock agrees. On her account, if a work contains utterances that are
not fictive in her sense (that is, if they express propositions that
readers are meant to believe but that they are not supposed to conjoin
in thought with other propositions they are merely meant to
make-believe), the work counts as non-fiction. It follows, she thinks,
that we should count works like Tacitus's *Histories* and
*Annals* and Morris's *Dutch* as non-fictional
patchworks of the fictive and non-fictive (Stock 2017: 160). Manuel
Garcia-Carpintero (2013) offers another way of keeping a tight
fiction/non-fiction distinction. He defends a version of
Currie's view that fiction-making prescribes imagining, but
instead of appealing to the psychological attitudes of those engaged
in fictive acts, as Currie does, he understands such prescriptions in
terms of constitutive rules that specify the commitments someone
incurs when engaging in fiction-making, as opposed to the constitutive
rules that are involved in assertive acts. On this normative view,
claims that are asserted as true can be part of a work of fiction,
since, given the author's purposes, one and the same fictive
utterance may be subject to both the norm of fiction-making and the
norm of assertion, as a performance of a direct as well as of an
indirect speech act as it were (2013: 356f.). But
Garcia-Carpintero accepts that works of non-fiction can include
invitations to imagine as well, and he thinks that works like
Tacitus's *Histories* and *Annals*
straightforwardly count as a patchwork of fact and fiction. (For
discussion, see Stock 2017: 161-3.)


## 2. Truth in Fiction



Whatever the right theory of the nature of fiction, (nearly) everyone
agrees that there are paradigm cases of works of fiction. Many of the
sentences in such works are, of course, not true since in paradigm
cases of fiction much of the content is made up. For example, the
sentence 



> 
> 
> It was the end of November, and Holmes and I sat, upon a raw and foggy
> night, on either side of a blazing fire in our sitting-room in Baker
> Street. (*The Hound of the Baskervilles*: ch. 15) 
> 
> 
> 



is not true at any real context of utterance since there is no
Sherlock Holmes, and no Dr. Watson to utter the sentence. More
generally, sentences that purport to describe the world depicted in a
work of fiction are often false (or at least not true) since they
misdescribe the world as it actually is; "Holmes was a detective
living at 221B Baker Street, London", for example. Still, this
sentence *sounds* true, whereas a sentence like "Holmes
was a short-order cook living in Paris" sounds false. One way of
capturing this point is to say that fictional sentences are elliptic
for sentences with an "in the story" prefix (Lewis 1978
[1983]): what is true is that in *The Hound of the
Baskervilles* Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes sat reminiscing in
their sitting-room in Baker Street on a raw and foggy night in
November, just as it is true that in *The Hound of the
Baskervilles* (and virtually all the Holmes stories) Holmes was a
detective living at 221B Baker Street, London. 



This shifts the problem of how to understand the kind of truth that
sentences have in a work of fiction to the actual truth of sentences
of the form "In work of
fiction *F*, *ph*". How should we understand such
prefixed sentences? It can't simply be that a such a sentence is
true if and only if *ph* is explicitly stated in the text
of *F*. For one thing, some things are not true in a work despite
being explicitly stated--the internal narrator of a story may be
highly unreliable (for example Charles Kinbote in
Nabokov's *Pale Fire* [1962]). In addition, to identify
something as an (obvious) truth of fiction we often have to rely on
various (uncontentious) interpretive moves that belong to the
pragmatics rather than semantics of language - what is stated
may go beyond what the words explicitly say (this is so even in the
case of a paradigm fictional truth like "Holmes lived at 221B
Baker Street"; see Hanley 2004).



Put the problem of the unreliable narrator aside for now, and assume
that normal practices of interpretation apply when identifying the
fictional truths stated in a work of fiction. Philosophers of fiction
have been mainly interested in the second problem: that of
characterizing what it is for a sentence to be true in a work despite
not being stated in the work. A first attempt might focus on the
background of actual fact that is available to readers of the work:
given that London is the capital of Great Britain, the fact that the
Holmes stories say that Holmes lived in London suggests that it is
also true in the Holmes stories that Holmes lived in the capital of
Great Britain. The simplest way to capture this thought would be to
say that it is true in a fiction that *p* iff *p* is a
logical consequence of the set of propositions that are represented as
true in a story, combined with the set of all actual truths. But this
suggestion won't do. Many actual truths are inconsistent with
what is stated in a story, and so can't be drawn upon in this
way to yield claims about what is true in the story. (It
is *actually* true, for example, that London did not have as
inhabitant a famous detective called "Holmes" who lived at
221B Baker St. But it is not true in the Holmes stories that Holmes
lived in a city that did not have as inhabitant a famous detective
called "Holmes" who lived at 221B Baker St.) We need to
filter out the background that we can legitimately draw upon when we
determine what is true in a work.


### 2.1 Truth in Fiction as Truth in the Worlds of Fiction



David Lewis provided the classic discussion of this issue in his
"Truth in Fiction" (first published in 1978, reprinted
with postscripts in 1983). His approach has two core ideas. The first
is that we should adopt a pretense view of fiction. A fiction is a
story told by a particular person on a particular occasion, and to
tell a story is typically to pretend that one is relating an account
of things that really did happen. The second core idea is the one
mentioned above: stories are related against a background of (known)
facts and beliefs, thereby ensuring that there is more to truth in
fiction than is stated in stories. The novelty of Lewis's
approach is the way he understands this background and its impact in
terms of the machinery of possible worlds and the semantics of
counterfactuals. To put the point in technical jargon, Lewis treats
in-the-fiction operators as special *intensional*
operators.



