Abstract
Semanticists and philosophers of fiction that formulate analyses of reports on the content of media—or ‘contensive statements’—of the form ‘In/According to s, \(\phi \)’, usually treat the ‘In s’-operator (In) and the ‘According to s’-operator (Acc) on a par. I argue that In and Acc require separate semantic analyses based on three clusters of linguistic observations: (1) preferences for In or Acc in contensive statements about fictional or non-fictional media, (2) preferences for In or Acc in contensive statements about implicit or explicit content and (3) tense preferences in contensive statements with In and Acc. To account for these three observations I propose to adopt Lewis’s possible world analysis for contensive statements with In and to analyse contensive statements with Acc as indirect speech reports.
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Notes
Most theorists take parafictional statements to also have implicit variants where the fiction operator is covert (e.g., “Bilbo travels to the Lonely Mountain”). Moreover, as Sainsbury (2014) notes, parafictional discourse can also feature other fiction operators such as ‘partial fiction operators’ like ‘In/According to the first three chapters of s’ or fiction operators such as ‘It is argued in/clear by s that’. Following Voltolini (2019), I take these to be derivative of the In and Acc operators.
Notable exceptions are Dohrn (2015) (whose observations are discussed in this paper), Sainsbury (2014) and Voltolini (2019). The latter two authors argue that In involves a more ‘distanced’ stance towards the fiction than Acc. However, these authors do not discuss the linguistic observations concerning the diverging behaviour of In and Acc discussed in the current paper. Rather, part of their debate is on whether the following minimal pair illustrates the semantic difference between In and Acc:
Whereas Sainsbury takes (Ia) to be true and (Ib) false, Voltolini takes both to be false. I do not further discuss these types of statements in this paper since my focus lies on the use of In and Acc in parafictional statements and both (Ia) and (Ib) seem to have a distinct ‘metafictional’ flavour, i.e., talk about fictional entities as fictional entities (see e.g., Kripke (2011), Recanati (2018), Semeijn and Zalta (2021)).
This example is taken from the online grammar platform Scribbr which advises writers to use simple present to report on the content of fictions, except is cases such as (24) that involve relative past tense constructions.
I assume that nonverbal media are also ROI subjects and hence we also report on those as ‘telling us’ things. In case the reader thinks nonverbal media don’t assert in this way, they may read for instance ‘the Star Wars saga’ as ‘the script of the Star Wars saga’.
More precisely, someone’s doxastic commitments are determined by their assertions and their retractions. This points to a potential benefit of the ROI analysis; Whereas doxastic commitments can be retracted, the fact that p was asserted cannot. Consider the case in which John earlier asserted that seagulls were the best but later took that back and has now asserted that seagulls are the worst. It is still true that John asserted that seagulls are the best. However, it is false that John’s (current) doxastic commitments entail that seagulls are the best. Importantly, it also seems false to say that according to John, seagulls are the best. In response to this we may add the qualification of talking about an agent’s unretracted assertions to the analysis of the phrase ‘According to s, p’ in terms of assertion.
The equivalent situation for the Anne/Chrissy case would be if Anne made a series of assertions and one can ‘read between the lines’ that she indirectly meant to make an additional claim (e.g., that Chrissy is not to be trusted).
There is a potential source of terminological confusion here. General lessons that we may draw from fictions (e.g., that love conquers all) are not ‘implicit fictional truths’ in the sense described here; It is not content that is mere background information assumed to be common ground between author and audience. As discussed in Sect. 5.1, I assume that these general truths are part of what is asserted by the medium, albeit indirectly (i.e., it is part of the ‘explicit’ content in this sense).
In fact, Lewis (1978) uses both past and present tense in his examples of parafictional truths.
See Zucchi (2001) for an alternative possible world analysis of In that accounts for this present tense preference by switching the time of evaluation to the time of the described events.
The same reasoning applies to contensive statements with In that report on non-fiction (e.g., (10)) which thus also display a preference for present tense (cf. Zucchi (2001)):
See e.g., Abusch (1997). In English, sequence of tense for instance occurs in indirect speech reports on past events. Suppose that Adeela at \(t_{1}\) said: “Sara is nervous”. If, at a later point \(t_{2}\), I would report on this speech act, I would say:
Because the main verb of (VI) (i.e., “asserted”) is in past tense, the subordinate verb (i.e., “was”) ‘shifts back’ to past tense as well (even though Adeela’s utterance itself was in present tense).
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Acknowledgements
This research is supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), Vidi Grant 276-80-004 (Emar Maier) and Rubicon Grant Let’s stop talking about Holmes. Many thanks to Natasha Korotkova, Emar Maier and three anonymous reviewers for valuable comments that helped improve the paper.
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Semeijn, M. On the difference between the ‘In’ and ‘According to’ operators. Linguist and Philos 47, 239–264 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-023-09395-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-023-09395-0