THE TRUTH ABOUT SHERLOCK HOLMES

• Authors: Haraldsen Fredrik
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

According to possibilism, or non-actualism, fictional characters are possible individuals. Possibilist accounts of fiction do not only assign the intuitively correct truth-conditions to sentences in a fiction, but has the potential to provide powerful explanatory models for a wide range of phenomena associated with fiction (though these two aspects of possibilism are, the author argues, crucially distinct). Apart from the classic defence by David Lewis, the idea of modelling fiction in terms of possible worlds has been widely criticized. In this article, the author provides a defence of a possibilist account against some lines of criticism. To do so, he assumes that names for fictional characters are directly referential and a possible worlds model that accommodates trans-world identity. On this background, he argues, it is possible to construct an elegant model of fictional discourse using familiar models of information exchange in ordinary discourse, and he sketches how this model can be used to i) make a natural distinction between fictional and counterfactual discourse, ii) account for creativity, and iii) sustain a natural definition of truth-in-fiction that avoids certain familiar objections to possibilism. Though he sets aside questions about the metaphysical commitments of a possible-world interpretation here, there is accordingly reason to think that the battle over possibilist treatments of fiction will have to be fought over metaphysical foundations rather than technical shortcomings.

Keywords

EN

CREATIVITY; FICTION; NON-ACTUALISM; POSSIBILISM

• Publisher: Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Institute of Philosophy of Academy of Sciences of Czech Republic
• Journal: Organon F. medzinárodný časopis pre analytickú filozofiu
• Year: 2017
• Volume: 24
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 339 - 365

Contributors

author

Haraldsen Fredrik

• Institute of Philosophy, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Klemensova 19, 831 64 Bratislava, Slovak Republic