True or False?: An updated look at the fictive use of language

The truth-value and function of fictive uses of language have plagued analytic philosophers. The greats have all given different answers when faced with a statement like “Tom Sawyer ran away from home”, true or false, even though a 12 year old tends to have no problem with the question. (Blocker 27) Meinong said it was true, after some conceptual additions to language; Russell said it was false because there was no Tom Sawyer; and Strawson said “none of the above” because it wasn’t a statement at all. Since the works of all three of these philosophers, and many others on the subject, the issue has still not been totally resolved. Works by H. Gene Blocker and Richard M. Gale may be able to shed light on the issue, however, from its two most important aspects. Gale spends his time focusing on what it means to use language fictively, what is actually being done when an actor utters a statement like “Hamlet killed his father” or an author writes in his novel “four legs good, two legs bad.” Meanwhile, Blocker explores what can be said about those fictive words, whether we can truthfully say Claudius said Hamlet killed his own father or a talking pig said “four legs good, two legs bad.” The combined effect of these two is to give a greater insight into how we use language, generally, and what it means to use language fictively.

Gale takes as his method Austin’s trilogy of acts – the locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary. Using this distinction he is able to defend his thesis that the difference between fictive and non-fictive use are pragmatic, having to do with a difference in how the speaker relates herself to others and affects their behavior rather than what she says (324-5). Whether the speaker says something fictively or not he is saying the same thing, and thus the locutionary act is the same. However, the illocutionary act differs between a fictive and nonfictive use of language. Just as much as a nonfictive use of language has a truth-value and can be verified, a fictive use of language also has a truth-value and can be verified, as this is contained in the locutionary act. Gale argues, however, that in using language fictively the speaker does not assert or state the locutionary act. She is not asserting existence or truth when uttering the sentence, as one would when uttering a sentence that is nonfictive (327).

Despite the ability to assign truth-value to a fictive use of language, however, Gale argues that we would not want to do that for two pragmatic reasons. First, saying what a person said is false reflects adversely on the speaker, but since the speaker did not assert that what she said was true it would be unfair to charge her with saying something false. Second, the ascription of truth-value requires that some question or doubt has been raised concerning the statement or someone has actually asserted it, but since the speaker has not asserted it and there is no doubt that she has not asserted it, then the occasion for assigning a truth-value has not come about. Similarly, Gale argues that the fictive use of language, at the level of the locutionary act, has the same ability to refer as the nonfictive use. Specifically, he holds to the belief that meaning is contained within the sentences themselves, not their use, and that the meaning contains the conditions that must be fulfilled for something to be its referent (330). However, to refer in the illocutionary sense is to do all that is contained in referring in the locutionary sense but also to intend to refer to some existent individual. The use of language fictively does not attempt to do this, just as it does not attempt o assert or state, and thus only refers in the locutionary sense (328).

Gale’s conclusive argument for how language is use fictively comes in the form of illocutionary disengagement. Because the character of the story may assert or state a sentence and intend to refer to another character in the story, and the reader or listener understands that this is happening, it is not just that the fictive use of language does not make use of the illocutionary act, but rather that the fictive use of language only pretends to perform the illocutionary act (335). Just as saying “I know I believe…” removes the illocutionary force of “I believe” because of the illocutionary force of “I know” the initial illocutionary force of the story being fictional and the intention that it be fictional removes all illocutionary force from the rest of the language in the story. In Gale’s words, “the effect of a fictive illocutionary act is to drain of illocutionary force every verb that occurs within its scope” (336). And it is because of this draining of illocutionary force that the perlocutionary act is altered. Generally, the perlocutionary act of a nonfictive sentence is direct – a sentence asserted as a warning is intended to invoke tension or anxiety in the hearer – while in the fictive use of language the aim is to suppress or inhibit the usual response and thus the perlocutionary act is quite different.

