The report principle

This leads to the “report principle”. Here is how Everett introduces the report principle:

We will treat the fictional text or narrated story essentially as if it were purported factual report. This is in certain ways close to the “report

2Note that this idea grounds Lewis’s expression “told as known fact” discussed above. Lewis does not cite Searle, though.

3I am ignoring the difficult case of “bald-faced lies” here. See [Sorensen 2007] for a seminal discussion of bald-face lies. See [Maier2018] for a distinction between lies and fictional discourse which takes into account complications relative to bald-face lies.

4[Borges1964], p. 248.

5Note that Searle’s idea can be applied to other media provided there is a “testimonial ability” in this non-linguistic medium. One can easily see how drawing comes with such a comparable ability, hence the fiction / non-fiction distinction applies there as it applies to language. Conversely, if a medium has no such ability, the distinction between fiction and non-fiction vanishes. For instance, music, under a naïve understanding of what music is, would not ground such a distinction.

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model” of our engagement with literary fiction, on which we pretend or imagine that the fictional text we are reading is a factual report.⁶

The report principle is thus a principle of generation which says, informally, that readers of fiction make as if the fictional text was a true report of fact. The report principle is a close cousin of Lewis’s “told as known fact” expression, although it is not used to construct a counterfactual statement.

Let me quickly dismiss a false objection here. Unreliable narration does not contradict the report principle, quite the contrary. An unreliable narrator can be conceived of, in this context, as analogous to a lying witness: they tell a distorted version of the (fictional) events. But for the lie to work, there must be (i) something like the testimonial ability of language, (ii) a norm akin to Grice’s maxim of quality, according to which one ought to tell the truth in one’s testimony. In the tribunal, for instance, this norm is usually made explicit. Consequently lying in the tribunal is possible (and severely punished). Conversely, if lying is possible in everyday use of language, this means that language has a testimonial ability and that something like Grice’s maxim is in force.

In fiction, the testimonial ability of language is pretended and the norm is pre-cisely the report principle. So unreliable narration is possible (though no punishment will happen). Therefore, far from contradicting the report principle, unreliable nar-rators presuppose it.

The interesting, tricky point about unreliable narration as opposed to false testi-mony is to explain how readers discover that the narration is unreliable. In reality, one can, in principle, catch the lying witness red-handed by confronting their testi-mony with the facts (or other witnesses’ testimonies). In fiction, there are no such facts independent from the telling of the facts (and very often, there are not several testimonies). In practice, the display of unreliable narration is often very subtly encoded within thestyle of narration, hence the literary interest.

Formalizing the report principle

When one tries to formalise the report principle into pretence semantics, one is faced with two distinct interpretations of it. As Everett points out:

In fact the report model can be understood in two different ways, depending on whether or not we understand the texts themselves to be present within the scope of the imaginings they prompt.⁷

6[Everett2013], p. 32.

7[Everett2013], p. 32.

So either it is fictional that the text is a report of fact, or it is not so. The first interpretation is called the “strong interpretation”, and the second the “weak inter-pretation”.

Many novels seem to follow a principle of generation like the strong report princi-ple, according to which the fiction requires the reader to imagine that the text they are reading is, fictionally, a true report of facts. For instance, Lolita by Nabokov, is such a novel. The text one reads is presented as the memoires of the fictional narrator Humbert. He writes them in prison. And the reader is explicitly required to imagine that they read these fictional memoires. There are numerous other examples. But the strong interpretation of the report principle is a special case, for there are many stories for which it does not apply.

It so happens that the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes became the paradigmatic example of fiction discussed by philosophers. Conan Doyle’s stories happen to abide by the strong report principle. Therefore, many philosophers were led to believe that the strong report principle was constitutive of all fictions. But it comes from the fact that Conan Doyle’s story are not paradigmatic at all. As Proudfoot forcefully puts it:

[...] philosophers who treat the Sherlock Holmes stories as astandard case of fiction misidentify the respect in which they are run-of-the-mill:

they are so in their banality, but the fact that the stories can be told as known fact is a highly unusual feature.⁸

Indeed, there are fictional text which do not abide by the strong report principle.

Ad hocexamples can be easily created when one adds at the end of a story “everybody died and no one was left to tell the tale”.⁹ But there are many other counterexamples to the strong report principle which are not ad hoc. These are the fictions in which it cannot be the case that the fictional text is not part of the fictional world. My favourite examples is Roy Lewis’ book entitledWhat we did to father, which tells the story of a family of Australopithecus who have not invented writing yet. Yet, the

“testimony” is in a written form. So if the strong report principle was in force, then the witness could not have been a member of the family. This clearly goes against what is fictionally “true” in the novel.

This is the so-called “reporting the unreported” problem. The term comes from [Walton 2013] (§3). In this article, Walton argues that the problem also happens in other media. For instance, a fictional drawing of a dinosaur does not license to infer that it is fictionally the case that there is a human being drawing the dinosaur.

8[Proudfoot2006], p. 34.

9Thisad hoccounterexample to the strong report principle comes from [Lewis1978].

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Another example is2001: A Space Odyssey in which it is fictional that the spaceship Hal is in a region of space where there is no one. Yet, the spaceship is seen from the outside. But it is not fictional that there are people watching the spaceship in this region of space. Because of the reporting-the-unreported problem, the strong report principle does not generalise to all fictions.

So are we left with the weak report principle as a candidate for generalisation.

The weak interpretation of the report principle is designed to answer the reporting-the-unreported problem. Here is how Everett describes the weak report principle:

Understood in the second, weaker way, the report model holds that when we consume fiction we treat the text as if it were a source of factual information, although the text itself is not a denizen of my pretence.

[Footnote: The difference between the strong and weak version of the report model can be seen as a difference between whether our imaginative engagement with the relevant text is governed by a type-I or a type-II principle of generation. I note that there may also be mixed cases where, during the course of our reading a text, we will take the text to be part of the world we imagine at certain times but not at others (perhaps Frankenstein is an example of this).] Rather we are to let the text guide our imaginings as we would let a real text guide our beliefs.¹⁰

This passage is quite obscure. I will try to elucidate it. Then I will argue against Everett’s view and propose another.