Do We Need Fictional Truth?
J from Blogosophy proposes that we use "in a manner of speaking" instead of "accoring to the fiction" as a prefix for fictional statements. This, J says, would also work for the problematic cases like "Sherlock Holmes consumed drugs that are illegal nowadays". I'm afraid I don't quite understand this operator. What are the truth conditions of "in a manner of speaking, p"?
Like Thomasson and most other philosophers, and unlike me, J also thinks there are different "modes" of speaking about fictional characters. If this were correct, it would perhaps open the way to a rather different account of fictional truth. The accounts I know all agree that we need to find true paraphrases for fictional statements that we accept but whose (apparent) logical consequences we don't accept. If we accept "Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street" but not "Somebody lived at 221B Baker Street", what we really mean by the former statement can't be that Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street. So what do we really mean? Maybe we really mean that the relevant fiction ascribes to Sherlock Holmes the property living at 221B Baker Street, where this has to be accepted as primitive (van Inwagen). Or maybe what we really mean is that Sherlock Holmes in some sense encodes this property (Parsons). Or maybe we mean that if the relevant fiction were told as known fact, Sherlock Holmes would live at 221B Baker Street (Lewis).
The possible alternative would be to say that statements about fictional characters are not even meant to be true. Certainly not everything we say is meant to be true. Perhaps statements about fictional characters are part of some other linguistic activity, like the statements actors make on stage. Then we don't need to worry about true paraphrases. Of course we still need an account of what goes on in this special kind of language game. And clearly the ordinary meaning of the used words plays an essential role in it. The only advantage is that we can use the broader category of what would be acceptable to say instead of what would be true to say in our account.
Compare van Fraassen's account of statements about theoretical entities in science: According to van Fraassen, talk about such entities is not governed by conventions to tell the truth, but rather by conventions to say something that is empirically adequate. Similarly, one could argue that statements about fictional characters are only meant to be "fictionally adequate", where, roughly, a statement is fictionally adequate iff it is true according to the fiction.
An obvious problem, even granted the distinction between modes of speaking about fictional characters, is that such an account seems to be only a minor notational variant of a standard account on which the relevant statements are regarded as true. Thus van Fraassen could just as well say that by asserting a scientific statement S we really mean that S is empirically adequate. That is, scientific statements carry an implicit adequacy operator: S is true iff empirically adequate(S). Similarly, it is hard to tell the difference between a convention to say sentences S such that "S is fictionally adequate" is true and a convention to say true sentences of the form "S is fictionally adequate" in which the "fictionally adequate" operator may be left tacid.