Truth in Fiction: Rethinking its Logic , by John Woods, Springer, 2018
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Truth in Fiction: Rethinking its Logic, by John Woods, Springer, 2018 Andrew Aberdein 1 Received: 10 August 2020 / Revised: 10 August 2020 / Accepted: 26 August 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Truth in Fiction (2018) is a sequel of sorts to John Woods’s much earlier The Logic of Fiction (1974). In that book, after canvassing a series of approaches to the semantics of fiction drawn from different areas of nonclassical logic, Woods eventually advocates a system of quantified modal logic which, as he now puts it, “appl[ied] to literary theory the refreshment of a well-understood and rigorously organized instrument of analysis” (125).1 However, the present book reflects the major turn Woods’s thinking has taken over recent decades away from the formalization of informal reasoning and towards a naturalized logic. Elsewhere he has revisited his early work applying formal logic to the understanding of the fallacies in the light of this naturalistic turn (for example, Woods 2013); here he revisits his early work on fiction. Woods now argues that formal approaches to everyday reasoning lose “sight of an important trichotomy which marks the difference between consequence-having and consequence-spotting and … consequence-drawing” (14). Whereas formal logic acquits itself well in accounting for the first of these activities, since the latter two take place “in the psychological spaces of human beings, the need for an empirically sensitive naturalized logic is unmissable” (218).
1 Taking Stories Seriously Woods rightly avers that “One of the worst mistakes a philosopher can make about fiction, especially popular fiction, is to hold that since it is meant mainly for entertainment … fiction’s not of much interest to anything as serious as philosophy” (104). Truth in Fiction is true to this admirable maxim, and pays due heed not just to fiction in general, but also to many of its idiosyncrasies. Woods complains that other philosophical accounts of fiction often display “alienation from the home-thinking and home1
This and all subsequent unqualified page references are to Woods (2018).
* Andrew Aberdein [email protected]
1
School of Arts and Communication, Florida Institute of Technology, 150 West University Blvd Melbourne FL 32901-6975 USA
Philosophia
speakings of stories” (217). Specifically, Woods attributes to many rival theorists of fiction five “Basic Laws of Fiction”: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
The something law: Everything whatever is something or other. The existence law: Reference and quantification are existentially loaded. The truth law: No sentence violating the existence law can be true. The fiction law: The sentences of fiction fail to refer and they fail to be true. The inference law: Inferences from and within fiction operate, if at all, in a much more circumscribed way than natural language in referentially stable inferences (35).
All but the first of these laws Woods repudiates as “an irretrievably lost cause for fiction” (149). He reasons as follows. Fiction plays a large part in many people’s lives. They talk ab
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