If truth were valuable ‘in itself’, then any truth, merely by virtue of being true, would be worth knowing – but this clearly isn’t the case: for instance, someone who keeps a meticulous daily record of the number of cars parked in the nearest lot with no use for the knowledge would strike us as odd. So, that something is true doesn’t justify our interest or commitment. Instead, we care about truths that inform specific enquiries or projects.
What grounds the nonfiction/fiction distinction is not that the former is based on truth or facticity per se, but that the former contributes to how we see the world insofar as it organises the kinds of truths that we care enough about to read and write about. The Montgomery County Commission didn’t initiate a systematic audit of all nonfiction books that might include false or misleading information. Rather, they targeted a book whose claim to truth practically interfered with their understandings of themselves and the country.
Our thoughts about reality and our thoughts about fiction go hand in hand. Of course, sometimes we care about fiction because it lets us entertain a world that is different from ours. But even when it is fiction’s departure from the real world that makes it worthwhile, the departure is measured against the background of the real world. In fact, not only the content of fiction – what we’re able or willing to call ‘fiction’ – but also the nature of fiction – what fiction is – depends on how we think about the real world. A comparative study of the way ‘fiction’ as a concept develops across cultures shows that, whenever a group of people think of reality differently, the nature and function of fiction is understood differently as well. We can observe this by contrasting the analytic philosophy of fiction with classical Chinese conceptions of fiction.
In early 20th-century analytic philosophy, fiction crops up as a test case for general theories for meaning, reference and existence. Theories that explain how names refer, or whether ‘existence’ and ‘being’ are the same, had to contend with fictional characters that seemed, in the words of Amie Thomasson, like ‘odd, freakish entities, quite unlike common or garden objects’. Note, for example, that Alexius Meinong’s separation in 1904 of ‘being’ and ‘existence’ explains how Pegasus is a nonexistent object, and that Gottlob Frege’s distinction in 1892 between ‘sense’ and ‘reference’ explains why fictional names seem meaningful even though they’re empty of referent; the name ‘Odysseus’ lacks reference but it has sense.
The trend has continued into the 21st century, and nearly all attempts to define ‘fiction’ involve tools developed from metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. For example, Richard Ohmann appeals to speech act theory to define fiction as discourse that pretends to assert; David Lewis applies the possible world framework to fiction; Kendall Walton utilises notions of imagination and make-believe to claim fictions are ‘props’ that prescribe certain imaginings; Gregory Currie and Kathleen Stock appeal to intention and imagination, arguing that fiction is a product of a fiction-maker’s intention for the audience to imagine its content.
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