Finally, Gale does move into a discussion of whether or not a statement like “Hamlet is a prince” is true or not. He argues that in the fictive use of language the statements are not “really about” fictional entities, meaning the reference to the entity can be eliminated. Before explaining how this happens, he separates three different uses of the above sentence to isolate the one that is most important. There is a fictive use of the sentence, such as in the story; there is an assertive use by a speaker intending to refer to some real life person; and there is an assertive use in which a speaker intends to describe what is related in some fictional story (333). It is the third type that is most important to our goal here, and is the one that Gale argues is not “really about” the fictional entity. His reductive analysis just works to expand the statement to exclude the proper name, such that the above sentence becomes “In some fictional story it is written that there is a man named ‘Hamlet’ having properties ? who is a prince” (333). Because there is no longer a referent, the sentence cannot be false under Russell’s argument for its falsity.

Blocker defends much of the same idea of how fictive language interacts with ordinary language. For both Blocker and Gale, fictive language is a parasite on ordinary language – fictive language needs ordinary language for its existence, but not vice versa. As Gale argues, it is easy to imagine a society that uses purely nonfictive language, but not one that uses purely fictive language, since the use of fictive language – pretending to perform a illocutionary act – requires a knowledge of how to employ the language nonfictively as well. For Blocker, the way that fictive language, and fictional referring in particular, differs from nonfictive language is in its use of partial referring, rather than ordinary referring (27). It is problematic, he argues, that referring is still perceived in terms of a paradigm relation of a description to an existing thing, because there is a more fundamental referential relation of thought to an object of thought, whether real or imaginary (Ibid.). As such, partial referring finds it roots in social convention that accepts sentences that aren’t true in the real world and expressions that don’t fully refer to an existent being.

Partially reference is not unique to fictional entities, however, it is something done everyday in every type of referring statement, and especially in referring statements about people. The difference, however, is that in ordinary reference we understand the referred object to occupy the same spatio-temporal world as ourselves, while in fiction we understand the referred object not to occupy that world (Blocker 36). Thus, an explanation of partial referring will give a better understanding of how we are able to talk about fictional entities. Partial referring is almost all we ever do – descriptive expressions refer not by asserting or implying real existence but by our understanding them to be partial and generalized accounts of full-bodied, complete, concrete situations (28). A sentence like “He slowly reached over and turned off the alarm”, whether he is fictive or real, only becomes a description of a complete context of objects and events by positing the completeness. Thus, the problem in ordinary language and fictive language is no different: somehow a world is given independently of ontological questions of real existence (Ibid.).

The theory of partial referring explains why even as we know there are no such people as these fictional entities, we understand the narrative as the revelation of whole complex persons. The character in a work of fiction is treated as a “partially disclosed entity about whom more can be learned, who therefore contains more than our description of him, and in that sense, transcends the actual descriptive sentences about him” (32). As for the explanation of truth and falsity as it relates to a novel, Blocker argues that “works of fiction describe the world in general terms with which we may agree or disagree and in this sense can be said to be true or false” (35). However, this ordinary truthfulness is different from its special “literary truth.” This special sense of truth lies in presenting a glimpse of the real world from a given standpoint, a partial standpoint. The truth of statements supported by independent factual evidence confirms whether a specific way of seeing the world is consistent with the facts, but the literary truth has even greater value because it shows us how to see the world in a given way in the first place.

The explanations of fictional entities given by Blocker and Gale may not satisfy the deeply logic-oriented, but it offers up an approach based around how fictive stories are actually presented and how people actually discuss fictional entities and as such explains, in much the same way Strawson did, how people actually use language with all its logical imperfections. Hamlet did not kill his father, but it is true that Claudius said he did; and a talking pig did say two legs was bad, even though the pigs went on to walk on two legs in the end of the novel. These things can be said to be truth, even though Hamlet, Claudius nor talking pigs exist in this world. If they couldn’t be, then much of our language, culture and understanding of the world would be lost.

Works Cited

Blocker, H. G. (1974).The truth about fictional entities. Philosophical Quarterly. 24, 27-36.

Gale, R. M. (1971).The Fictive use of language. Philosophy: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. 46, 324-340.