Against explicitism

One can find a defense of explicitism about fictional “truth” in the recent [D’Alessandro2016]. Here is his definition of the view:

Explicitism, as I’ve defined it, is the thesis that the set of true propo-sitions in a given fiction is a subset of the explicit propopropo-sitions in that fiction.¹⁴

Implicitism is the denial of explicitism thus defined.

D’Alessandro’s defense of a form of explicitism is a heroic and somewhat desperate attempt, as he himself confesses. Here is the way he describes his own defense:

[...] no philosopher that I know of has seriously questioned implicitism or attempted to defend any version of explicitism. My second and primary goal here is to challenge this orthodoxy. I hope to show that implicitism is much less obviously true, and that explicitism is much less obviously false, than the standard wisdom suggests.¹⁵

Indeed, “standard wisdom” has it that explicitism faces two serious problems: it both undergenerates and overgenerates fictional “truths”. It obviously undergener-ates, since we have the intuition that there are some implicit fictional propositions like (1).¹⁶ It also overgenerates, because it sometimes happens that the narrator is unreliable so that fictional sentences should not be taken at face value: in this case, the expressed explicit fictional propositions are intuitively not “true in the fiction”.

For instance, Humbert inLolita explicitly asserts that Lolita was willing to have sex with him and that he did not, but that he eventually gave in to temptation. Given many narratological cues to be found inLolita, the reader is to question such a de-scription of the fictional events and rather adopt as a fictional “truth” that Lolita is a victim of paedophilia and did not give her consent.

This point was made over and over again. Here is, for instance, Byrne dealing away with explicitism:

14[D’Alessandro2016], §4.

15[D’Alessandro2016], §1.

16Maybe (1) follows deductively from what is explicitly stated in Shakespeare’s play. One can easily change the example as is done below.

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Why not identify what is true in a fiction with what is explicitly said in the fiction (or follows deductively from what is explicitly stated)?

Well, in some fictions there are deluded narrators, and so they speak falsely. Therefore the proposal doesn’t give a sufficient condition. But it doesn’t give a necessary condition either. There are many truths in fiction which aren’t explicitly stated, and aren’t entailed by what is explicitly stated. It’s true in the Holmes stories – as Lewis pointed out – that Holmes doesn’t have a third nostril, and that he never visited the moons of Saturn. However, neither of these propositions is explicitly stated in the stories, or entailed by what is explicitly stated.¹⁷

D’Alessandro responds to the overgeneration problem by stressing that in his definition, he explicitly says that the fictional propositions area subsetof the explicit propositions. Precisely, this subset which are reliably said by the narrator. I think this response is insufficient. First, it follows from this that a fiction in which the narrator was utterly unreliable would contain no “truths” at all. Indeed, suppose, for the sake of argument, that the narrator was such that everything he says is “false”

in the fiction. Then, by definition, none of the explicit fictional proposition are “true”

in the fiction. Although it seems very intuitive to say that one can easily get (some of) the “truths” in the story by negating the statements expressed by the narrator.

D’Alessandro’s view entails that one cannot do this.

Second, and less dramatically, it seems that recognizing that a narrator is (some-times) unreliable implies that one recognises as “true” in the fiction some proposition which was not explicitly said. Indeed, my recognition of Humbert’s unreliability is not my withholding my judgement about the expressed proposition that Lolita gave her consent but the plain recognition that she did not.

As for the undergeneration problem, D’Alessandro does not give any response.

Here is his comment on Holmes’s lacking a third nostril:

The explanation for this, in my view, is not that implicitism is actually correct. On the contrary, I stand by the claim that “Holmes has two nostrils” is not true in the Holmes stories, in the proper sense of “true”.

(Of course it’s not false in the stories either; it simply lacks a truth value.)¹⁸

I think this is beating around the bush. First, one may question what D’Alessandro means by “the proper sense of ‘true’” here. If it means “explicitly true in the fiction”,

17[Byrne1993].

18[D’Alessandro2016], §5.

then what he says is trivially true. If it denotes our intuitive conception of “truth in the fiction”, then D’Alessandro is committed to the view that there is no contrast between, say, (1) and (2). This is a bad result for any theory of fictional “truth”.

Curiously enough, D’Alessandro continues in the following manner:

The correct explanation is rather that it’s reasonable for the reader to imagine, or to tentatively suppose, that Holmes has two nostrils. The reader is entitled to imagine this because, for instance, that’s the picture of Holmes that Conan Doyle presumably had in mind, and it’s the one that Conan Doyle presumably wished for his readers to have in mind.¹⁹ This is precisely what implicitism is about: the reader needs to take into account something elsethan the set of fictional sentences to retrieve the set of fictional propo-sitions, for instance they should consider the author’s intentions. At this point, D’Alessandro’s attachment to explicitism is purely verbal: what he calls “true in the fiction”, everyone calls “explicit”; what he calls “reasonable to imagine”, everyone calls “true in the fiction”. What everyone calls the “problem of truth in fiction” cor-responds to what D’Alessandro recognises as the problem of “what it is reasonable for the reader to imagine”. D’Alessandro recognises here that explicitism is not a live option for the theorizing of reasonable imagining.

