Common Belief and Make-Believe
Merel Semeijn
TL;DR
This paper explores how fictional truths in make-believe games depend on shared beliefs among participants rather than unknown facts about fictional elements.
Contribution
The paper proposes a novel account of fictional truth based on common beliefs among participants, avoiding interference from unknown facts about props.
Findings
Fictional truth can be grounded in participants' shared beliefs about props.
Conditional principles of generation should only apply to props whose existence is commonly believed.
Two objections based on objectivity of fictional truth are discussed.
Abstract
On Walton’s account of make-believe, unknown facts concerning the existence and nature of props can influence fictional truth. Inspired by Lewis’s and Walton’s discussions of import of fictional truth, I explore the shape and tenability of an alternative account that avoids such interference of unknown facts, by making fictional truth rely on participants’ common beliefs about props: conditional principles of generation are only valid if they quantify over props whose existence and nature is common belief between participants of the game of make-believe. I discuss two possible objections to the proposed account that are both based on the intuition that fictional truth should be something that is objective and independent of participants’ mental states.
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Taxonomy
TopicsEpistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Philosophy and History of Science