LanCog Workshop on Fiction and Imagination
Benjamin Schnieder (Hamburg)
On the Logic of Fiction
The content of a story consists in more than is explicitly given to its audience. In figuring out the complete content of a story, we draw all kinds of consequences from the explicitly given material. The most basic consequences are purely logical ones, so it may seem natural to assume a closure principle such as: if a proposition x belongs to the content of a fiction F, and y is a logical consequence of x, then y belongs to the content of F as well. But if we work with the classical notion of consequence, this closure principle has notorius problems because of the possibility of inconsistent fiction. I will propose an alternative notion of consequence, based on the notion of ground, with which the closure principle becomes more attractive.
The content of a story consists in more than is explicitly given to its audience. In figuring out the complete content of a story, we draw all kinds of consequences from the explicitly given material. The most basic consequences are purely logical ones, so it may seem natural to assume a closure principle such as: if a proposition x belongs to the content of a fiction F, and y is a logical consequence of x, then y belongs to the content of F as well. But if we work with the classical notion of consequence, this closure principle has notorius problems because of the possibility of inconsistent fiction. I will propose an alternative notion of consequence, based on the notion of ground, with which the closure principle becomes more attractive.