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Fictions and Reality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Extract
A literary text or fiction, while making use of the referential or descriptive resources of our ordinary language, nevertheless does not make use of them in a referential or a descriptive manner. Reference may indeed seem to be made to persons or circumstances or events, in the sense that such things are mentioned in the literary text and may even be linked together by it into some kind of a story. Reference is not made to them, in the sense that these persons or circumstances or events have no existence in the actual world in which the text is written or read, or else that it is irrelevant to the nature of the text as a piece of literature if they do have such an existence.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1988
References
1 See for example Walton, Kendall L., (1) ‘Pictures and Make-Believe’, Philosophical Review 82 (1973), 283–319CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and (2) ‘Fearing Fictions’, Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978), 5–27Google Scholar; Lewis, David, ‘Truth in Fiction’, American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1978), 37–46Google Scholar; Evans, Gareth, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford University Press, 1982), Ch. 10.Google Scholar
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11 ‘The Cow in Apple Time’ is reprinted by permission of the Estate of Robert Frost, Edward Connery Latham as editor, and Henry Holt and Company, Inc. (New York) and Jonathan Cape Ltd. (London), from The Poetry of Robert Frost. © The Estate of Roben Frost.
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22 I am grateful to Jerry Valberg for reading an earlier version of this argument and for making helpful suggestions.
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