This monograph examines truth in fiction by applying the techniques of
a naturalized logic of human cognitive practices. The author
structures his project around two focal questions. What would it take
to write a book about truth in literary discourse with reasonable
promise of getting it right? What would it take to write a book about
truth in fiction as true to the facts of lived literary experience as
objectivity allows? It is argued that the most semantically
distinctive feature of the sentences of fiction is that they
areunambiguously true and false together. It is true that Sherlock
Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street and also concurrently false that he
did. A second distinctive feature of fiction is that the reader at
large knows of this inconsistency and isn’t in the least cognitively
molested by it. Why, it is asked, would this be so? What would explain
it? Two answers are developed. According to the no-contradiction
thesis, the semantically tangled sentences of fiction are indeed
logically inconsistent but not logically contradictory. According to
the no-bother thesis, if the inconsistencies of fiction were
contradictory, a properly contrived logic for the rational management
of inconsistency would explain why readers at large are not thrown off
cognitive stride by their embrace of those contradictions. As
developed here, the account of fiction suggests the presence of an
underlying three - or four-valued dialethic logic. The author shows
this to be a mistaken impression. There are only two truth-values in
his logic of fiction. The naturalized logic of Truth in
Fiction jettisons some of the standard assumptions and analytical
tools of contemporary philosophy, chiefly because the neurotypical
linguistic and cognitive behaviour of humanity at large is at variance
with them. Using the resources of a causal response epistemology in
tandem with the naturalized logic, the theory produced here is
data-driven, empirically sensitive, and open to a circumspect
collaboration with the empirical sciences of language and cognition.
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Rethinking its Logic
Product details
ISBN
9783319726588
Published
2018
Publisher
Springer Nature
Language
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Author