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It seems a matter of common sense to say that in the fictional world conceived by Shakespeare it is true that Hamlet was a bachelor and it is false that he was married. Philosophers ready to object that fictional sentences lack reference and are thereby falseor that both the statements about Hamlet would have the same truth value (Russell 1919:169)do not take into account the fact that there are persons gambling away their future on the grounds of the recognized falsity or truth of similar statements. Any student asserting that Hamlet was married to Ophelia would fail in English, and nobody could reasonably criticize his/her teacher for having relied on such a reasonable notion of truth. |
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In order to reconcile common sense with the rights of alethic logic, many theories of fiction have borrowed the notion of Possible World from modal logic. It sounds correct to say that in the fictional world invented by Robert Louis Stevenson, Long John Silver (i) entertains a series of hopes and strong beliefs and thus outlines a doxastic world where he succeeds in putting his hands (or his only foot) on the coveted treasure of the eponymous Island and (ii) performs many deeds in order to make the future course of events in the real world match the state of his doxastic one. |
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This chapter is a reelaboration of my Report 3 at the Nobel Symposium 65 on Possible Worlds in Humanities, Arts and Sciences, Lidings, August 1986. |
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