Lewis offers two main analyses. On Analysis 1, the background against
which a story is told is just actuality, appropriately filtered to
remove whatever is at odds with the story. Truth in a fiction is just
what *would* have been true had the fiction been told as known
fact. In terms of Lewis's possible world analysis of
counterfactuals (Lewis 1973), this can be rendered as:


* **Analysis 1** A sentence of the form
"In fiction *F*, *ph*" is non-vacuously true
if and only if some world where *F* is told as known fact and
*ph* is true differs less from our actual world, on balance,
than does any world where *F* is told as known fact and
*ph* is not true. (1978 [1983: 270])



Analysis 1 easily captures the fact that it is true in the Holmes
stories that Holmes had a liver, for example (despite no mention being
made of this in the stories). It also captures the fact that the
fictional truth of many claims is simply left indeterminate (while it
is true in the stories that Holmes had a liver, for example, it is not
true in the stories that he had an average-sized liver). But the
analysis also seems to catch too much (Lewis 1978 [1983]; Currie 1990;
Phillips 1999; Walton 1990; Wolterstorff 1980). Given a story
*S*, take any truth *p* that has no bearing on the events
described in *S*. On Lewis's Analysis 1 it will then be
true in *S* that *p*, whether or not anyone believes that
*p*. If, for example, Napoleon had exactly 100,001 hairs on his
head at the battle of Austerlitz, it will then be true in the Holmes
stories that he did.



If the unknown proposition *p* has implications for the events in
the story, another problem arises. Take the example mentioned by
Lewis. Suppose, as many think, that the swamp adder in "The
Adventure of the Speckled Band" (1892) was intended by Doyle to
be a Russell's viper (Lewis 1978 [1983: 271]; but cf. Byrne
1993: 25, note 5). In the story, Holmes concludes that the murder
victim in the story was killed by the snake's climbing down a
fake bell-rope. The Russell's viper is a constrictor, however,
so it cannot physically climb ropes, and hence
 Analysis 1
 suggests that it is true in "The Speckled Band" that
Holmes bungled (Lewis 1978 [1983: 271]). But this would clearly be the
wrong conclusion to draw: what is true in the story is that Holmes was
right. The fact that Conan Doyle was ignorant of a little known
biological fact should not affect what is true in the Holmes
stories.



This example suggests that it is (often) better to conceive the
background in epistemic terms. (But maybe not always; as Lewis points
out, there is a contested critical tradition that uses psychoanalytic
views to interpret literary texts, as in the claim that Hamlet had an
Oedipus Complex. Such a claim is probably best understood in terms of
 Analysis 1.)
 Lewis's Analysis 2 provides such an epistemic orientation. It
treats "background" as beliefs that are overt in the
author's community, where 



> 
> 
> a belief [is] overt for a community at a time iff more or less
> everyone shares it, more or less everyone thinks that more or less
> everyone shares it, and so on. (1978 [1983: 272]) 
> 
> 
> 



Take the collective belief worlds to be the worlds where all the overt
beliefs are true. Truth in fiction is what would have been true in the
collective belief worlds, had the fiction been told as known fact:


* **Analysis 2** A sentence of the form
"In fiction *F*, *ph*" is non-vacuously true
iff whenever *w* is one of the collective belief worlds of the
community of origin of *F*, then some world where *F* is
told as known fact and *ph* is true differs less from
*w*, on balance, than does any world where *F* is told as
known fact and *ph* is not true. (1978 [1983: 273])



Analysis 2 rules out the case of the hairs on Napoleon's head
since there is no number *h* such that people collectively
believed that Napoleon had *h* hairs at the battle of Austerlitz
(at best they accepted very rough upper and lower bounds that allowed
for 100,001 hairs but also considerably more or fewer). And the
analysis rules out the case of the Speckled Band since the reception
of the story by its readers showed that the relevant collective belief worlds are all worlds in which there is nothing to prevent swamp adders from climbing
ropes. (In this case, the belief probably did not exist before people
began reading the story, but was acquired as a result of trusting the
author.) But the analysis also has some strikingly counterintuitive
consequences. Take a typical Victorian novel that nowhere takes a
stance on whether God exists. On
 Analysis 2
 it will nonetheless be true in this novel that God exists, simply
because Victorian England was overtly theistic so that the collective
belief worlds are all worlds in which God exists (Walton 1990).
Similarly, it will be true in many works that there are ghosts, and
that women are markedly inferior to men.




In the later postscripts to his paper, Lewis considers some needed
revisions to his two accounts. He conjectures, for example, that a
story's explicit content and background may need supplementing
by "carry-over" of truths from other fictions if we are to
capture what is true in a story (Lewis 1978 [1983]; Hanley 2004). But
the most widely discussed revision that Lewis mentions, and the one
that has generated most debate, concerns the case of impossible
fictions--fictions that cannot be told as known fact in any
possible world. We turn to this debate below (Sec 2.4) after reviewing
two other influential accounts of truth in fiction.




Some final remarks about the notion of worlds that features in
Lewis's account and the many accounts inspired by his approach.
Lewis's worlds are possible worlds. He himself construes these
as maximal connected spatio-temporal objects (Lewis 1986), although
many others take them to be abstract entities of some kind (see the
entry on
 possible worlds.) 
 One can accept Lewis's account of
truth in fiction while preferring one of these alternative
metaphysical conceptions of possible worlds. The important point is
that the notion of a possible world, no matter how conceived, is a
piece of modal machinery that has many other roles to play in
metaphysics. It should not be confused with the notion of a fictional
world, appealed to by philosophers and non-philosophers alike.
Fictional worlds present themselves as realms, created by authors and
generally incomplete and sometimes inconsistent, that are more or less
distant from the real world but despite the distance are at least
partially accessible from the real world (thus, we can know about
Holmes and admire him from a distance, even if we can't help him
solve crimes). But although we often talk about fiction in terms of
fictional worlds, making literal sense of such talk is fraught with
difficulty (Pavel 1986 makes the attempt; Walton 1978 is a salutary
reminder of what can go wrong), and philosophers have tended to take
such talk with a grain of salt, construing fictional worlds instead as
sets of fictional truths (Walton 1978; Walton 1990: 64-7) or as sets
of worlds rather than single worlds (Lewis 1983: 270; Ross 1979:
49-54). Some have used the notion of a fictional world construed in
some such way to provide a kind of linguistic counterpart to the
mental reality and imaginary models discussed in 1.6, by appealing to
the idea of a context of utterance or interpretation. (For more on
the relevant notion of context, see the entry on 
 theories of meaning.)
 On such a view, saying that a sentence is aimed at correctly
representing a fictional world means that the sentence is to be
interpreted relative to a context that contains the fictional world
rather than the actual world as its world parameter. Consider a
sentence like "Othello was jealous". As uttered in a
context that contains the actual world as its world parameter, this
sentence is not true since "Othello" refers to nothing
there. But the very same sentence is true in a fictional context that
contains the fictional world of Othello as its world parameter, for at
that world "Othello" refers to the jealous Venetian
soldier of Shakespeare's play. This account arguably also
accommodates the problem of how fiction can contain real truths, as in
historical fiction. In such cases, one and the same sentence, say
"Napoleon invaded Russia", can be both actually and
fictionally true, keeping the very same content in both the real and
the fictional context. 



