Organon F
Volume 31, February 2024, Issue 1, Pages 60–89
ISSN 2585-7150 (online) ISSN 1335-0668 (print)
Research Article
The Alethic Status of Contradictions in Fictional Discourse
Vladimir Vujošević
Whether contradictions could be “true in fiction” has become an unavoidable topic in the debates on the bounds of fictionality. This paper claims that genuine contradictions in fiction are far more infrequent phenomena than is usually claimed. The majority of cases that have been put forward as examples of contradictory fictions can be convincingly understood either as instances of rhetorical pseudo-contradictions or (in the case of the so-called “forking-path“ narratives) as disjunctions of possible outcomes rather than contradictory conjunctions of simultaneously enacted exclusive scenarios. The only philosophically interesting category of contradictory fiction would be the one in which a single “root” contradiction is explicitly affirmed as the central element of the story (in the third-person, authoritative narrative voice). The paradigmatic example would be the revised version of Graham Priest’s “Sylvan’s Box” this paper presents. However, it could be argued that the problem with such narratives is that they unsuccessfully attempt to perceptually code what remains exclusively propositional content. They are, thus, fatally under-described, and the truth of the contradictory proposition fails to be adequately established in fiction. The idea that one can posit contradictions as fictional facts is based on oversimplified notions of narrative conventions and truth in fiction.
Truth in fiction; contradiction; the law of non-contradic-tion; “Sylvan’s Box”.
Author
Vladimir Vujošević
Affiliation
University of Donja Gorica
Address
Faculty of Philology, Oktoih 1, ME-81000 Podgorica, Montenegro
Received
21 September 2023
Revised
19 February 2024
Accepted
22 February 2024
Publishers
Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences
Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences
APA
Vujošević, V. (2024). The Alethic Status of Contradictions in Fictional Discourse. Organon F, 31(1), 60–89. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2024.31104
Chicago
Vujošević, Vladimir. 2024. "The Alethic Status of Contradictions in Fictional Discourse." Organon F 31 (1): 60–89. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2024.31104
Harvard
Vujošević, V. (2024). The Alethic Status of Contradictions in Fictional Discourse. Organon F, 31(1), pp. 60–89. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2024.31104
© Vladimir Vujošević
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