Agency and fictional truth: a formal study on fiction-making

Abstract

Fictional truth, or truth in fiction/pretense, has been the object of extended scrutiny among philosophers and logicians in recent decades. Comparatively little attention, however, has been paid to its inferential relationships with time and with certain deliberate and contingent human activities, namely, the creation of fictional works. The aim of the paper is to contribute to filling the gap. Toward this goal, a formal framework is outlined that is consistent with a variety of conceptions of fictional truth and based upon a specific formal treatment of time and agency, that of so-called stit logics. Moreover, a complete axiomatic theory of fiction-making TFM is defined, where fiction-making is understood as the exercise of agency and choice in time over what is fictionally true. The language $$\mathcal {L}$$ of TFM is an extension of the language of propositional logic, with the addition of temporal and modal operators. A distinctive feature of $$\mathcal {L}$$ with respect to other modal languages is a variety of operators having to do with fictional truth, including a ‘fictionality’ operator $$M $$ (to be read as “it is a fictional truth that”). Some applications of TFM are outlined, and some interesting linguistic and inferential phenomena, which are not so easily dealt with in other frameworks, are accounted for.