This kind of account yields an alternative construal of in-the-fiction
operators. Rather than being a special kind of intensional operator,
as it is on Lewis's account, an in-the-fiction operator turns
out to be a context-shifting operator. Take someone's utterance
of the sentence 'In Shakespeare's Othello, Othello was
jealous'. The operator is context-shifting to the extent that
the context relative to which we are to interpret the embedded
sentence 'Othello is jealous' is different from the
context of utterance of the sentence as a whole, since the latter is
centered on the actual world, rather than the fictional world of
Othello. (See Recanati 2000, Predelli 2005, Bonomi 2008. Predelli
2008 offers a variation on such accounts.) 


### 2.2 Truth in Fiction as Make-Believe Truth



Walton's account of truth in fiction rests on his distinctive
account of a work of fiction as a prop in a game of make-believe,
where the function of the prop is to prescribe imaginings. Unlike
Lewis, he doesn't place stress on the idea that fictional
statements are implicitly prefixed with an in-the-fiction operator. For Walton, a proposition is
fictional--true in the fiction--just in case participants in
such a game of make-believe are supposed to imagine it as true (Walton
1990; for some recent reservations about this account, see Walton
2013, 2015). There are two types of fictional truth: the
*primary* fictional truths are evident in the work itself,
while the *implied* fictional truths are generated from the
primary ones. The problem of how to generate implied fictional truths
from primary fictional truths is essentially the problem that Lewis
faced, and the principles that Walton describes--the Reality
Principle and the Mutual Belief Principle--are close to Analysis
 1
 and
 2,
 but without the commitment to the machinery of possible worlds.
Letting \(p\_1\)... \(p\_n\) be the primary fictional truths of
fiction *F*, the Reality Principle holds that it is true in
*F* that *q* iff had \(p\_1\)... \(p\_n\) been the case,
*q* would have been the case, while the Mutual Belief Principle
holds that it is true in *F* that *q* iff the following was
mutually and openly believed in the society from which *F*
originated: had \(p\_1\)... \(p\_n\) been the case, *q* would
have been the case. 



Walton acknowledges that each principle has counterintuitive
consequences (see Walton 1990: ch. 4 on the contrast and interplay
between the two principles). Lewis himself noted this in the case of
the Reality Principle, but as we remarked above the same seems true of
the Mutual Belief Principle. In addition, neither principle seems able
to handle cases in which genre conventions generate fictional truths.
Consider an otherwise typical zombie story that never explicitly says
that zombies move by stumbling forward rather than by running
(Woodward 2011: 163). Because this way of moving is a conventional
feature of zombies in the zombie story genre, it will be true in the
story that zombies don't run, even though the question "Do
zombies run?" is probably not answerable by appeal to either
principle (Woodward 2011: 163; Lewis 1978 [1983: 274]; Walton 1990:
161-9). Walton himself thinks that the moral to be drawn from
such difficulties is that these principles are no more than rules of
thumb, and that there is no single, general principle that governs the
practice of critics and appreciators of fiction (1990: 139). A rather
different approach to these problems is taken by Stacie Friend, who
argues that problems ensue if we insist on *principles*, taken
as ways of inferring implied fictional truths from primary fictional
truths. Instead of defending the Reality *Principle*, she
defends what she calls the Reality *Assumption*, the thesis
that everything that is really true is also fictionally the case,
unless it is excluded by the work (Friend 2017).



There is a further concern about the apparatus Walton employs, one
that also affects Lewis's account. To apply the above rules of
generation, we need to be able to determine a work's
*primary* fictional truths, those that are evident in the work
or, in Lewis's terms, those that are part of what is told as
"known fact". These present no trouble if we have a
reliable narrator, but what if the narrator is unreliable? With Lewis
as his focus, Currie imagines a situation in which the Holmes stories
are written in a "tone of understatement and irony", so
that Holmes appears only somewhat successful even though in the story
he is "spectacularly successful" (Currie 1990: 70). Given
that the worlds to be considered are worlds in which the story is told
as known fact, the worry is that, for Lewis, Holmes is only somewhat
successful in the stories. Walton's answer to this kind of
problem is to allow free rein to the kind of pragmatic interpretive
moves that are used in ordinary communicative exchanges (see Walton
1990: ch. 4). If there is evidence of understatement and irony, we
should make allowances for that when determining what is true. Lewis
has a broadly similar answer. In a footnote Lewis points out that
there are all kinds of ways of telling stories. Storytellers may
present themselves as quite unreliable (mad, naive, etc.), or as
translators of some work rather than the person who wrote it, and so
on. He adds that 



> 
> 
> in these exceptional cases also, the thing to do is to consider those
> worlds where the act of story-telling really is whatever it purports
> to be--ravings, reliable translation of a reliable source, or
> whatever--at our world. (Lewis 1978 [1983: 266 fn. 7]) 
> 
> 
> 



Hence if the author pretends to be recounting a true story in a tone
of understatement and irony, then the worlds of the story are those
worlds in which the teller really does tell a true story in a tone of
understatement and irony, not worlds where his actual words are to be
taken literally (cf. Hanley 2004).


