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Page 82
enormous flexibility and superficiality, he or she is also required to display a consistent good will.
If the Model Reader behaves so, he/she will enjoy the story. Otherwise he/she will be condemned to an everlasting encyclopedic research. It can happen that there exist readers wondering how many inhabitants Saint-Guen-les-Toits could have had, or what the name of Charles Bovary's grandfather was. But such fussy readers would not be the Model ones. They are craving for maximal worlds, while fiction can survive only by playing on Small Worlds.
Notes
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1. Such were the topics of the Nobel Symposium on Possible Worlds in Humanities, Arts and Sciences held in Lidingo, on the outskirts of Stockholm, in August 1986 (Allen 1989), where epistemologists, historians of science, logicians, analytic philosophers, semioticians, linguists, narratologists, critics, artists, and scientists met to discuss such a point. My present reflections depend on many of the papers presented at the symposium and on the following discussion.
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2. The best solution would be to consider the possible worlds of a fiction theory simply as linguistic objects, that is, descriptions of states and events that are the case in a given narrative context. In this sense, however, one should accept the objection raised by Partee (1988:94, 158) apropos of Carnap's state descriptions: being sets of sentences they are not possible worlds because possible worlds "are part of the model structures in terms of which languages are interpreted"; possible worlds are alternative ways things might have been and not descriptions of these ways. Otherwise, to say that a narrative text outlines one or more possible worlds would be only a more sophisticated way of saying that every narrative text tells stories about unreal events.
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3. I owe this suggestion to Bas van Fraassen, personal communication on The Role of the Reader.

 
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