Abstract
In his essay, ‘Truth in Fiction’, David Lewis raises four objections to a Meinongian semantics of fiction. Meinongian semantic domains admit existent and nonexistent objects, including objects ostensibly referred to in fiction, and permit reference and true predication of constitutive properties to existent and nonexistent objects alike. Lewis proposes an alternative to Meinong’s object theory that considers the truth of a sentence in a work of fiction only within an explicit story-context. He explains truth in fiction by (selectively) prefixing (most) problematic sentences with the operator, ‘In such-and-such fiction…’. ‘Sherlock Holmes is a detective’, for example, on Lewis’s analysis, becomes, ‘In the Sherlock Holmes’ stories, Sherlock Holmes is a detective’. I criticize all four of Lewis’s objections to a Meinongian theory of fiction, suggesting that they can be answered or refuted, thereby blunting Lewis’s charge that a Meinongian semantics is at a theoretical disadvantage in comparison with his modal story-contexting. Lewis-style modal story-contexting, moreover, is not incompatible with a Meinongian logic of fiction. Finally, by itself, without Meinongian object theory, Lewis’s proposal is subject to equally powerful countercriticisms. Lewis-style story-contexting needs to be combined with a Meinongian semantics of fiction in order to avoid Lewis’s objections to Meinongian object theory, and to avoid Meinongian objections to Lewis’s story-context-prefixing.
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- 1.
A more precise and thereby necessarily narrower characterization of the story-telling context, in light of the author’s many imitators, and the occurrence of Holmes in multiple story-telling contexts, can be written as, ‘In the stories and novellas of Doyle, Holmes is a detective’. There is no obvious reason to limit story-telling context from above or below, allowing more general inclusion of related writings beyond those the author actually composed or even contemplated, such as ‘In all of world literature at any time now or in the future, Holmes is a detective’, and more specific and to that extent potentially uninteresting but nevertheless semantically valuable contexting of propositions to the very sentence of a work of fiction in which the proposition is expressed, as in ‘In the ninth sentence of Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes is a detective’.
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Lewis 1983, 264: ‘As a first approximation, we might consider exactly those worlds where the plot of the fiction is enacted, where a course of events takes place that matches the story. What is true in the Sherlock Holmes stories would then be what is true at all of those possible worlds where there are characters who have the attributes, stand in the relations, and do the deed that are ascribed in the stories to Holmes, Watson, and the rest. (Whether these characters would then be Holmes, Watson, and the rest is a vexed question that we must soon consider.)’ Lewis provides a more detailed explanation of the modal apparatus for the interpretation of his story-contexting prefixes in his Analyses 0,1,2.
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Jacquette 2000b.
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If we want to be able to say that Holmes is taller than Poirot, given their absolute heights as described in their separate stories but in no single combined story, then isolating these facts in distinct logically possible worlds does not help. There will of a logically possible world in which both characters exist, but these will not be part of any Lewis-style modal analysis of the works of fiction in which Holmes and Poirot are featured. The problem is related to Lewis’s counterexample sentence 6. A related criticism of Lewis’s story-contexting is discussed by Kastin 1993. Also Lamarque 1987.
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Lewis acknowledges the semantic complications entailed by historical fiction, when he writes, 1983, 273–4: ‘I have said that truth in fiction is the joint product of two sources: the explicit content of the fiction, and a background consisting either of the facts about our world (Analysis 1) or of the beliefs overt in the community of origin (Analysis 2). Perhaps there is a third source which also contributes: carry-over from other truth in fiction. There are two cases: intra-fictional and inter-fictional.’ Lewis’s Analysis 1 and Analysis 2 offer rigorous formulations of modal story-contexting semantics. He explains, 1983, 270, 273: ‘ANALYSIS 1: A sentence of the form “In the fiction f, ϕ” is non-vacuously true iff some world where f is told as known fact and ϕ is true differs less from our actual world, on balance, than does any world where f is told as known fact and ϕ is not true. It is vacuously true iff there are no possible worlds where f is told as known fact … ANALYSIS 2: A sentence of the form “In the fiction f, ϕ” 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 ϕ is true differs less from the world w, on balance, than does any world where f is told as known fact and ϕ is not true. It is vacuously true iff there are no possible worlds where f is told as known fact.’ Parsons 1980, 51–60, 182–9, similarly distinguishes between ‘native’ and ‘imported’ fictional objects.
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See Parsons 1980, 54: ‘…we don’t confuse “Holmes doesn’t exist” with “According to the story, Holmes doesn’t exist.”’ Parsons considers degenerate fictions that seem to involve nothing but extranuclear (nonconstitutive) predications, 198: ‘Story: “Jay exists. The end.” Story: “An object doesn’t exist. The end.”’ Parsons expresses doubt about whether the examples are genuine stories, and from an aesthetic viewpoint this is perhaps a legitimate concern. It is hard to see what the passages lack in syntactic or semantic content that would disqualify them as (exceedingly uninteresting) stories.
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Lewis 1983, 270: ‘We sometimes speak of the world of a fiction. What is true in the Holmes stories is what is true, as we say, “in the world of Sherlock Holmes.” That we speak this way should suggest that it is right to consider less than all the worlds where the plot of the stories is enacted, and less even than all the worlds where the stories are told as known fact … But it will not do to follow ordinary language to the extent of supposing that we can somehow single out a single one of the worlds where the stories are told as known fact. Is the world of Sherlock Holmes a world where Holmes has an even or odd number of hairs on his head at the moment when he first meets Watson? What is Inspector Lestrade’s blood type? It is absurd to suppose that these questions about the world of Sherlock Holmes have answers. The best explanation of that is that the worlds of Sherlock Holmes are plural, and that the questions have different answers at different ones. If we may assume that some of the worlds where the stories are told as known fact differ least from our world, then these are the worlds of Sherlock Holmes. What is true throughout them is true in the stories; what is false throughout them is false in the stories; what is true at some and false at others is neither true nor false in the stories.’
- 8.
Lewis writes, in Postscript B in the reprinted version of ‘Truth in Fiction’, on ‘Impossible Fictions’, Philosophical Papers, Vol. I, 277: ‘An inconsistent fiction is not to be treated directly, else everything comes out true in it indiscriminately. But where we have an inconsistent fiction, there also we have several consistent fictions that may be extracted from it. (Perhaps not in the very hardest cases—but I think those cases are meant to defy our efforts to figure out what’s true in the story.) I spoke of the consistent corrections of the original fiction. But perhaps it will be enough to consider fragments: corrections by deletion, with nothing written in to replace the deleted bits.’
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See Priest, guest ed. 1997. Especially contributions by Mares, Nolan, and Van der Laan. Hintikka 1975. Rescher and Brandom distinguish between ‘inconsistent’ and ‘impossible’ worlds. See their 1979, 4: ‘It is necessary to insist … that one should avoid speaking of inconsistent worlds as impossible worlds. This would be question-begging, for it is a prime aim of the present analysis to show that they can be considered as genuinely possible cases.’ Rescher and Brandom’s logic is proto-paraconsistent, but it is clear that a Meinongian semantics might interpret the modalities of impossible objects like the round square either by means of impossible or inconsistent worlds.
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Jacquette, D. (2015). Truth and Fiction in Lewis’s Critique of Meinongian Semantics. In: Alexius Meinong, The Shepherd of Non-Being. Synthese Library, vol 360. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18075-5_13
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