Lewis on Meinongian Logic

In “Truth in Fiction,” David Lewis raises four objections to a Meinongian semantics of fiction. Lewis does not deny that a Meinongian logic of fiction could be made to work, but identifies disadvantages in Meinongian semantics as a reason for recommending his own possible worlds alternative. A Meinongian semantics proposes to explain meaning without ontological prejudice. It analyzes the meaning of the sentence “a is F” in the same way and by reference to the same semantic principles, regardless of whether or not a happens to exist. Meinongian semantic domains admit existent and nonexistent objects, including objects ostensibly referred to in fiction, and permit reference and true predication of constitutive properties to existent and nonexistent objects alike. A Meinongian theory thus interprets the sentence “Sherlock Holmes is a detective” as true, on the grounds that what we mean by the putative proper name “Sherlock Holmes” is a nonexistent object described in the fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle that truly has the property of being a detective in the same way and in the same sense as an existent detective. Lewis proposes an alternative to Meinong’s object theory that considers the truth of a sentence in a work of fiction only within an explicit story-context. He explains truth in fiction by (selectively) prefixing (most) problematic sentences with the operator, “In such-and-such fiction...” For example, “Sherlock Holmes is a detective,” on Lewis’s analysis, becomes, “In the Sherlock Holmes stories, Sherlock Holmes is a detective.” This is by no means a trivial transformation that reduces the truth of sentences ostensibly about fictional objects to tautologies, analytic or other a priori truths. For it does not follow logically or analytically that Sherlock Holmes in the Sherlock Holmes stories is a detective, since the stories might have described Sherlock Holmes as something other than a detective. The effect of Lewis’s proposal is to relocate the truth conditions for a sentence in or about fiction from the immediate content of the sentence to the fictional context in which the sentence appears or to which it applies. The advantage he sees in modal story-contexting is that it avoids the need for nonexistent Meinongian objects.