# Common Belief and Make-Believe

## 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.

## Key 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.