Fiction, Time, and Agency. An Essay on the Language and Logic of Fiction-Making

One of the most important, and less disputed, core features of fictional works is that they are endowed with (representational) content. And it is out of discussion that the creation of a work is a deliberate process that leads to the work, usually through a sequence of intermediates stages or drafts. Thus, it is only natural to think of fiction-making as a deliberate process leading to a certain content through a series of intermediate contents. Let us call this view the content-choice conception of fiction-making. In this book the content-choice conception is elaborated on the background of a precise view of time and agency, that of so-called stit theory (see e.g., Belnap et al. 2001). A number of formal theories of fiction-making are formulated, which correspond to different conceptions of fiction-making and to different families of fiction. As we shall see, the content-choice conception is deeply in- grained in the way we speak and reason about fiction, and it also plays a role in the classification of fictional works. Further- more, an adequate understanding of fiction-making helps to shed some light on a variety of intertwined linguistic and inferential phenomena. Perhaps more pointedly, it enables us to account for fiction-related fragments of language that are beyond the scope of traditional philosophical analyses of fictional discourse.