A Pragmatic Framework for Truth in Fiction
Andrea Bonomi · dialectica · 2003
According to R. Stalnaker, context plays a role in determining the proposition expressed by a sentence by providing the domain of possible worlds that propositions distinguish between: a sentence expresses a proposition by selecting a subset of the set of possible situations given by the context. This is also true for embedded sentences, but these sentences express propo-sitions by selecting subsets out of contexts derived from the basic one. In this paper we pro-pose a semantic analysis of sentences of the form “In fiction x, p ” based on this picture of context. We argue that the derived contexts for sentences in the scope of “In fiction x ” are determined by three factors: what the beliefs of the author are taken to be, the conventions established for the fiction, and a defeasible presumption of reliability of the narrator. We develop a formal implementation based on the notion of a system of spheres centered on a set of worlds. 1. Fiction and communication When we communicate with others, we do so against a background of com-mon beliefs, a body of information shared by the participants in the commu-nicative exchange and recognized by them to be shared. The background of shared information may help us to determine the content of what is said and is updated in the course of the communication process as a result of the speech acts performed by the participants in the process. This picture of how com-munication works has been developed by R. Stalnaker in a number of papers.1 While the type of discourse most often discussed in these papers is the spo-ken discourse, the picture is applicable to written texts as well. For example,