Fiction as action

Hoffman, Sarah

doi:10.1007/bf02385199

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Even though MP still has some defenders (Hoffman 2004, Alward 2009, Recanati 2021 cf. García-Carpintero 2022b for discussion), it is not the standard view of fiction among analytic philosophers anymore.…”

Section: Ad Hocery Objections and How To Deal With Themmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Truth in Fiction’ Reprised

García‐Carpintero¹

2022

The British Journal of Aesthetics

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The paper surveys recent appraisals of David Lewis’s seminal paper on truth in fiction. It examines variations on standard criticisms of Lewis’s account, aiming to show that, if developed as Lewis suggests in his 1983 Postscript A, his proposals on the topic are—as Hanley puts it—‘as good as it gets’. Thus elaborated, Lewis’s account can resist the objections, and it offers a better picture of fictional discourse than recent resurrections of other classic works of the 1970s by Kripke, van Inwagen and Searle. The turn that Lewis suggests and the paper recommends draws on the remaining outstanding contribution from that time: Walton’s.

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Section: Ad Hocery Objections and How To Deal With Themmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Truth in Fiction’ Reprised

García‐Carpintero¹

2022

The British Journal of Aesthetics

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“…See Walton 1990;Currie 1990;Martinich 2001;J. Searle 1979. Hoffman (2004 persuasively argues that Walton's view can be understood in terms of speech acts, even though Walton himself explicitly denies it.…”

Section: The Permissibility Of Lying Objectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The structure of semantic norms

Kaplan

2022

Philosophical Books

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The normativity of meaning—introduced by Kripke in 1982, and the subject of active debate since the early 1990s—has been exclusively understood in terms of duty‐imposing norms. But there are norms of another type, well‐known within the philosophy of law: authority‐conferring norms. Philosophers thinking and writing about the normativity of meaning—normativists, anti‐normativists, and even Kripke himself—seem to have failed to consider the possibility that semantic norms are authority‐conferring. I argue that semantic norms should be understood as having an authority‐conferring structure, and show how this allows normativism about meaning to escape the two most popular arguments against it.

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“…More in general, on his view fictions aren't sui generis, dedicated representations of a specific kind, on a par with assertions or commands. 2 Some researchers (Hoffman 2004, Alward 2009 endorse variations of Searle's argument; most however accept Currie's (1990, 17-8) and Walton's (1983;1990, 81-3) objections. 3 Inspired by Walton's 1970s work, Currie (1990 offers the sort of speech-act approach to fictionalizing and the resulting fictions that Searle explicitly opposed, taking Gricean reflexive intentions to invite imaginings to be essential to fictions.…”

Section: Mere Pretense Vs Dedicated Representation Views Of Fictionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predelli on Fictional Discourse

García‐Carpintero

2021

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

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John Searle argues that (literary) fictions are constituted by mere pretense—by the simulation of representational activities like assertions, without any further representational aim. They are not the result of sui generis, dedicated speech acts of a specific kind, on a par with assertion. The view had earlier many defenders, and still has some. Stefano Predelli enlists considerations derived from Searle in support of his radical fictionalism. This is the view that a sentence of fictional discourse including a prima facie empty fictional name like “Emma Woodhouse” in fact “is not a sentence, and it encodes no proposition whatsoever.” His argument is broadly abductive; he claims that this view affords compelling explanations of features of fictions he finds well-established, among them that fictions without explicit narrators nonetheless have covert ones. Here I take up his arguments, in defense of the dedicated speech act view. I thus address pressing issues about the status of fictional names and the nature and ubiquity of narrators in fictions.

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Fiction as action

Cited by 7 publications

References 1 publication

‘Truth in Fiction’ Reprised

‘Truth in Fiction’ Reprised

The structure of semantic norms

Predelli on Fictional Discourse

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