The appearance principle

The strategy is to build in a principle of generation into the picture so that Woolf-like counterexamples could not arise. The best they can achieve is to yield contradictory pretences, which can be analysed away. This general principle can be called the appearance principle and be put along with or in place of the reality and the mutual belief principles.

Here is a situation Evans considers:

Two men, let us suppose, both seem to see a little green man on the wall, and are persuaded, with reason, that there is no such thing;

they are, they think, victims of a trick, perhaps involving the use of holograms. There will be two different ways of telling the story; one in

which they are right in thinking this, and one in which they are wrong.

For the time being, let us suppose they are right. This shared perceptual information provides an ideal backdrop for an existentially creative game of make-believe. The basic stipulation – that things are as they seem – immediately generates a whole mass of make-believe truths. (e.g. that [^fthe little man on the wall has a beard]^f, etc.).²⁹

The appearance principle Evans’s proposes is thus:

[^fThings are as they seem]^f

He illustrates how this principle works with perception, which is pretty straightfor-ward, but how is this principle to be applied in the case of linguistic fictions?

What we need to make sense of the appearance principle in the case of fiction is a distinction between illusory and non-illusory linguistic content. This, Evans claims, is given by the causal theory of semantic information he advocates in his book.

Let us focus on referring expressions once again, since they define a fundamental subset of the semantic information on which things are easier to define. Definite descriptions can give rise to semantic illusions, as opposed to proper nouns. Definite descriptions, indeed, descriptively refer. That is, the referent, if there is one, is picked up by description, i.e. it is whoever uniquely satisfy the description. By contrast, proper nouns are directly referential. That is, the referent, if there is one, is picked up directly, i.e. there must be a relevant causal chain which links up the utterance of the name and the individual named, irrespective of what the speaker might think true or false of the referent.

There is a clear analogy with perception. One can see directly some individual or see them through a representation of them, like a drawing or a hologram. In the first case, the perceptual information is gathered causally, whereas in the second case the link to the individual is causal up to the representation and intentional afterward.

For instance, suppose our two protagonists now suffer a linguistic illusion. They would both interpret the sentence: “The average English man drinks tea in the morn-ing”. They would, by definition, understand they are suffering a semantic illusion and none of them would believe that there is a man, who is both English and average, and thatthis man drinks tea every morning. They need not know exactly what the trick is, just as in the case of the hologram. But the shared semantic illusion, if accepted, also “provides an ideal backdrop for an existentially creative” pretence. Given what

29[Evans1982], p. 360. For the record, Evans symbolises the fictional operator using * * instead of brackets. It corresponds precisely to Everett’s operator, so no harm is done to the original text here.

CHAPTER 7. FROM PRETENCE TO FICTION

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the words mean, especially the word “average”, one can generate a “whole mass”

of fictional propositions when applying the appearance principle. Of course, all this would be up for disagreement, but the person is clearly a man, probably white, some-thing like 40 (I guess), voting for Brexit (but that already is open for disagreement I suppose), etc. The point is that what the word “average” provides an “informational background” in the required sense.

This principle of appearances blocks Woolf-like counterexamples. Indeed, the testimonial ability of language is encoded in the meaning of certain words. So if [^fthings are as they seem]^f, then a secondary fiction in which the language used makes it impossible that reports of fact can be produced is simply impossible.

Is there a revenge reporting the unreported problem? I do not think so. Try and imagine a world in which there was no distinction whatsoever between appearance and being. It is either a world in which there were no appearances and only pure beings. Or a world in which there were no beings and only appearances. The first case sounds like Plato’s realm of ideal Forms. But this world could not be told.

That is the whole point of Plato’s doctrine. The second case sounds like Berkeley’s metaphysical picture in whichesse est percipi, without the second partaut perpicere.

Again, I think such a world could not be told or represented in any way. This is precisely why Berkeley needsboth the things perceived and the things that perceive as primary entities in his ontology.

Therefore, I think it is possible to block Woolf-like counterexamples and thus meet the revenge of the reporting-the unreported problem. Instead of a report principle, one should adopt the more abstract appearance principle. It is not that the fictional text is a report of fact in the weak sense. It is that, when engaging in a fiction, it is fictional that things are as they seem. Since, without indications to the contrary, the testimonial ability of language seems to operate when assertions are uttered, it follows that the report principle is a special case of the appearance principle. This idea suggests a now familiar picture of language in keeping with a causal theory of semantic information. Evans, once again, was an interesting lead to follow on this.

7.4 Conclusions

The aim of this chapter was to find (the set of) fiction principles, i.e. the principles of generation which are constitutive of fictions as opposed to other kinds of pretences.

The starting point of this inquiry was Searle’s seminal idea that fictional discourse is pretend assertion. It follows from this idea that what I called the “testimonial ability” of language is duplicated or simulated within the scope of fiction. This led

to the formulation of a report principle which says, informally, that the fictional text should be thought of as a pretend report of facts.

In trying to formalise this intuition, one is forced to distinguish between two interpretations of the report principle depending on the fictional status of the fictional text. If it is fictional that the text is a report of fact then one interprets the report principle in the strong sense, if not in a weaker sense. In light of the so-called reporting-the-unreported problem, the only candidate for generalisation was found to be the weak report principle.

I then discussed Everett’s proposal to distinguish between the two interpretation of the report principle using principles of type (T1) and (T2). I showed that this was at best misleading. (T2) principles are principles which govern the function of props and fictional text are indeed props. But I showed that in order to avoid the reporting-the-unreported principle, one has to distinguish between two levels of pretence. I called these two intertwined pretences the “primary” and “secondary”

pretences, following Vuillaume. I proposed that this two-fold structure should be constitutive of all fictions. And I illustrated the interest of this logical structure by discussing a linguistic problem relative to the use of linguistic tense in fictional discourse and well known narratological problems. I suggested that this double-structure was already familiar to narratologists. The main improvement on these already existing works is that pretence semantics avoids the problematic notion of

“world” altogether.

Finally, I suggested a revenge problem of reporting-the-unreported which appears at the level of the secondary pretence. This problem, to my knowledge, has received little to no attention in the philosophical literature. I suggested that a tentative way of meeting the problem would be to shift from the weak report principle to a more general appearance principle which originates in the work of Evans. I tried to give a precise formulation of it and showed that this principle adequately prevents the revenge of the reporting-the-unreported problem.

This concludes the solution to the problem of fictional “truth”. For linguistic fictions, because they exhibit this double-structure, are formalised into pretence se-mantics in such a way that inferences like the one concluding to the fictionality of (1) and not of (2) are completely available. In part 2, I will show how this frame-work can be fine-tuned so as to get more substantial fictional propositions out of fictional texts. I will show this by focusing on the practice of literary criticism and its underlying rationality.

Chapter 8