Manuel Garcia Carpentero
Manuel García-Carpintero was born in Daimiel (Ciudad Real, Spain) in 1957. He got his "Licenciatura" ( ≈ BA) at the University of Barcelona (1979) and his PhD also at the University of Barcelona (1988), where he has taught since 1984, after teaching at secondary schools between 1979 and 1984. He visited the CSLI, Stanford University, for one academic year (1990-91), and for three-month periods the philosophy departments at MIT (1992), NYU (1997), Oxford (1998) and Lisbon (2011, 2012). He was a fellow at the Center for the Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Edinburgh, 2001), and he has been appointed Visiting Professor at the University of Lisbon (2013-2016, 2016-2020), where he is a member of LanCog, CFUL. His main interests are in philosophical logic, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind and related epistemological and metaphysical issues. He was awarded a "Distinció de Recerca" for senior researchers by the Catalan Government between 2002 and 2008, and in 2008 (2009-2013), 2013 (2014-2018) and 2018 (2019-24) the prize “ICREA Acadèmia” for excellence in research, also funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya. He is completing a book on the nature of assertion under contract with OUP, entitled Tell Me What You Know.
Manuel Garcia Carpentero
Lewis on Truth in Fiction
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Abstract: In his classic article "Truth in Fiction" (1978), Lewis offers an account of the content ascriptions of fictions that assumes the type of account of fictions itself offered by John Searle in "The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse "(1974/5). Searle argued that fictions are not the result of dedicated, sui generis acts (or, equivalently, they are not dedicated, sui generis artifacts) such as statements, questions, or directives; they are simply the result of the pretense of such acts. This view of "mere pretense" fiction ('MP') had previously been defended by MacDonald (1954) and Gale (1971), and later by others such as Hoffman (2004) or Alward (2009); Predelli (2020) has recently reconstructed and strongly defended some aspects of it. The role that simulation plays in MP should be distinguished from the appeal to simulation as one of the means by which fiction creators create their fictions in the "dedicated representation" ('DR') views of Walton, Currie, and others. , including myself. In this article I will confront the arguments of Searle, Lewis, Predelli and others in defense of (my own version of) DR. I will develop in my own terms what I consider to be a decisive objection: namely, that MP is implausibly committed to having fictional storytellers in all fictions, storytellers who present the character of the fictional world "as a known fact." "I will suggest that Lewis's account of" Truth in Fiction "may nonetheless survive, but only (as he himself appears to be open in postscripts A and D) by assuming DR instead of MP.