Chapter 12 - Fiction

Summary

This chapter takes up the question of truthmakers for truths in and about fiction. After adopting a liberal attitude toward such truths, it surveys some of the basic positions and stances one might take regarding the alethic and metaphysical issues related to fiction. It then offers an (admittedly non-comprehensive) approach to the truthmakers for the truths related to fiction. Though the topic of truthmaking and fiction has only received minimal explicit attention, the view favoured here is most in line with Amie Thomasson’s artifactual theory that takes fictional characters to be dependently existing abstract beings. The chapter finishes by downplaying the ontological costs that accompany this view, and showing how views like Thomasson’s about fictional characters resonate with the trivialist view about mathematics.