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Page 67
In order to compare worlds, one must take even the real or actual world as a cultural construct. The so-called actual world is the world to which we referrightly or wronglyas the world described by the Encyclopedia Britannica or Time magazine (a world in which Napoleon died on St. Helena, two plus two equals four, it is impossible to be the father of oneself, and Sherlock Holmes never existedif not as a fictional character). The actual world is the one we know through a multitude of world pictures or stated descriptions, and these pictures are epistemic worlds that are frequently mutually exclusive. The whole of the pictures of the actual world is the potentially maximal and complete encyclopedia of it (on the purely regulative nature of such a potential encyclopedia, see Eco 1979 and 1984). "Possible worlds are not discovered in some remote, invisible or transcendent depositories, they are constructed by human minds and hands. This explanation has been explicitly given by Kripke: 'One stipulates possible worlds, one does not discover them by powerful microscopes' " (Dolezel * 1988:236).
Even though the real world is considered a cultural construct, one might still wonder about the ontological status of the described universe. Such a problem does not exist for narrative possible worlds. Being outlined by a text, they exist outside the text only as the result of an interpretation and have the same ontological status of any other doxastic world (on the cultural nature of any world, see the recent remarks of Goodman and Elgin 1988, ch. 3).
Hintikka (1988: 55), speaking of possible worlds as considered in a Model Theory, said that in describing a possible world we are free to choose the universe of discourse it is designed to apply to. Thus possible worlds are always small worlds, "that is, a relatively short course of local events in some nook or corner of the actual world." The same holds for fictional worlds: in order to lead its readers to conceive of a possible fictional world, a text must invite them to a relatively easy "cosmological" taskas we shall see in the following sections, mainly in sections 5 and 6.
3. Technical vs. Metaphorical Approach
The notion of furnished possible worlds proves to be useful in dealing with many phenomena concerning artistic creation. Nevertheless, it should not be misused. There are cases in which to speak of possible worlds is mere metaphor.
When Keats says that Beauty is Truth and Truth is Beauty, he only expresses his personal view of the actual world. We can simply say that

 
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