My description of the problem of truth in fiction makes it the case that the rele-vant data for the theorizing of fictional “truth” encompasses the reasonable inferences the reader draws in imagination. Hence, explicitism is not a live option.

Note on Retcons: D’Alessandro says he has a general argument against im-plicitism which leads him to reconsider exim-plicitism. His argument relies on the possibility of retroactive continuity (retcon) in fiction. Retcon “is a literary device in which established facts in a fictional work are adjusted, ignored, or contradicted by a subsequently published work which breaks continuity with the former.”²⁰ It so happens that a “fictional truth” in one fiction can be given in another fiction.

D’Alessandro tentatively supposes that for any fictional “truth”, one can imagine a relevant retcon which makes it the case that it is, in fact, not “true in the fiction”.

He further supposes that fictional “truth” is unalterable.

But his argument, as he remarks himself at the end of his article, is too powerful since it denies both explicitism and implicitism. It follows from his argument that there are no “truths” in any fiction. In which case, the above contrast is lost. It is not difficult to deny D’Alessandro’s suppositions, though.

19[D’Alessandro2016], §5.

20Wikepedia: Retroactive Continuity.

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I will something to say about retcons and fictional “truth” at the end of this part, in §8.3, for I think they question the link between fictional “truth” and the reader’s activity which is an interesting side issue about fictional “truth”. I think this literary phenomenon points to a substantial qualification of the “authorial prerogative”: this is the subject of the next subsection.

1.3.2 Intentionalisms

It is clear that the set of sentences explicitly written by the author are not sufficient to yield an adequate theory of fictional “truth”. But it also seem clear that this set is necessary to get at what is “true in the fiction”. Fictional “truth” has to depend, in some sense, on what the author actually wrote. Let us call this intuition the authorial prerogative. It states the obvious fact that the author has a crucial bearing on what is intuitively “true in the fiction”, since they actually produced the explicit fictional propositions. The pre-theoretical intuition behind the authorial prerogative says that an author can make a proposition fictional by writing sentences expressing it in the story.²¹ In this sense, it seems that fictional “truths” are a kind of truth by stipulation.

Explicitism can be seen as an untenable reduction of the authorial prerogative to the mere output of the writer’s work, namely the set of fictional sentences. But, as D’Alessandro himself remarked, it is very likely that the author’s intentions should matter. Intentionalism about fictional “truth” is the view that one should consider both what is explicitly said and the intentions of the author to determine what is

“true in fiction”. In other words, the author’s intention is one of the guides to fictional

“truth”. Intentionalism thus counts as a kind of implicitism. Indeed, the author’s intentions need not be explicit.

There is a wide variety of intentionalism, depending on one’s theory of intentions, in which one should define what is characteristic of an authorial intention. There are also debates about what should count as an author in this view, whose intentions are relevant for fictional “truth”. It is thus more accurate to talk about intentionalisms.

The debates over what is the best of intentionalisms are clearly open in the philosophical literature. Stock recently published a book in defense of what she calls

“extreme intentionalism” ([Stock 2017]). Here is a glimpse of the debates when she describes her view against other forms of intentionalism:

Extreme intentionalism is a variety of what is often called “actual author intentionalism”. This characterises fictional content²² in terms

21This is what is eloquently termed the “Say-so principle” in [Woods1974].

22This corresponds to what we have called “fictional propositions”.

of what the actual author intended, in producing that fiction. Extreme (or actual author) intentionalism says that the authorial intention of a certain sort is both necessary (has to be present) for fictional content of a given kind and sufficient (its presence is enough) for fictional content of that kind.

Despite near-universal opposition to it, at first sight, at least, extreme intentionalism has several things going for it. It is more streamlined and less ad hoc-looking than “modest” versions of intentionalism. On these latter sorts of view, an author’s intentions are determinative of fictional content only in certain circumstances, but not always. For instance, they are determinative where they do not violate conventional sentence meaning, or where they do not otherwise fail. Where they do these things, some other feature determines meaning. Extreme intentionalism eschews such inelegant caveats.²³

Stock then proceeds to define her preferred notion of intention which is adapted from Grice’s notion of a reflexive intention. She gives a book-length argument against rival forms of intentionalism.

Although these debates are perfectly legitimate, I think discussing them in detail would lead us too far from the problem of fictional “truth” as defined above. I am interested in the inferential mechanism which yields the above contrast, given the set of fictional sentences expressing fictional propositions. As such, one should accept as true a form of intentionalism. But debates about the different versions of intentionalism have little bearing on the inferential mechanism proper. In other words, any form of intentionalism starts from the idea that we (readers of fiction) get contrasts like the above contrast and then proceeds in asking what is the underlying intentional structure relating us to the author in such a way that it makes us good and reliable at getting contrasts like the above one. By contrast, what this part is about are the specifics of such automatic inferences that we draw when plunged into the appropriate intentional structure. I will therefore remain neutral on the debates about intentionalisms.

In the philosophical literature, one can find two competing theories focusing on such a drawing of fictional inferences. Although many philosophers contributed to the discussion, it is fair to say that the two champions of the rival views are David Lewis and Kendall Walton.

23[Stock2017], §1.2, p. 14.

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