Analytic philosophy has thus developed a very specific interest in fiction. There are many problems surrounding fictional representations which have been tackled by analytic philosophers in the last century, which are still very much debated and, for most questions, open problems. Among these problems, one can find questions like:
How come one can learn things about the real world through reading fiction? How come we can be moved by fictional characters while knowing that they do not exist?
And many others which are grouped under the label “philosophy of fiction”.
In this dissertation, I will contribute to one goal of the philosophy of fiction by providing a semantics for fictional discourse. In particular, I will focus on the two central notion of semantics which are truth and reference. I will be looking for a theory of truth and reference in fiction.
I will defend a view I call “functionalism” which originates in the work of Kendall Walton. I am not going to defend Walton’s philosophy of fiction as a whole.24
In-(my translation)
That intentionality is not a relation in the sense that a century of logical-mathematical culture has accustomed us to understand this word, it follows from the very position of the problem that this problem is intended to solve: the constitu-tion within the subject’s life of the ideality of all objectivity. That there is a whole enigma here for those who remain in the naïve position of scientific and philosophical realism, Husserl was fully aware of this. However, the analysis of the noematic struc-tures should, in [Husserl’s] opinion, allow us to see more clearly into these problems of constitution.
23For a recent illustration of this dual strategy around fiction, see [Woods2018], §3.2 (pp. 57-58).
24Guillaume Schuppert recently defended such a doctoral thesis on Walton’s philosophical system.
INTRODUCTION: IS IT REALLY A PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM?
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stead, I aim at constructing a new version of functionalism whose debt to Walton’s ideas will be repeatedly acknowledged throughout. I will be focusing on linguistic fictions for reasons of space and competence. In this respect, I will follow and use [Everett2013] which is an application and development of Walton’s idea in order to solve problems within linguistics and philosophy of language.
Walton’s theory of mimesis does not originate in the solving of semantic prob-lems. Its original concern came from aesthetic problems and the philosophy of art.
Philosophers of art look for a general theory of what aesthetic experience is, i.e.
what it means to engage with a work of art. Walton forcefully proposed that there is a continuity between children’s games of make-believe and aesthetic practices, and develops a general theory of make-believe which culminates in hismagnum opus [Wal-ton 1990]. From the start, philosophers of language stated their interest in Walton’s theory. Among others, Gareth Evans pioneered in taking up Walton’s programmatic ideas into a full-fledged semantics for fictional discourse.
When it comes to truth and reference, functionalism met already existing theories and heated debates started right on. The central tenet of this dissertation is that functionalism can meet the challenges posed by rival theories and solve the difficult problems raised by linguistic data. Thus I will engage on the two fronts awaiting functionalism.
On the problem of “truth in fiction”, the rival account is a possible-world account of truth in fiction with all its ramifications. The main figure of this rival account is David Lewis. I will argue against the possible-world account of “truth in fiction”
and propose instead what I call a pretence semantics in the wake of [Evans 1982]
and [Everett2013]. This is part 1.
On the problem of reference in fiction, the rival account is that of the realist in all its different forms, from the hard-core neo-meinongians to the mildest artefactualists about fictional characters. Realists hold that fictional characters exist in some sense, while functionalists are, to the bone, anti-realists holding that fictional characters do not exist in any sense. I will argue that pretence semantics as developed in part 1 can be naturally combined with a causal theory of reference to explain the complex linguistic data raised by realists. This ispart 3.
Part 2 does not engage in any philosophical debate with rival views. Instead, I will go into the detail of the functionalist account. The devil being in the detail, it will be interesting to fine-tune the theory developed in the previous part on a hard case. This part focuses on a case study, recently unearthed by Stacie Friend, called the “Great Beetle Debate”. In trying to understand what literary critics are arguing
See [Schuppert2019]. He nicely shows how Walton’s ideas are both incredibly encompassing and, in some detail, unsystematic.
about when they argue, I will show that the notion of fictional “truth” as defined by the functionalist meets a particular form of indeterminacy which is not linguistic, epistemic or ontological but, I will argue, pragmatic.
At the end of each chapter, I put appendices. They are digressions and analogies inspired by contemporary works in computer sciences and mathematics. It is useful to set them aside, because they would drive the reader away from the philosophical problems discussed in the dissertation. But I think they are important to the dis-sertation for they shed interesting lights on the new philosophical notions which I introduce. To be honest, the “novelties” I present are really nothing new. I simply borrowed ideas from these other disciplines and transformed them so as to contribute to existing debates in the philosophy of fiction. The presence of these appendices should make this plain.
Moreover, it so happens that inspiration from computer science in the studying of fiction is a long story. Marie-Laure Ryan, in her thought-provoking [Ryan1991], identifies five “contributions of AI to literary theory”:
The potential contributions of AI to literary theory and textual semi-otics fall into five categories: a fundamental belief; a lesson in method-ology; a set of questions defining a particular approach; a repertory of analytical tools; and a source of analogies.25
I think the appendices of this dissertation fall into the last two categories. When Ryan talks of analogies, she has a certain framing metaphor in mind:
For years, the leading analogy in literary thinking has been the lin-guistic one: literature is a language (as well as, metonymically, an artefact made of language); the text is a “system of signs”. Involvement with AI and computer science suggests another metaphor: the text as a machine.
Or if the text is a language, why not a computer language?26
This framing metaphor does not come from Ryan’s work. Among others, Calvino made decisive contributions towards such a framing metaphor in [Calvino 1980]. As computer science greatly changed in the past forty years, it is useful to update the metaphor with the recent results and problems one can find in computer sciences.
25[Ryan1991], p. 5.
26[Ryan1991], p. 8.