Sportive Thoughts

Part 6 of 12. Those of you who know Kripke and modal logic better than I should be a great help here.

6. Let us now return to the contemporary philosophical problem with fiction. We do not believe fictions but we do not disbelieve fictions. I want to address two answers to this problem before bringing to bear on it the formulation of Aristotle’s mimesis developed directly above. One of the most popular ways of exculpating fiction’s lack of truth-functionality is the fictional worlds thesis, a modification of the ontological theory of possible worlds. In common parlance, people discuss “the world of…” a particular fiction. Movie trailers by Don LaFontaine consistently use the phrase. When we discuss the more complicated problems concerning the philosophical status of fictions, the terminology takes on a much more specialized role, borrowed mainly from model logic.
Some argue that the worlds described in fiction are, in fact, possible worlds, because they share some elements of the world we inhabit. Our ability to describe the worlds of fiction is analogous to our ability to describe possible worlds. If we thought it would help our understanding of fiction, we could even try to schematize possible worlds. There is, however, a critical problem with trying to do so. At best, a model description of fictional worlds would give us a complex ontological picture of how fictions are composed. Fiction, under these modalities, can be posited according to the relations established between all the various possible worlds. Thomas Pavel wrote one of the best explanations of fictional worlds hypothesis. Pavel writes,

All we have access to are a few clues, from which we are biologically and culturally programmed to infer a general configuration. Whatever form this activity takes, it will include the ability of hypothetically positing worlds in which the clues are included. But this involves risk-taking reference to individuals, properties and states of affairs whose presence may be only an indirect result of the processing of clues.

The “risk-taking reference” is the “ontic relation” R of fictional worlds logic. The writer creates the fiction with respect to the world he knows. Thus, the problem of belief is solved; the writer always keeps two worlds in mind, that which he has knowledge of and that which he creates. They are related to each other logically, and with enough complexity to keep them from infecting one another.
But this seems to only repeat the second facet (b) of Aristotelian mimesis: that the artist can use his craft to combine and improve the objects he wishes to represent in his art. The art itself remains unique in relation to knowledge of the world. And so, while a fictional worlds hypothesis may give an exhaustive schematic of the ontological properties of fictional worlds, it does not advance what we already know—what we have known or had opportunity to know for a very long time—about the maker of mimesis.