Possible Worlds and Fictional Worlds

Abstract

It seems almost self-evident that narrative works of art tell possible stories. But is it worth taking the concept of the “possible world” at face value and claiming that we can account for the “world” of narrative fiction through the concept of possible worlds (as developed in modal semantics)? According to David Lewis’s famous paper, Truth in fiction (1978/1983), the answer is yes. In this paper, I will present Lewis’s analysis in detail and argue that we can only fully evaluate its strengths and weaknesses by paying careful attention to two key restrictions that Lewis imposes on theories seeking to account forthe intuitive truth conditions of sentences used paratextually (i.e. to report on what goes on in a fiction). His own theory meets both requirement, Non-triviality (“the analysis should avoid delineating the range of possible worlds by relying on the concept of ‘truth in fiction’”) and Possibility-Fictionality Asymmetry (“the analysis should avoid including
the actual world among the relevant possible worlds”), but Lewis pays a heavy theoretical price to satisfy them. The technical solution he employs to ensure their fulfillment ultimately results in the model, in certain cases, misidentifying the range of truths of artistic narrative fictions. Lewis does not address this issue, as he apparently does not consider the Interpretative Asymmetry constraint binding (“the analysis must be sensitive to the difference in the nature of the inferences underlying the interpretation of literary texts and other types of narrative texts”). In this paper, I will show that Non-triviality and Interpretative Asymmetry cannot be satisfied simultaneously. If we insist on Non-triviality, our analysis will fail to adequately capture the specificities of artistic fiction, though the possible-world discourse will still offer some explanatory power – this is the solution Lewis adopts. Conversely, if we prioritize Interpretative Asymmetry, the concept of “possible worlds” will not do any real explanatory work in the theory, though the analysis will be sensitive to the unique aspects of literary narratives—this is the path taken by the authors of post-Lewis theories of fiction.