### 2.3 Truth in Fiction and the Role of "Authors"



Currie's answer to the problem of the unreliable narrator is
quite different. His account of what is true in fiction eschews any
appeal to worlds in favor and appeal to the beliefs of someone he
calls the *fictional author*:


* C "In
the fiction *F*, *ph*" is
true iff it is reasonable for the informed reader to infer that the
fictional author of *F* believes that *ph* (Currie 1990:
80).



Here the fictional author is "that fictional character
constructed within our make-believe whom we take to be telling us the
story as known fact" (Currie 1990: 76), and the "informed
reader" is a reader who knows the relevant facts about the
community in which the work was written (1990: 97). The view also
offers a distinctive way of dealing with the problem of unreliable
narrators. When the evidence suggests that a narrator is unreliable,
we are supposed to construct a hidden, completely reliable and
knowledgeable fictional author who is "speaking with the voice
of one of the (unreliable) characters in the story" (1990: 125);
the reader figures out what is true in the story by forming an
impression of the beliefs of the author, based on the text of the
story and facts about its community of origin. While many commentators
have lauded the move away from possible worlds, a number have doubted
that positing such an author is adequate to the task of explaining
truth in fiction (e.g., Byrne 1993; Howard-Snyder 2002; Swirski 2014),
even complaining that it seems gratuitous to postulate "some
shadowy meta-narrator who has all true beliefs but is choosing not to
reveal himself" just to deal with a narrator who is unreliable
(Matravers 1995; see Currie 1995a, 1995b for further discussion, and
Currie 2010 for a more sceptical perspective on internal narrators).
Other philosophers have offered alternative accounts of the (real,
hypothetical, ...) authors whose beliefs or intentions determine what is
true in fiction. Stock, for example, argues for an extreme
intentionalism on which, with some important qualifications aside,
what is true in a fiction is what the real author intends her audience
to imagine as being true (Stock 2017). Others prefer more moderate
appeals to the real author (e.g., Livingston 2005, for whom fictional
truth rests on what it is appropriate to make believe, given a goal of
understanding fictive utterances in the author's artistic context).




Alex Byrne has a final criticism that he thinks affects Currie's
and Lewis's accounts of truth in fiction in equal measure. It is
easy to see that if *F* is a fiction then the sentence "In
fiction *F*, *F* is told as known fact" is true for
both Lewis and Currie. Byrne (1993) labels this consequence of the two
views *idealism*, and he offers two objections. First, certain
fictions are what Currie calls *mindless*: fictions in which
there is no intelligent life, and so no one to tell the tale. In such
stories, it is false that there is someone who is telling the story.
Second, postulating knowing tellers would suggest quite extraordinary
epistemic capacities on the part of these tellers in the case of
fictions that carry detailed information about the psychology of
characters, say. Currie's response to the first kind of
complaint is that the postulation of a teller for every tale is simply
a staple of literary and aesthetic theory (Currie 1990: 75-6).
If so, not worrying about how the teller got her information (it is
enough that she must have got it somehow or other; cf. Hanley 2004)
might be another such staple.



One worry about such a response is that it seems little different from
saying we should treat the story as if it were told from a God's
eye point of view. But the response is probably best treated as an
instance of something far more general: an appropriately dismissive
attitude to certain sorts of questions. Walton calls questions of this
type "silly questions". One of his many examples concerns
the way Othello is able to come up with superb verse--in English
too!--despite his great distress; another one concerns the way
narrators in literary works tell of events they could not possibly
know about (Walton 1990: 174ff). In Walton's view, we should
simply stop worrying about the apparent threat posed by questions of
this kind, perhaps by disallowing or de-emphasizing offending
fictional truths (such as that Othello was a great literary talent, or
that the narrator was somehow able to determine that the characters in
a novel "lived happily ever after" (1990: 177-8)).
Such questions are "largely if not entirely irrelevant to
appreciation and criticism" (Walton 1990: 238). If this is
right, there is little reason to think that idealism of the kind Byrne
objects to constitutes a fatal defect in the approaches of either
Currie or Lewis.



Byrne himself defines truth in fiction in terms of what a Reader can
infer about what the Author invites him to make-believe, where the
Reader and Author are idealised entities identified in terms of
pragmatic principles of interpretation. This allows Byrne to explain
how it can be true in a story that there is no one left to tell the
tale and why it is rarely true in stories that there exists someone
with unexplained and extraordinary epistemological powers who knows
the deepest thoughts of others (Byrne 1993). The same conclusion is
available on some other author-based views, such as those of
Livingston 2005 and Stock 2017. In fact, all such approaches promise
to deliver a fairly direct way of defusing "silly questions"
concerning truth in fiction.




Whatever the best way of dealing with the issue of "idealism", it is
an issue that affects Lewis and Currie in equal measure. But there is
another issue that some take to be an important reason for preferring
an author-based account like Currie's to a possible worlds-based
account like Lewis's, namely what sense to make of truth in impossible
fictions, a topic we turn to next.



