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Page 73
adds that Tom believes that non-p and that John believes that Tom erroneously believes that p. The reader must decide to what extent these various propositional attitudes are mutually compatible and accessible.
In order to clarify, this point, we must understand that fictional necessity differs from logical necessity. Fictional necessity is an individuation principle. If John is fictionally the son of Tom, John must always be isolated as the son of Tom, and Tom as the father of John. In Eco 1979 I called this kind of necessity an S-property, that is, a property which is necessary inside a given possible world by virtue of the mutual definition of the individuals in play. In German the meaning of Holz is determined by its structural borderlines with the meaning of Wald; in the narrative world Wn of Madame Bovary there is no other way to identify Emma than as the wife of Charles, who in turn has been identified as the boy seen by the Narrator at the beginning of the novel. Any other world in which Madame Bovary were the wife of the baldest King of France would be another (non-Flaubertian) world, furnished with different individuals. Therefore, the S-property characterizing Emma is the relation eMc (where c = Emma, c = Charles and M = to be married with).
To see all the consequences we can draw from this approach, let us consider the two worlds dominating Sophocles's Oedipus Rex; the Wo of the beliefs of Oedipus and the Wf of the knowledge of Tyresias, who knew the fabulathe fabula being taken by Sophocles as the report on the real course of events. Let us consider the following relations K = killer of; S = son of; M = husband of. For the sake of economy the minus sign scores the inverse relation (victim of, parent of, wife of):
23167-0073a.GIF
In Wo there is Oedipus, who killed an unknown wayfarer x and who married Jocasta; Laius, who was killed by an unknown wayfarer y and who was the father of a lost z; Jocasta, who was the mother of a lost z and who is presently the wife of Oedipus. In Wf x, z, and y have disappeared. The actual world described by the fabula (validated by Sopho-

 
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