Abstract

Does telling a story imply a fictional world in which that story takes place? In contemporary philosophy, “fictional worlds” are one solution to the problem of how there can be true and false judgments about fictional characters. Fictional-world accounts generally disregard whether facts are explicitly stated in the story or not; it is enough for them to be logically implied. And yet, as Ruth Lorand has observed, whether a fact is stated or merely implied changes the meaning of a story. “Imagine that the original text contains the following sentence: ‘Daisy Miller is human and as such she was born to human parents.’ Wouldn’t..