### 2.4 Impossible Fictions



Some works of fiction describe scenarios that are impossible: not just
physically impossible (like fantasy stories), but metaphysically or
logically impossible (like certain time-travel stories and stories
that deny mathematical facts such as Ted Chiang's
"Division by Zero", 1991). Early in his paper, Lewis
completes Analyses 1 and 2 with the clause: "'In fiction
*F*, *ph*' is vacuously true iff there is no
possible world where *F* is told as known fact". That
clause implies that anything whatsoever is true in impossible stories.
But he then notes that some such stories involve *venial*
contradictions, contradictions due merely to a slip-up on the
author's part (the Holmes stories, for example, since these
sometimes locate Dr. Watson's old war wound in his leg and
sometimes in his shoulder). To avoid the unpalatable conclusion that
anything whatsoever is true in these stories as well, Lewis suggests
towards the end of "Truth in Fiction" that any such story
should be represented as a series of minimally revised consistent
versions of the original, with truth in the story being truth in
*all* the minimally revised consistent versions (Lewis 1978
[1983: 274-5])--what he later called the method of
*intersection*. On this view, it is true in the stories that Dr. Watson
had a war-wound, but it is not true in the stories that he had one on
his shoulder and it is not true in the stories that he had one on his
leg. 



Postscript B to the original article shows a change of mind. To
preserve what he calls the "distinctive peculiarity of
inconsistent fiction" (Lewis 1983: 277), Lewis now suggests we
adopt the method of *union*: what is true in a fiction is what
is true in at least one consistent fragment, so that we can have
"In fiction *F*, \(\phi\)" is true and "In fiction
*F*, \(\neg \phi\)" is true, but never "In fiction
*F*, \(\phi \land \neg\phi\)" is true. 



Yet, as Lewis himself acknowledged, this account does not work with
blatantly inconsistent stories whose contradictions are not venial,
and with respect to these stories he takes a hard line: "we
should not expect to have a non-trivial concept of truth in blatantly
impossible fiction" (Lewis 1978 [1983: 275). Many disagree,
offering examples of such stories where the issue of truth and falsity
appears to arise much as it does for consistent
stories. Currie's (1990) example is of a story that turns on the
hero's disproof of Godel's incompleteness
results. Such a story simply can't be divided into consistent
fragments. Similarly, consider Graham Priest's story of
Sylvan's Box, which involves the discovery of a box belonging to
the late Richard Sylvan that is at once empty and non-empty (Priest
1997, 2005). (Other examples may include stories about donkeys that
talk and pigs who lead revolutions, as well as fictions in which
actual people and fictional characters interact, for example,
Pirandello's *Six Characters in Search of an Author*
[1921]; cf. Byrne 1993; Woodward 2011; for an even more radical take
on the inconsistency in fiction, see Woods 2018.) Some bite the
Lewisian bullet at this point. Hanley (2004), for example, argues that
some such fictions may be susceptible to the method of union; in other
cases, the best way to interpret them is simply to doubt the
reliability of their narrators. Nolan (2007) similarly argues that our
intuitive judgment of what is true in the fiction in such cases tracks
the narrator's beliefs rather than the represented facts.



Most writers agree, however, that there can be a coherent notion of
truth in fiction even for "blatantly" inconsistent
fictions (see, for example, Byrne 1993; Le Poidevin 1995; Phillips
1999; Gendler 2000; Weatherson 2004, Priest 2005, Proudfoot 2006). But
even when there is agreement about this, there is no agreement about
the resources needed to capture such a notion of truth. Some think
that the best and perhaps most obvious solution to the problem of
inconsistent fiction is a generalization of Lewis's own
approach: we should admit appropriately selected impossible worlds to
the set of worlds that realize what is told in such a story (see
Priest 1997, 2005; Woods 2003: ch. 6; Berto 2012: chs. 7, 8; Jago
2014; cf. also the entry on
 impossible worlds).




Impossible worlds, however, are for many a difficult pill to swallow.
Lewis himself makes a throwaway remark that might suggest a moderate
alternative - he adds:



> 
> 
> or perhaps we should expect to have [a non-trivial concept of truth in
> blatantly impossible fiction] only under the pretense--not to be
> taken too seriously--that there are impossible possible worlds as
> well as possible possible worlds. (1978 [1983: 275]) 
> 
> 
> 



(such a view would be a kind of extended modal fictionalism--see
SS1.5 of the entry on 
 modal fictionalism). 
Lewis makes a further appeal to this idea in a letter to
Graham Priest (9 January, 2001), although only to assert that the idea
is of limited usefulness. In his words,



> 
> 
> I agree with you about the many uses to which we could put
> make-believedly possible impossibilities, if we are willing to use
> them. The trouble is that all these uses seem to require a
> distinction between the subtle ones and the blatant ones (very likely
> context-dependent, very likely a matter of degree) and that is just
> what I don't understand. (Lewis 2004: 177)
> 
> 
> 



Currie's diagnosis of the problem of truth in impossible
fictions is very different. He thinks that worlds simply constitute
the wrong currency for characterizing the notion of truth in fiction,
even when authorial and community belief is added to the mix (as on
 Analysis 2).
 Currie thinks that once we understand the notion of truth in fiction
in doxastic terms as what we can reasonably take the fictional author
to believe
 (account C
 above), the case of radically inconsistent fiction presents no
further problems. There is no bar, he thinks, to supposing that
someone believes impossible propositions, even simple impossible
propositions like \(7+5 [?]12\), and so there can be no objection to
the claim that even blatantly impossible propositions can be true in a
work of fiction. 



But while this may work for the simplest cases, it is not clear that
we can be so sanguine about others. Thus, consider stories like
Gendler's story of the Tower of Goldbach in which \(7+5 [?]
12\) and \(7+5=12\) (Gendler 2000), or Priest's story of
Sylvan's box, empty and non-empty at the same time. It is one
thing to allow that such contradictory propositions are both true in
the relevant story; understanding how it can be reasonable to
attribute belief in both propositions to a fictional author may be
more difficult. Or consider a story in which everything whatsoever is
true (imagine a story in which God or Sylvan discloses this to
Priest). Even those who think that there is no bar to believing
impossible propositions are likely to reject as incoherent the thought
that someone can believe *all* propositions (cf. Priest 2000).




