Page 287 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Notions of reference and truth are subjected to ide- alization. Factual discourse is given priority as being most amenable to formalization. One very influential assumption has been that language in its 'proper' use should be directed at the real world. It follows immedi- ately, therefore, that there is a problem about dis- course which traffics in fictional entities. This renders names like 'Sherlock Holmes' or 'Pickwick' anom- alous and creates a difficulty in assigning any clear truth status (truth-value) to the sentences in which those expressions appear. One tactic is to deny fic- tional statements any truth-value whatever; another is to go beyond the confines of traditional two-valued logic and assign them a third value distinct from truth and falsity.
Among the most common strategies has been the resort to some form of paraphrase. After analysis, an example like 'Hamlet killed Polonius' is construed as a disguised way of talking either about Shakespeare or the play he wrote. The whole purpose of this analysis is to accommodate fictional discourse within the stan- dard framework of truth and falsity. Other logicians have appealed to the notion of 'possible worlds.' On this approach, it makes sense to say, for example, that Sherlock Holmes exists and plays the violin in some worlds other than the actual world. Thus the name 'Sherlock Holmes' has a reference in some worlds and not others, and the proposition that he plays the violin is true in some worlds, false or even lacking a truth- value in others. Apart from difficulties with the idea of 'possible worlds' itself, there are problems peculiar to fiction and its 'objects.' Unlike real things, the enti- ties of fiction are incomplete. While the proposition that Napoleon disliked cats is in principle decidable, the proposition that Sherlock Holmes disliked cats is not. On this latter issue, Conan Doyle's texts are silent. Furthermore, according to so-called 'classical' logic, anything whatever follows what is false. If the state-
ments of fiction are taken as false, then what might seem to be perfectly acceptable inferences made by readers are rendered arbitrary: it would be as reason- able to infer from Conan Doyle's novels that the moon is made of green cheese as it would to infer that Holmes was cleverer than Inspector Lestrade. Worse still, some instances of fiction (science fiction or fan- tasy tales) are paradoxical or logically inconsistent and therefore violate the constraints on what can count as a 'possible world.'
3. Further Developments
In addition to attempts to marry some of the approaches outlined, some logicians have developed new systems of logic which tolerate the inconsistencies and anomalies prohibited by more 'classical' con- ceptions. According to some proponents of these newer systems, the idea that there is any one logic of fiction may itself be questionable. It suffices to say here that these new proposals remain controversial.
Bibliography
Crittendon C 1991 Unreality: The Metaphysics of Fictional Objects. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY
Currie G 1990 The Nature of Fiction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Donnellan K 1974 Speaking of nothing. Philosophical Review 83: 3-31
Lamarque P V, Olsen S H 1994 Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective. Clarendon Press, Oxford
Lewis D 1978 Truth in fiction. American Philosophical Quar- terly 15(1): 37-46
Rorty R 1982 Is there a problem about fictional discourse? In: Rorty R Consequences of Pragmatism. Harvester, Brighton
Searle J R 1974-75 The logical status of fictional discourse. New Literary History 6: 319-32
Walton K 1990 Mimesis as Make-believe. Harvard Uni- versity Press, Cambridge, MA
Woods J H 1974 The Logic of Fiction. Mouton, The Hague
The topic of identity is fundamental in twentieth- century philosophy. It has been central to many of the most vexed problems and debates in philosophy of language, metaphysics, and the philosophy of science. Yet the logic of identity is extremely simple and gives little hint of the philosophical dividends which have flowed from its discovery and application. Identity is, technically, a congruence relation, that is, a relation
that each thing has to itself and to nothing else. The identity relation can be added to predicate logic to yield the enriched language of predicate logic with identity. Thus enriched, the predicate calculus can express numerical sentences, ones that capture the exclusive sense of'else' in English and can also provide contextual definitions of descriptive phrases in the fashion pion- eered by Bertrand Russell in his theory of descriptions.
Identity A. A. Brennan
Identity
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