Truth in Fiction \"Live by the Harmless

Truth in Fiction

"Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy."

-- Kurt Vonnegut

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."

Ludwig Wittgenstein

In an influential article on the concept of truth in scientific language, Polish logician and mathematician Alfred Tarski advanced a detailed analysis of what constitutes a "true sentence" (Tarski, 1933). According to Tarski's semantic theory of truth, a proposition is true if and only if it states what is the case. For example, the statement, "The cat is on the mat," is true if and only if there is a real cat on an actual mat. Tarski's concern for precise criteria for determining the truth-value of sentences came out of a project to give rigorous definitions of truth in scientific discourse (Hodges, 2010).

At a more general level, logicians and philosophers have argued for centuries over variations of the correspondence theory of truth. In this theory, language is an activity that functions at a meta-level to the reality that it describes. Propositions, when true, correspond to facts and events outside language. When a speaker makes a statement about the world, if the what the speaker claims to be the case (in words) corresponds to what is the case (in reality), then the proposition is true (David, 2009). If the words do not correspond to reality, then the proposition is false. Well-formed scientific statements resolve to either truth or falsehood, depending on their relation to extra-linguistic reality.

In the correspondence theory of truth, those are the only possible values: true and false. However, as the British language philosopher J.L. Austin argued, people often use language for purposes other than making reference to an external world of facts. If the purpose of our linguistic endeavors is not strictly logical or referential; values other than truth or falsehood may be relevant to the proper analysis of the language (Austin, 1962). From theoretical speculation to creative storytelling, the intent of a statement may not be to describe an actual state of the external world at all, but rather to entertain, invent, imagine, or provoke. In such cases, the truth-value of a statement may be beside the point.

I will argue here that works of fiction are not simply "false" in the Tarskian sense of the word. The relation between "true propositions" and works of fiction is more complex than the relation between the logical operations of truth and falsity. Fiction may contain elements of truth and still be fiction. There are cases where fiction is neither true nor false, but engaged in a type of discourse that has nothing to do with the correspondence theory of truth. The logician's use of language and the fiction writer's use of language will often deploy language for unrelated ends. Therefore, it is unfair and misguided to apply the standards of one valuable pursuit to denigrate an unrelated pursuit, simply because they both use words in the form of statements.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary (2011) defines fiction as "something invented by the imagination or feigned; specifically, an invented story." When we attend a play, watch a movie, or read a novel, we typically understand that what we are witnessing is an invented story, not to be taken as a literal representation of reality. We are asked to suspend our disbelief for the sake of enjoying the story. So when a work is presented as fiction, it is not making a claim to correspond to the objective world, but creating an imaginary world.

The logician Arthur Prior proposed that all sentences that take the form of propositions asserting facts contain the implicit preface "It is true that..." (Hertzberg, 2002, p. 149). Works of fiction, in contrast, may be implicitly prefaced by the frame, "Imagine if...," or explicitly prefaced by a phrase such as "Once upon a time..." Such phrases signal that what is to follow is not to be taken as a factual report of events the author is claiming to have actually occurred.

If an audience is invited to suspend disbelief when being presented with a work of fiction, then the untruths are not mistakes or betrayals of the truth, but the question of true correspondence to the actual world is temporarily set aside. A work of fiction may even be criticized as libelous or politically dangerous if it veers too close to the truth. So an imaginative story is typically content to exist alongside the truth. As a product of the imagination, rather than an exacting scientific or historical account, the purpose of fiction may be to invite us as the audience to entertain creative non-truths, which cause us to think about the actual world from a different perspective than we normally would.

A non-truth need not be reduced to a simple falsehood, any more than an agnostic can be placed in the same camp as a militant atheist, simply because neither affirms the existence of a god. As attitudes toward religious belief may vary in subtle, non-binary ways, works of fiction need a more subtle set of terms to describe their possible non-true relationships to the actual world. Instead of being simply false or untrue, a work of fiction might be described as "parafactual" or "paralethia," to coin some imaginary words that combine the Greek prefix for alongside with a root word for truth.