Strong and Weak

Weak troubles

Everett asserts, in his footnote, that the difference between the strong and the weak interpretation can be cashed out in his formalism as a difference between a (T1) and a (T2) principle.

Here is, I suppose, what Everett suggests:

(Strong): [^ff is a report of fact]^f

(Weak): For all sentenceA, if A would be true under the supposition that f were a true report of fact, then [^fA]^f.¹¹

10[Everett2013], p. 33.

11Note thatWeakis not strictly speaking of type (T2), but I cannot see how one should translate

“being a true report of fact” into first order logic supplemented with Everett’s operator.

It seems that (Strong) is formalised as should be. By contrast, I think that for-malizing (Weak) in this way simply begs the question.

Indeed, what does “under the supposition that f is a true report of fact” mean?

Remember that f is the real text, for Weak is supposed to be a principle of type (T2). But f is not in fact a true report of fact, so the supposition yields a counter-factual statement. But then, we are left with the same problem that was used as a direct argument against Lewis’s counterfactual treatment of “being told as known fact”. There is no way of supposing that f is a true report of fact without dramat-ically changing the semantic content off. Weak was supposed to explain how the reader is to suppose this. But it presupposes what it is designed to explain.

To make this vicious circle plain, here a more brutal rendering of Weak into a proper (T2) principle:

(Weak’): (Report(f)∧f →p)→[^fp]^f

The intended meaning of (Weak’) is the following: if the proposition p is implied by the fiction f and f is a true report of fact, then p is fictional. But this is flatly circular: that p is implied byf is precisely what should be generated by Weak’. Taking off the vicious circle

I argue that we can solve the puzzle by introducing a second pretence to the first’s rescue. The idea has been proposed in several places, especially in [Walton 2013]. I think the general framework of pretence semantics can make this proposal precise.

Let us call primary pretence the pretence in which the fictional events occur.

Let us call secondary pretence the pretence according to which the fictional text is a factual report of the events occurring in the primary pretence. This terminology comes from [Vuillaume 1990].¹²

The secondary pretence is a pretence in which the fictional text is a factual report of information. There are two main characters which I will call thenarrator and the narratee. In general, the main fictional events of the secondary pretence is that of the narrator telling a story to the narratee, be it oral or written. The way the story is told, i.e. with or without interruption, in what order, reliably or not, are fictional events of the secondary pretence. The personality of the narrator, their sex, age, sense of humour and biases are also fictional features of this secondary pretence. The

12There are different terminologies in the literature. Predelli nicely talks about the “fiction proper” and the “fictional periphery”. [Walton 1990] introduces the work world and the “game world”. [Walton2013] uses “primary story world” and “secondary story world”.

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study of the only secondary pretence is sometimes the object of literary criticism.¹³ Then, there are two cases which correspond to both interpretations of the report principle. In one case, the narrator and narratee are fictional characters of the primary pretence. In this case, the secondary pretence should be thought of as a part of the primary pretence. Indeed, one is to imagine that the narrator and narratee are characters among the other characters of the primary fiction. The narrator thus came to know about the events and later reports them to the narratee.

In the second case, the narrator and narratee pretend to be fictional characters part of the primary pretence. In this case, it is not the case that they are fictional characters of the primary pretence but it is fictional (according to the primary pre-tence) that they are. So from the real world point of view, it is primary-fictional that the narrator came to know about the secondary-fictional events and then reports them to the narratee. In this case, it is not possible to conflate the two pretences into one as in the previous case.

This double structure thus naturally unifies both interpretations of the report principle. Such a double structure has been investigated by narratologists for a long time, since it has been claimed that it explains many cases of “meta-fiction” on which I will focus in the next section. It elegantly solves the reporting the unreported problem by making explicit a hidden layer in the appreciation of fiction. We will see shortly that something like the reporting the unreported problem comes back in this framework, though.

I claim that fictional pretences as opposed to non-fictional pretences have this distinctive double structure. Consequently, fictions (in the ordinary sense of the word) should be seen as complex games of make-believe in which there is at least one embedded pretence.¹⁴ Contrary to Gregory and Eric who straightforwardly pretend that this stump is a bear, the readers and spectators of Hamlet first pretend that they (that is the narratee whose role they play) receive information from a source (that we call a narrator) and then pretend that the source is a causal source of information of the primary-fictional events. In other words, what Borges says of the actor generalises to readers. To paraphrase him taking the reader’s point of view:

the reader plays at being a person (the narratee) listening to a person (the narrator) who plays at being a reliable, causal source of information who produced the written text one is reading.

13For example, feminist literary criticism originates in the study of the general setting of the secondary pretence in nineteenth century English novels. It was shown how such pretences where almost always featuring a male narrator and a male narratee, with the accompanying sexual biases.

See [Gilbert and Gubar2000].

14Stories within stories show that there can be more than one embedded pretence in a fiction.

Here is a schema of this double-structured pretence:

Figure 7.1: Double-structured pretence distinctive of fiction

The blue lines represent metaphysical borders. The metaphysical border between the primary and secondary pretence is a dashed line, because when the report prin-ciple is interpreted as Strong requires, then the primary and secondary pretence collapse into one and the same pretence. In this case the narrator knows about the fictional events. Consequently, both the narrator and narratee are fictional charac-ters. By contrast, when the report principle is interpreted as Weak requires, the primary and secondary pretences are distinct, and the narrator pretends to know about the fictional events.

This distinctive double structure has been investigated by theoreticians of

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ture. For instance in [Ryan1991]¹⁵ and in [Eco 1994]¹⁶ one can find several schemas which reveal a similar two-fold structure. However, I can see two differences between my schema and theirs:

(i) it captures bothStrongandWeakinto one single schema, thus showing how the two interpretation of the report principle are structurally related;

(ii) the focus here is on pretence, hence on the fictionality-conditions of what the narrator tells to the narratee and not on what kind of “world” the fictional text

“projects”.¹⁷

Continuity and discontinuity between fictions and other games of make-believe

This structure, I contend, explains both the continuity and the fundamental differ-ence between “ordinary” games of make-believe and fictions. Fictions are structurally more complex than other games of make-believe. They should be thought of as em-bedded games of make-believe. It is constitutive of linguistic fiction that they show a double-structured pretence. But it is also possible that they display even more sophisticated embeddings, with more levels of pretence. Games of make-believe, by contrast, are not necessarily double-structured. But it is possible to find such embeddings in non-fictional games of make-believe.

The continuity between the two kinds of activity is thus explained. Walton ex-presses some puzzlement concerning the (lost?) continuity between children’s games of make-believe and fictions at the beginning of [Walton 1990]:

Children devote enormous quantities of time and effort to make-believe activities. And this preoccupation seems to be nearly universal, not peculiar to any particular cultures or social groups. The urge to en-gage in make-believe and the needs such activities address would seem to be very fundamental ones. If they are, one would not expect children simply to outgrow them when they grow up; it would be surprising if make-believe disappeared without a trace at the onset of adulthood.

It doesn’t. It continues, I claim, in our interaction with representa-tional works of art (which of course itself begins in childhood). The forms

15See her chapter 1 for discussion and p. 30 for her concluding schemas.

16See his 1st lecture entitled “Entering the woods” and especially his figures 1-5, pp. 19-23.

17The terminology is theirs.

make-believe activities take do change significantly as we mature. They become more subtle, more sophisticated, less overt.¹⁸

I think we now have a clear idea of what “subtle, more sophisticated, less overt”

means: it means double-structured in the above sense.