Fictionality and Evidence

A preview

In the Frog and Toad story “The Surprise,” Frog secretly rakes the leaves in Toad’s front yard, while Toad secretly does the same for him. That is to say, it is fictional in “The Surprise” that Frog and Toad rake each others’ yards—where “It is fictional in S that X” is the technical, philosophical way to say “In S, X.” “The Surprise” is a simple enough story, but of course anything is complex if held up to the philosophical light and turned through the appropriate angle. The complexity in this case comes when we ask how the rakings got to be fictional. In virtue of what is “Frog raked the leaves” fictional in “The Surprise”?

Actually here wild speculation and long sessions of philosophical head-scratching seem unnecessary: the words “Frog raked the leaves” are right there on the page. But not everything fictional in a story is written on one of the story’s pages (or, in the case of a film, seeable in the images projected on the screen). In the film Inception Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Dom Cobb “has technology enabling him to enter people’s dreams. He and his team can go many layers deep, entering a dream inside a dream, and so on. To do this, Cobb must be sedated and go into a dream-state himself. During the film, he goes several layers deep in dreams, and by the final scene has exited many dreams. Is it fictional in this film that, at the end, Cobb has made it all the way out to reality? Or, instead, is it fictional that he is still in a dream, or that the film does not decide between these possibilities?” The answer is not “right there on the screen,” and when the film ends, the answer is unclear.

Many people, wanting to know the answer, will re-watch the film. When they do, what are they looking for, that they think will help settle the question? A natural idea is that they are looking for evidence: “facts” that are fictional in the film, which are or would be good evidence that Cobb made it out (or, alternatively, that he didn’t). This suggests that, sometimes at least, something X is fictional in story S when some other things E1, E2, ... that are “already” fictional in S are good evidence for X. (Roughly speaking, “good evidence” here means that someone whose evidence consisted only of E1, E2, and so on, would be justified in believing S.)