David Lewis, "Truth in Fiction" Notes
M. Davidson, CSUSB
Phil 387
Suppose you don't want to say there is a nonexistent object, Sherlock Holmes, that is
the referent of "Sherlock Holmes." (This would be Meinong's view.) How can
sentences like "Sherlock Holmes lives at Baker Street" come out true if "Sherlock
Holmes" has no referent? (Note that Lewis doesn't consider the option that Sherlock
Holmes is an abstract object. We will consider this option next.)
Lewis: Why not use a truth-in-fiction operator?
When are we to take fictional sentences to involve a hidden truth-in-fiction operator?
Context will tell us. Consider
(1) Holmes lived at Baker Street.
and
(2) Holmes really existed.
The first sentence seems to be equivalent to
(1') In the Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes lived at Baker Street.
The second doesn't seem to involve a truth-in-fiction operator; it purports to be about
the way things really are as opposed to the way things are in the stories. The same
goes with
(3) Holmes is a fictional character.
Lewis says this is false, again, because "Holmes" doesn't refer.
Truth in fiction is closed under implication. Let "TF" stand for a truth-in-fiction operator,
then,
If TFp and p->q, then TFq.
Lewis: TFp is true iff p is true at a certain set of possible worlds specified by the
fictional stories in question. So which worlds?
Attempt 1: Those worlds in which characters perform those actions and stand in
relations that Holmes, Watson, etc. do.
R: There may be a circularity here. It may be that figuring out what occurs in a
story requires understanding the truth-in-fiction operator.
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R: Suppose that there actually were a person named "Sherlock Holmes" who had
the same properties and stood in the same relations as Holmes does in the
stories. AC Doyle has no idea of the existence of such a person. Would our
world then make true various claims about what is true in the Holmes fiction?
No, Lewis (and Kripke) say. The Holmes stories aren't about this person AC
Doyle did not know about.
Attempt 2: Think of stories as concrete things that occur at a particular time, as
opposed to abstract sets of sentences or propositions or the like. The relevant worlds
are those where an individual tells the same story here (a token of the same story type)
as fact.
When a story is told fictionally, the sense of a name in the fiction assigns it no
reference.
So then,
Analysis 0: A sentence of the form "in the fiction f, p" is true iff p is true at every world
where f is told as known fact rather than fiction.
Problem: Aren't there truths in a fiction that aren't explicitly mentioned
(background facts)? (E.g. it's true that Holmes wasn't a flamenco dancer, even though
this is never mentioned in the stories.) Then
Analysis 1: A sentence of the form "In the fiction f, p" is non-vacuously true iff some
world where f is told as known fact and p is true differs less from our actual world than
any world in which f is told and p is not true.
There may be claims (e.g. "Holmes has an even number of hairs on his head") that are
neither true nor false in a fiction, and this is because there are ties between various
worlds in which f is told as to whether this claim is true or not.
Analysis 1 analyzes truth-in-fiction counterfactually. What is true in a fictional story
depends crucially on what our world is like. What if the author is unaware of some facts
about the world, and this winds up changing the stories (e.g. the facts about the
speckled band Lewis mentions, that in the actual world such a snake can't climb ropes)?
Consider two sets of worlds: Those where the collective background beliefs of the
community of the storyteller are true, and those in which the fiction is told as fact. The
former gives the content of the background beliefs, the latter the content of the story.
We don't want to take those worlds that are parts of each set. There may be none, as
fiction contains claims that aren't believed to be true by the relevant community. So
then,
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Analysis 2: "In the fiction f, p" is non-vacuously true iff, whenever w is one of the
collective belief worlds of the community of origin of f, then some world where f is told
as known fact and p is true differs less from the world w, on balance, than does any
world where f is told as known fact and p is not true. It is vacuously true iff there are no
possible worlds where f is told as known fact.
Can't other sentences true in fiction affect what is true in a fiction f, either from other
fictions (see other stories based on the Holmes stories) or from the same fiction?
What about fictions that aren't possibly told as fact? This may be true because the
fiction is impossible, or it's not possibly told. Then any proposition is vacuously true in
such a story. This may be fine (Lewis thinks) if the fiction is impossible (a guy who
befriends a married bachelor, e.g.). But is this true? Is it also then thereby true that in
such a world there is a dragon?
Or, what if the author contradicts himself or herself? Two options Lewis suggests: Go
with revised stories that don't contain contradiction that otherwise are as close as
possible to the original. What is true in the story is what is true in all of these worlds.
And in some of them (if we're concerned with the location of Watson's war wound, as
Lewis discusses) will have Watson getting war-wounded in one place, and some of
them another place. So there will be nothing definitely true about the location of his
war-wound.
Second option: Suppose the closest world in which a story is told as known fact contain
truths that clearly aren't in the original story (e.g. the case of an author claiming
carelessly that a person is in one place one minute and thousands of miles away in
another--the closest worlds to the actual world in which this story is told as a truth might
be ones with teleportation, which might be odd to add to a story). In these cases, we
might want to take one of the slightly revised stories as the actual story.
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