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For Tom, Red isin that contextan essential property of x1. Tom wants to buy only red boats. John cannot conceive of Tom's world in the same way as the inhabitants of Flatland cannot conceive of a sphere. John distinguishes his boats only according to their size, not to their color: |
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John cannot conceive of Tom's world, but Tom can conceive of John's Wj as a world in whichin terms of Wt matrixcolors remain undecided. Both y1 and y2 can be designed in Wt as |
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In analyzing fiction one must frequently decide in which senseon the grounds of our knowledge of the actual worldwe can evaluate individuals and events of imaginary worlds (differences between romance and novel, realism and fantasy, whether the Napoleon of Tolstoy is identical with or different from the historical one, and so on). |
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Since in every state of a story things can go on in different ways, the pragmatics of reading is based on our ability to make forecasts at every narrative disjunction. Take the paramount case of criminal stories where the author wants to elicit false forecasts on the part of the readers in order to frustrate them. |
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We are also interested in validating true statements about fictions. To say that it is true thatin the world designed by Conan DoyleSherlock Holmes was a bachelor is not only interesting for trivia games: it can become important and relevant when one is challenging irresponsible cases of so-called deconstruction or free misreading. A fictional text has an ontology of its own which must be respected. |
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There is another reason why the comparison between worlds can become important in fiction. Many fictional texts are systems of embedded doxastic worlds. Suppose that in a novel the author says that p, then |
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