Unreliability, Deception, and Fictional Facts

Abstract

Many if not most unreliable narratives somehow fool the reader about what is the case in the fiction. Call this type of unreliability ›deceptive unreliability‹ In this paper I discuss and define deceptively unreliable narration. My argument proceeds in three steps. First, I argue that a reader can be fooled about fictional facts in two ways, as they might either be given wrong information about what is the case in the fiction, or relevant information might be kept from them. In both cases, the consequence is that the reader is justified in entertaining wrong beliefs about what is the case in the fiction. So, according to my preliminary definition of deceptive unreliability, a deceptively unreliable narrative is a narrative that justifies the reader in entertaining wrong beliefs about the facts of the fiction. This definition raises a number of questions, one of them being: »What determines what is the case in a fiction?« In the second step of my argument I give an answer to this question. Roughly, it is that fictional facts depend on interpretations in the following way: in a certain fiction p is the case if at least one optimal interpretation of said fiction claims that p in this fiction. As I argue in the final part of my essay, this finding is hugely relevant for my preliminary definition of deceptive unreliability. Accordingly, I propose to change that definition in order to avert an implausible consequence. The definition of deceptive unreliability I submit is, roughly, this: a narrative that is deceptively unreliable justifies a belief about the fictional facts that is not correct according to all optimal interpretations of it.