Fictions that don’t tell the truth

Philosophical Studies (2024) 181:1025–1046 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02098-7 Fictions that don’t tell the truth Neri Marsili1 Accepted: 30 December 2023 / Published online: 25 April 2024 © The Author(s) 2024 Abstract Can fictions lie? According to a classic conception, works of fiction can never contain lies, since their content is not presented as true, nor is it meant to deceive us. But this classic view can be challenged. Sometimes fictions appear to make claims about the actual world, and these claims can be designed to convey falsehoods, historical misconceptions, and even pernicious stereotypes. Should we conclude that some fictional statements are lies? This article introduces two views that support a positive answer, and two that support a negative one. After examining various ways in which fictions can deceive, it concludes in favour of the view that fictional statements can mislead, but never lie. Keywords Fiction · Lying · Unreliable narration · Deception · Assertion · Implicature Poets themselves, tho’ liars by profession, always endeavor to give an air of truth to their fictions David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature Now for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth. For, as I take it, to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false. […] But the poet (as I said before) never affirmeth […]. And therefore, though he recount things not true, yet because he telleth them not for true, he lieth not. Sir Phillip Sydney, An Apology for Poetry 1 The poet: a liar by profession? Consider the oft-quoted passages above. They instantiate two rather radical, opposite views. The first one, defended by Hume, is that all fiction-writers are liars. Famously endorsed by Plato, who did not wish to include the mendacious poets in his Republic, this view exerted influence on philosophers throughout history: Pascal defined * Neri Marsili ; 1 UNED, Madrid, Spain 13 Vol.:(0123456789) 1026 N. Marsili poetic imagination as the “queen of lies and error”, and about a century later Hume penned the harsh comment above. Nowadays, tides have changed. The thesis that fiction writers are liars strikes most contemporary philosophers as risible—little more than a historical curiosity. Surely fiction and lying have an important trait in common: typically, they both involve saying something that isn’t (believed to be) true. But the current consensus is that it would be erroneous to conflate these two concepts, since they are importantly distinct. Many philosophers nowadays (like most folk) rather side with Sir Phillip Sidney’s view that fictional statements aren’t lies—however, as we shall see, exceptions abound. There are excellent reasons to side with Sydney. It would be rather odd to claim that the falsities contained in a work of fiction are lies. Take, for instance, the incipit of Jorge Luis Borges’s The Lottery in Babylon: “Like all the men in Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have known omnipotence, ignominy, imprisonment.”. Nobody would argue that Borges’s opening statement is a lie, even if Borges surely believed it to be false—he was never a proconsul, nor a slave; nor did he share this fate with “all the men in Babylon” (among other reasons, because he never lived there). But why do we judge that the Borges has not lied in writing this statement? Sydney’s plausible suggestion is that lying requires making assertions (“telling things for true”), whereas authors of fiction (“poets”) don’t present their stories as true. Accusations of mendacity, then, aren’t in order. The falsities we find in fictional works aren’t lies, because they aren’t affirmed. This explanation is simple and appealing. But it’s not the only explanation on the table. Some philosophers think that a deceptive intent is essential to lying, and an alternative explanation follows from this view. If Borges’s incipit contains no lies (the story goes), it’s because Borges has no intent to make his readers believe something false. He doesn’t want to convince them that that he was a slave and a proconsul, or that he lived in Babylon. Lies differ from fiction because lies, unlike fictions, aim to deceive. Which of these two views better tracks the distinction between fiction and lying? And can genuine lies be found within works of fiction? This paper aims to answer these two questions. Its goal is to determine what grounds the distinction between lying and fiction, and to establish whether these concepts really are mutually exclusive. 2 Fiction versus lying 2.1 Defining lying, and distinguishing it from fiction How does lying differ from fiction? Let’s start by considering what lying is. There is consensus that stating what you believe to be false is a necessary condition for lying: 13 Fictions that don’t tell the truth 1027 you cannot lie unless you explicitly say (as opposed to imply) something that you believe to be false:1 Lying-Nec: A speaker S lies only if S states that p and S believes that p is false Lying-Nec identifies necessary conditions that aren’t jointly sufficient to determine whether an utterance is a lie. Alone, it is unable to distinguish lying from fiction. Consider Borges’s example once again. Writing The Lottery in Babylon’s incipit, Borges stated something that he believes to be false (that he was a proconsul, a slave, and so forth). The incipit satisfies Lying-Nec, but it’s not a lie. To distinguish lying from fiction, Lying-Nec needs to be narrowed down. We need a criterion that can tell lying apart from ‘non-mendacious falsities’2: fictions, but also ironic statements; jokes; teasing remarks; hyperboles; metaphors; euphemisms, and the like. Historically, philosophers have offered two competing solutions: Deceptionist accounts of lying and Assertionist accounts. Deceptionist accounts complement Lying-Nec with an ‘intention to deceive condition’ (IDC below): Deceptionist definitions: S lies to A iff: (a) S states that p (b) S believes ¬p (IDC) S intends A to believe p3 For the Deceptionist, non-mendacious falsities aren’t lies because they aren’t meant to deceive. If Borges isn’t lying, it’s because he isn’t attempting to deceive his readers (he isn’t trying to convince them that it is actually true that he was a proconsul, a slave, etc.). But there is an alternative approach to explain why fictional statements of this sort aren’t lies. One can complement Lying-Nec with the requirement that the speaker must genuinely assert that p (AC below): Assertionist definitions: S lies to A iff: (a) S says p (b) S believes ¬p 1 For an overview, Mahon (2015). For discussion of some complications regarding the requirement that the speaker has to believe that what they say is false, see Marsili (2014, 2016, 2018); for some reservations about the idea that the speaker must make an explicit statement, see Viebahn (2017, 2021), but cf. Marsili and Löhr (2022) and Pepp (2022) for a reply. 2 I am using ‘falsities’ for ease of exposition here, (...truncated)