The Language of Fiction

The Language of Fiction brings together new research on fiction from philosophy and linguistics. Fiction is a topic that has long been studied in philosophy. Yet recently there has been a surge of work on fictional discourse in the intersection between linguistics and philosophy of language. There has been a growing interest in examining long-standing issues concerning fiction from a perspective informed both by philosophy and linguistic theory. The Language of Fiction contains fourteen essays by leading scholars in both fields, as well as a substantial Introduction by the editors. The collection is organized in three parts, each with their own introduction. Part I, “Truth, reference, and imagination”, offers new, interdisciplinary perspectives on some of the central themes from the philosophy of fiction: What is fictional truth? How do fictional names refer? What kind of speech act is involved in telling a fictional story? What is the relation between fiction and imagination? Part II, “Storytelling”, deals with themes originating from the study of narrative: How do we infer a coherent story from a sequence of event descriptions? And how do we interpret the words of impersonal or unreliable narrators? Part III, “Perspective shift”, zooms in on an alleged key characteristic of fictional narratives, viz. the way we get access to the fictional characters’ inner lives, through a variety of literary techniques for representing what they say, think, or see.

Hassidic Idealism: Responding to Problems

The previous chapter suggests that a radical idealism follows from the most basic tenets of Judaism. This chapter responds to various problems that arise from that idealism: does it allow for free will; does it rob us of ontological significance; does it exacerbate the problem of evil; and does it allow for true contradictions? All of these questions are answered with the use of various philosophical tools developed in the philosophy of fiction.

Fictional Discourse

This book defends a Radical Fictionalist Semantics for fictional discourse. Focusing on proper names as prototypical devices of reference, it argues that fictional names are only fictionally proper names, and that, as a result, fictional sentences do not encode propositions. According to Radical Fictionalism, the contentful outcomes achieved by fiction are derived from the outcomes of so-called impartation, that is, from the effects achieved by the use of language. As a result, Radical Fictionalism pays special attention to fictional telling and to related themes in narrative fiction. In particular, the book proposes a Radical Fictionalist approach to the distinction between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic fiction, and to the divide between storyworlds and narrative peripheries. These ideas are then applied to the discussion of classic themes in the philosophy of fiction, including narrative time, literary translation, storyworld importation, fictional languages, inconsistent fictions, nested narratives, and narrative closure. Particular attention is also given to the commitments of Radical Fictionalism when it comes to discourse about fiction, as in prefixed sentences of the form ‘according to fiction F, … ’. In its final two chapters, the book extends Radical Fictionalism to critical discourse. In Chapter 7 it introduces the ideas of critical and biased retelling, and in Chapter 8 it pauses on the relationships between Radical Fictionalism and talk about literary characters.

Introduction

The author’s argumentative strategy for the book is introduced, and situated methodologically. An explanation follows that in the first half of this book a theory of fictional content known as ‘extreme intentionalism’ is proffered, with the argument that it should be taken very seriously as an adequate account of fictional truth. Some critics of the theory are canvassed and extreme intentionalism is differentiated from certain other positions with which it might be confused. It is then indicated how, in the second half of the book, it will be shown that extreme intentionalism and the lessons learnt from it can illuminate cognate questions in the philosophy of fiction and imagination. The author’s aim in this book is explained as being to construct three complementary explanatory theories simultaneously, one about fictional truth, one about fictional content, and one about imagination. In each case the methodological approach employed is distinguished from that of straightforward conceptual analysis. Finally, several advantages of the proposed approach are pointed out.

Fiction and Organization Studies

The topic of fiction is in itself not new to the domain of organization studies. However, prior research has often separated fiction from the reality of organizations and used fiction metaphorically or as a figurative source to describe and interpret organizations. In this article, we go beyond the classic use of fiction, and suggest that fiction should be a central concern in organization studies. We draw on the philosophy of fiction to offer an alternative account of the nature of fiction and its basic operation. We specifically import Searle’s work on speech acts, Walton’s pretense theory, Iser’s fictionalizing acts, and Ricoeur’s work on narrative fiction to theorize about organizations as fictions. In doing so, we hope that we not only offer an account of the “ontological status” of organizations but also provide a set of theoretical coordinates and lenses through which, separately or together, the notion of organizations as fictions can be approached and understood.

Metaphysical perspectives on YHWH as a fictional entity in the Hebrew Bible

Within a literary ontology, YHWH in the Hebrew Bible is technically also a fictional entity or object. In Hebrew Bible scholarship, a variety of philosophical issues surrounding fiction have received sustained and in-depth attention. However, the mainstream research on these matters tends to focus on the philosophical foundations of or backgrounds to a particular literary theory, rather than on metaphysical puzzles as encountered in the philosophy of fiction proper. To fill this gap, the present article seeks to provide a meta-theoretical overview of the main contemporary philosophical perspectives on the metaphysics of fictional objects. Three views (and their sub-currents) are discussed, namely possibilism, (neo-)Meinongianism and (literary) creationism. Each view’s theory is introduced and critically appropriated with reference to what is implied to be an answer to the question of what exactly the biblical character YHWH can meaningfully be said to be in the context of the metaphysics of fictional objects. In this way, the present study also goes beyond the traditional concern with the nature of God in Old Testament theology.