Fiction-Making as a Gricean Illocutionary Type

There are propositions constituting the content of fictions—sometimes of the utmost importance to understand them—which are not explicitly presented, but must somehow be inferred. This essay deals with what these inferences tell us about the nature of fiction. I will criticize three well-known proposals in the literature: those by David Lewis, Gregory Currie, and Kendall Walton.1 I advocate a proposal of my own, which I will claim improves on theirs. Most important for my purposes, I will argue on this basis, against Walton’s objections, for an illocutionary-act account of fiction, inspired in part by some of Lewis’s and Currie’s suggestions, but (perhaps paradoxically) above all by Walton’s deservedly influential views. I start by quoting a story by the Argentinean writer Julio Cortázar, short enough to be given in full; it will provide a crucial example to help present my argument.