Why there is no truth in fiction

Let’s say you’re a correspondence theorist as to truth.

I think this means that there is no truth in fiction (Tf) equivalent to the sense of the words truth and falsity that we might apply to, say, our best scientific theories (Ts).

The problem is that Tf must be grounded on a choice of multiple worlds whereas Ts is not based on such choice but on the way that the actual world, or a set of worlds defined under a predicate, is.

If I ask whether it is true that Barack Obama is in Washington (1) then the way the actual world is either corresponds with the proposition ‘Barack Obama is in Washington’ or it does not (subject to further debate about the referent of the name ‘Washington’, dependent as it may be on certain alleged social/institutional facts).

In the same way, it is false that Osama Bin Laden is in Washington (2) (I presume). Yet, there could be a novel written about Bin Laden infiltrating Washington so that one might say that in the fiction or in the story, Osama Bin Laden is in Washington. This is a common idiom.

Yet, to make the Tf of (2) equivalent in sense to the Ts of (2) we would need to introduce a whole bunch of ways the world could and couldn’t be for propositions to correspond with. Whether these worlds (real or ersatz) are just out there in logical space waiting to be referred to or they are produced every time someone performs a creative act, there arises the problem of the metaphysical equivalence of these multiple worlds.

That is, there is nothing about the worlds themselves that determines the right choice between them to settle an argument about truth in fiction.

To expand on this, consider that every fictitious narrative underdetermines the world to which it refers. In our story, Osama may be in Washington, but the story is silent as to whether his beard is dyed brown or ginger in order for Osama to avoid detection. Indeed, the ways in which the story underdetermines a world may be multiplied ad infinitum.

It is no answer to this objection to say that the world to which our story refers just is indeterminate, i.e. it is an impossible world with truth gaps and/or that is not closed under entailment. A unique reference to one such impossible world, too, is not guaranteed by anything in the story.

The last step in this argument against truth in fiction is to point out that the indeterminacy of reference by fictitious narratives is that this indeterminacy extends to an infinite array of inconsistent impossible worlds. Thus, for any proposition say to be true in a narrative, its negation will also be true and the positive proposition will also be false.

Maybe this does not quite mean that there is no truth in fiction, but rather that there is too much truth in fiction. That is, if Tf is equivalent in sense to Ts then it leads to trivialism in fiction. I prefer to think that trivialism tells us that the truth predicate has dissolved and we are not really talking about truth anymore.