Note that the problem of impossible fictions affects Walton's
make-believe account rather differently. Truth in fiction for Walton
is a function of prescriptions to imagine, and he is relatively
sanguine about such prescriptions in the case of impossible fictions.
Even contradictions, he suspects, can be imagined in the relevant
sense, but he adds that even if they can't, his account of
fictionality or fictional truth is safe. He offers two options:
first, there might be prescriptions to imagine a contradiction even if
actually imagining it is not possible; secondly, there might be
separate prescriptions to imagine *p* and not-*p*, but not
their conjunction (Walton 1990, 64-6).



The second way is an analogue of Lewis's method of intersection.
Perhaps the first way is needed to deal with the case of blatant
contradictions, but as Walton notes even this is far from clear.
While imagining a contradiction may well not be possible if
imagination relies purely on mental imagery, the kind of imagining
invoked in fiction is very different: what is at stake here is
*propositional* imagining and it is difficult to motivate the
claim that imagining even blatant contradictions is impossible.
Attempts to do so tend to rest on quite contentious views of what
propositional imagining must involve (cf. Everett 2013; cf. also Kung
2016 on the telescopic versus stipulative views of imagining).


## 3. Truth Through Fiction



After his discussion of truth in fiction, Lewis acknowledged in
Postscript B that some people value fiction "mostly as a means
for the discovery of truth, or for the communication of truth"
(Lewis 1983: 278), that is, genuine truth, not merely fictional truth.
It is possible that Lewis simply meant that sentences like "In
the Holmes stories, Holmes is a detective" are really, and not
just fictionally, true, for this fact captures the sense in which it
is really true, say, that Holmes is a detective and really false that
he is a rockstar. But the problem of whether fiction-involving
sentences communicate truths does not end here. There are various
other ways of understanding how fiction might make such a
contribution. To begin with, some statements true in a work of fiction
are also genuine truths, included because the author wanted an
appropriately realistic setting for the work (e.g., historical
statements in works of historical fiction) or in order to acquaint
readers with facts that the author regards as morally or politically
significant (consider, for example, the fiction of Charles Dickens,
Upton Sinclair, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn). Whatever the reason, such
cases suggest that fiction can serve as a means for readers to
discover genuine truths. 



Philosophers and literary theorists by and large agree with this claim
(Friend 2006; Lamarque & Olsen 1994). Even on imagination-based
theories of fiction, there is nothing to prevent statements that
readers are invited to imagine as true from also being known as
fact. This is consistent, however, with acknowledging that learning
from fiction is not always easy, since it requires an ability to tell
whether an apparently factual claim in a work of fiction has been
included in the fiction because of its truth or for other
reasons. More generally, a number of psychological studies suggest
that readers often lack the ability to tell truth from falsehood in
fiction, failing to adequately scrutinize information when engaging
with fiction while being more careful in the case of non-fiction (see,
for example, Prentice & Gerrig 1999; Wheeler et al. 1999; Butler
et al. 2012). While this propensity on the part of readers
doesn't show that they are never able to gain factual knowledge
rather than mere (true) belief from engaging with works of fiction, it
may make it harder than it first appears. One plausible suggestion is
that where there is knowledge rather than mere belief, this happens
because readers have acquired a competence at reliably discriminating
truth from falsity in works of that genre (Friend 2014).



But learning factual truths is not what philosophers and literary
theorists usually have in mind when they think of fiction as a means
for the discovery, or communication, of truth. They have in mind truth
that has deeper human significance, like the universals that Aristotle
claims in *The Poetics* to find in the works of poets, or the
kind of truth about human nature, for example, that Samuel Johnson
finds in Shakespeare ("he has not only shewn human nature as it
acts in real exigencies, but as it would be found in trials, to which
it cannot be exposed"; Johnson 1765). Many philosophers thus
embrace what is commonly called (literary) cognitivism, which claims
that literary fiction can contribute to readers' knowledge in a
way that adds to the literary or aesthetic value of a work (Davies
2007; Gaut 2005). 



But knowledge in what sense? Like Aristotle, a number of cognitivists
think that literature can form the basis of propositional knowledge,
even if there is dispute about what kind of propositions can be known
and how they are known (Novitz 1987; McCormick 1988; Carroll 2011;
Kieran 2004; Kivy 1997; Elgin 2007; Mikkonen 2013). A common claim is
that literature provides knowledge about moral values, especially
about the particular moral requirements of concrete situations
(cf. the appeal in Nussbaum 1990 to the later novels of Henry
James). Some think literature can also provide a kind of conceptual
knowledge, such as insight into a moral concept like sympathy (John
1998). Others have thought it can even teach deep psychological truths
or truths about our place in the world. In many cases, however, the
"truths" readers claim to find in literature will be quite
contestable, with different works presenting different points of view.
Even then, however, it might be argued that readers at least acquire
knowledge of possibilities. Consider, for example, a work like
Celine's *Journey to the End of Night* (1932),
whose underlying hypothesis is that all humans and their institutions
are abhorrent. Even Putnam, who is broadly sympathetic to cognitivism,
agrees that all we really learn from Celine's work is how
the world looks to someone who accepts that hypothesis, which is
merely "knowledge of a possibility" (Putnam 1978). 



Many cognitivists, however, think that the knowledge we acquire from
literary fiction is not centrally a kind of propositional or even
conceptual knowledge, but a kind of practical knowledge. For example,
literature can cause us to attend to the world in a more focused way,
enriching our perceptual experience and emotional and moral
understanding (Diamond 1995; Nussbaum 1985, 1990, 2001; Gibson 2007;
Robinson 1995 [1997]). One way it might do this is by being a source
of what Davies calls *categorial understanding* (2007: 146),
yielding new categories through which to understand the world, for
example *quixotic* and *Kafkaesque* (Goodman 1978:
ch. 4). It can also provide phenomenal knowledge: knowledge of what it
is like to be a certain kind of person or be in a certain kind of
situation, and so knowledge that can be put to use in planning or to
help us understand other people or the moral complexity of situations
(Kieran 1996; Currie 1998; Putnam 1978; Carroll 2002; Swirski
2007). 



