Philosophy
The Logic of Fictional Discourse and Truth in Fiction
Quick fact
In David Lewis's influential analysis, a sentence like 'Sherlock Holmes lived at Baker Street' is true in the real world because it is true in the closest possible world where the Sherlock Holmes stories are told as known fact, rather than as fiction.
Why this is interesting
We all agree that Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street—yet he never existed. How can a sentence about a fictional character be true?
Read the full explanation
Understanding The Logic of Fictional Discourse and Truth in Fiction
When we read a novel or watch a film, we engage with a fictional world. Statements about that world—'Gandalf is a wizard' or 'Hermione is a skilled witch'—seem true within the story, but they are about things that do not exist in reality. This creates a puzzle: how can we say such statements are true at all? The key is to separate the real world from the fictional world. In the real world, the sentence 'Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street' is not true in the ordinary sense, because there is no Sherlock Holmes. Yet within the story, it is true. The logic of fictional discourse seeks to explain this. One natural idea is that fictional sentences are true relative to a 'fictional world', a kind of possible world where the events of the story happen. But this raises questions: What about contradictions within a story? What about stories that are impossible? And how do we determine what is true in a fiction beyond what is explicitly stated? For example, it is implied that Holmes has a brain, even if not stated. So we need rules for inferring implicit truths in fiction. These are the central issues of the logic of fictional discourse.
A deeper explanation
The mechanism for interpreting fictional discourse involves treating it as a form of pretense or as quantification over possible worlds. According to Kendall Walton's pretense theory, when we utter 'Sherlock Holmes lived at Baker Street', we are not asserting a real-world fact but participating in a game of make-believe. The sentence is true in that game if it is true in the fictional world of the story. In David Lewis's counterfactual analysis, we consider the closest possible world where the story is told as known fact. A sentence is true in the fiction if it holds in all the closest such worlds. This handles explicit and implicit truths, and even resolves some contradictions by considering the way the story is told. The significance of this logic is that it shows how we can reason about non-existent entities in a structured way, without committing to their real existence. It also highlights the limits of truth-conditional semantics for natural language. Understanding this concept matters because it clarifies the nature of truth, reference, and the relationship between language and reality, and it connects logic to aesthetics and literary theory.