TITLE:
Pretense Theory and the Imported Background
AUTHORS:
Jeffrey Goodman
KEYWORDS:
Fiction, Truth in Fiction, Pretense, Make-Believe
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Philosophy,
Vol.1 No.1,
August
17,
2011
ABSTRACT: Kendall Walton’s pretense theory, like its rivals, says that what’s true in a fiction F depends in part on the importation of background propositions into F. The aim of this paper is to present, explain, and defend a brief yet straightforward argument–one which exploits the specific mechanism by which the pretense theory says propositions are imported into fictions–for the falsity of the pretense theory.