Many are sceptical. Anti-cognitivists think that, whether or not a
work's aesthetic or literary value would be enhanced by
contributing knowledge. Echoing Plato's famous charge in *The
Republic*, Jerome Stolniz (1992) has argued that there is no
proper domain of artistic knowledge: significant truths found in
literary works are the proper subject of other areas of enquiry, not
literature. Even if one does acquire beliefs from literary works, the
works themselves don't supply the warrant for the beliefs, and
so can scarcely be said to yield knowledge. Furthermore, to the
extent that we do learn from literature it is either hard to
articulate what we learn, or the truths turn out to be cognitively
trivial; *Pride and Prejudice* (1813), for example, may teach
us little more than the banal "Stubborn pride and ignorant
prejudice keep attractive people apart" (Stolniz 1992:
193). Others have raised doubts about the ability of literary fiction
to yield the kind of substantial practical knowledge that is often
claimed for it. Reading Styron's historical novel, *The
Confessions of Nat Turner* (1967) may make us think we know what
it was like to be a black slave in early nineteenth century Virginia,
but it is surely more likely that exposure of this kind simply
generates the illusion of knowledge (Harold 2016).



Cognitivists have fought back in a number of ways. Propositional
cognitivists have argued that literature does offer support for its
knowledge claims, say by taking them as live hypotheses to be tested
(Kivy 1996, Novitz 1987) or by allowing readers to draw on latent
memories and other available resources (Carroll 2011) as well as
argumentative resources explicitly found in the text (Mikkonen 2013).
And both propositional and non-propositional cognitivists have
acknowledged that there is no certain route to knowledge through
literature; as in the case of our acquiring factual beliefs on the
basis of reading fiction, literary works can make us less
knowledgeable (believe falsely or behave unwisely) as well as more
knowledgeable.



A final point. As we have seen above, literary cognitivists think that
a work of literary fiction can contribute to readers' knowledge
in a way that adds to the value of the work; anti-cognitivists deny
that it can contribute the kind of knowledge cognitivists focus
on. More radically, however, one of the best-known concerns about
literary cognitivism is that, even if literary works do provide
readers with knowledge, the knowledge they yield doesn't
contribute to their literary value. Such a *non*-cognitivist
view is associated in particular with the work of Lamarque and Olsen,
who have offered an influential argument for a "no-truth"
theory of literary fiction (Lamarque & Olsen 1994). On this view,
while we may well be able to learn from literature, the truth of a
claim made by a literary work is never relevant to the work's
literary value; all that is relevant is a work's theme and how
it is presented. Not surprisingly, this view has also proved highly
contentious, with many commentators critical of the separation of
theme and truth (see, for example, Rowe 1997; Gaut 2005; Kivy
2011).


## 4. The Paradox of Fiction



Whether works of fiction provides readers with knowledge (and, if so,
what kind), there is little doubt that authors of such works often aim
to communicate what they take to be salient truths in the hope of
affecting their readers in some way. Upton Sinclair, for example,
wanted readers of *The Jungle* (1906) to recognize the poor
treatment of workers in Chicago slaughter-houses, and to respond to
this treatment with anger. Even more familiar, however, is the way
authors try to get readers of a work of fiction to respond emotionally
to the *fictional* truths they encounter in the work, rather
than any actual truths. To take a classic example, on reading
Tolstoy's *Anna Karenina*, a reader may feel deep pity
for Anna Karenina because of her increasing despair as Vronsky
distances himself from her, an emotion Tolstoy no doubt expected and
intended. But this generates a famous puzzle: how can a reader feel
pity for Anna, knowing that Anna doesn't exist? This puzzle,
commonly known as the *paradox of fiction* or *the paradox
of fictional emotions*, involves a triad of seemingly compelling
but incompatible claims about emotional responses generated by
engaging with fiction. For a representative formulation: 


* (A) People
experience emotions for fictional objects and situations, knowing them
to be fictional
* (B) People do
not believe that fictional objects and situations exist
* (C) In order
to experience an emotion for an object or situation, one must believe
that it exists



(A broadly equivalent formulation is found in Gendler's entry on
 imagination.)
 The question is how best to resolve the inconsistency among these
claims; that is, which of (A)-(C) to give up so that consistency
is restored, and why these and not others.



Different solutions to the paradox provide different answers to such
questions, although it is worth noting that the paper that introduced
the paradox to the philosophical world, Colin Radford's
"How can we be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina?"
(Radford 1975) took a rather different line from other solutions. His
*Irrationalist* solution (our classification follows Levinson
1997) holds that people's apparent ability to respond
emotionally to fictional characters and events is "irrational,
incoherent, and inconsistent" (Radford 1975: 75). They regard
(C) as a normative constraint on rational agents, but their actual
behavior and beliefs, as described in (A) and (B), show that they fail
to conform to this constraint.



Dissatisfaction with Radford's account resulted in numerous
publications that have kept discussion of the problem alive. Most, in
fact, favor a rejection of (A) or (C). Among those who reject (A),
some deny (A) on the grounds that it misdescribes the nature of our
affective responses. According to the *Non-Intentionalist*
solution the affective states in question are not emotions but more
akin to object-less states like moods or reflex reactions (Charlton
1970: 97), while for the more popular *Surrogate-Object*
solution (A) misidentifies the target of emotional responses to
fiction: they really have as their objects (parts of) the fictional
work itself; or perhaps the descriptions or thought contents afforded
by the fiction (Lamarque 1981); or on another formulation real
individuals or phenomena that resemble the persons or events of the
fiction (see, for example, Charlton 1984).



