Fiction — A semantic approach

Abstract

The semantic approach to fiction presented in this paper is a traditional (Fregean) one with ‘sense’ (intensional meaning or content) as a basic concept and thus an alternative to some modern formal-semantic-approaches, especially to possible-world-semantics. In section one I try to define a concept called ‘fictional discourse’. This definition makes it possible to understand works of fiction as texts which consist (at least partly) of fictional discourse. In section two I defend my semantic approach against ontological arguments which make use of terms like ‘fictive entity’. In section three I provide a brief account of literary works of fiction, which includes an answer to the question ‘what makes literary works of fiction true?’.