A third way of denying
 (A)
 is Kendall Walton's well-known *Make-Believe* solution
to the paradox (Walton 1990, 1997; see also Currie 1990). According to
Walton, it is fictional in the imaginative games of make-believe that
people play on the basis of their reading works of fiction that they
experience emotions for fictional objects and situations. In reality
they don't. A reader of *Anna Karenina* (1877)
doesn't really pity Anna Karenina, but what she does experience
are various characteristic psychological and bodily effects of her
*imagining* that Anna Karenina has suffered greatly.
Originally, Walton called states of this kind quasi-emotions (in this
case, quasi-pity); the fact that a reader experiences quasi-pity in
the course of her imagining is what makes it fictional in her game of
make-believe that she feels genuine pity for Anna Karenina. A case of
real pity, by contrast, requires the quasi-pity that an agent
experiences to be the result of her genuine belief that someone is
suffering or has suffered (Walton 1990: 251), and only when this is
its cause will the quasi-pity also be accompanied by appropriate
behavior: an attempt to console if consoling is within one's
power, say. (Walton's classic example of the absence of
appropriate behavior is that of not running out of the theatre, even
though in the grip of quasi-fear, while watching a horror movie in
which the Green Slime turns towards you.) Walton clarifies his view in
Walton 1997, where he emphasizes that he regards fictional emotions
not so much as special kind of states, but as emotions that are merely
felt in the context of engaging with fiction rather than actuality.
What Walton cannot allow, however, is that it is genuinely true that
people have emotions in this sense towards fictional characters like
Anna Karenina. No relational claims of this kind can be genuinely true
for Walton, since he denies that there are any fictional characters.
(Whether his rejection of fictional characters is required by his
reasons for rejecting (A) is another question. For more on this
question, see the entry on
 fictional entities.)




Walton's view has been subject to much criticism (for a survey,
see Neill 2005). Before we turn to its main rivals, it is worth
observing that Walton's main reason for not counting fictional
emotions as real emotions (the lack of characteristic associated
behavior) is also the main reason why few commentators nowadays accept
the *Suspension of Disbelief* solution, which involves
rejecting
 (B)
 and maintaining that when readers of fiction emotionally respond to
the characters they read about they are acting on an implicit belief
that these exist. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who coined the term, may
have held a version of this view; cf. Coleridge 1817: ch. 14 [in vol.
2, p. 2].) For discussion, see Radford 1975, Schaper 1978, and Carroll
1990.) 



Far more popular are views that reject
 (C)
 and hold that we have real emotions towards fictional objects despite
believing that they don't exist. A possible reason for this is
that, unlike the two other statements of the triad, (C) strikes many
as a piece of articulated theory (the so-called cognitive theory of
emotion) rather than a commonsense claim (cf. Gendler 2008). One way
of rejecting (C) is the *Surrogate-Belief* solution, which
maintains that an emotional response to a fictional character requires
no more than the belief that the character exists in the world(s) of the
*fiction* (cf. Neill 1993). Another solution--and possibly
the most widely accepted of all--is the
*Anti-Judgmentalist* solution, which denies that emotional
responses to objects logically require beliefs concerning the
existence and emotion-prompting features of objects; instead, it is
enough if we imagine, "mentally represent" (Lamarque
1981), or entertain, such objects "in thought" (Carroll
1990). (See also Stecker 2011, which regards this solution as in some
sense the default solution; he thinks other solutions are nonetheless
worth investigating because of the way they shed light on the way our
reactions to fiction often differ from standard emotional reactions.)
Versions of such "thought theories" are also defended in
Moran 1994, Smith 1995, Feagin 1996, and Gendler 2008. But note that
such views face the problem that the objects of the emotions mobilized
by fiction are either understood in some nonstandard way, for example
as thought contents (cf. the objection in Walton 1990 to Lamarque
1981) or, more generally, as abstract rather than concrete entities;
or they are understood as nonexistent objects, a category many
philosophers find ontologically problematic. (For a useful overview of
the various solutions, see Gendler & Kovakovich 2006. See also the
entry on
 fictional entities.)


## 5. Conclusion



This entry has focused on a number of central issues in the philosophy
of fiction: the nature of fiction; what it means to say that something
is a truth of fiction; what (and in what sense)
we can learn from fiction; and how we can have emotional responses to
characters of fiction. There are other issues in the philosophy of
fiction that could have been discussed in this entry, a number
of them the subject of related entries. Consider the question of
what makes something a correct interpretation of a work of literary
fiction. This topic, which is connected to the issue of truth in fiction,
became of intense interest to both philosophers and literary theorists
following the publication of Wimsatt and Beardsley's "The
Intentional Fallacy" (1946), although the topic of
interpretation itself has a long history going back as far as Greek
antiquity (see the entry on
 hermeneutics).
 There are also problems involving our reasons for seeking out works of
fiction of various kinds. The previous section discussed the so-called
paradox of fiction, but as it turns out this is a relative newcomer to
the set of problems that involve our engagement with works of
fiction. There is also the much-debated puzzle of why we enjoy works
of tragedy (and even horror); sadness and fear are scarcely emotions
that we would normally welcome, let alone enjoy, yet people readily
engage with works of tragedy. (The so-called paradox of tragedy
received a famous treatment, still debated in contemporary philosophy,
at the hands of Aristotle in the
*Poetics*, who also used tragedy as an example of how we can
learn from fiction.) A newer problem,
although discussion goes back to at least Hume, is the so-called
problem of imaginative resistance: given the ease with which readers
of fiction can entertain all kinds of implausible fictional scenarios,
even impossible ones, what explains the impediments we face when asked
to imagine certain sorts of situations, for example ones in which
morally horrendous acts like torturing an innocent person are
considered morally right? (For an overview of these puzzles, see
 the supplement to the entry on
 imagination).
 Juxtaposing these
various problems and issues not only gives a good indication of the
thematic richness of contemporary philosophy of fiction, but also
reminds us of its long history.