reductio ad borgnine
Fiction does not exist. There is no such thing. Fiction is a fiction perpetrated by papists, jackdaws, nazis, communists, Rotarians, Southern Baptists, Templars, Free Masons, Andy Rooney, and certain fringe elements within the black panther party in order to further their own twisted agenda.
To be sure, there exist things that we call fiction, but the most that can be said of them is that they are not true. They are stories about happenings, goings on, and various and sundry events surrounded by circumstances which have failed to obtain in our universe.
Note: I hold to, of course, a strong Correspondence Theory of truth, because the only opposition to the Correspondence theory I have ever encountered developed either out of Creation Science, Gynocentric Feminism, Radical Afro-Centric Historical Revisionism, Standpoint theory, or Papists, or other similar fields subjected on dubious matter. In short I don't buy it. Just like I don't buy creation science, patriarchal oppression, Egyptian supremacy, the moral superiority of a subjective minority, or the existence of jesus.
As the metaphysician David Lewis has established, The World we live in is little more than a single island universe, a singleton member of the infinite set of all possible worlds. Furthermore, in order for something to be possible in this world, that means it happened in another possible world. Finally, actuality is indexical. I can say I live in the actual world and it is true, but someone else, who lives in a world other than this one can also say it and it is also true. The actual world is the one that the utterance actual is uttered in.
The practical consequence of this is that there is no fiction. Nothing is made up, it is a mere catalogue of possibility. Certainly, Gregor Samsa has not turned into an ungeziefer in this world, but there are an infinite number of possible worlds in which he has. The point is even more obvious with less gifted writers than kafka, such as Proust, Tolstoy, or Flaubert.
Take Dostoevsky, for example, the best of a bad bunch. Certainly, Raskolnikov is not murdering landlords and being subjected to trials in our island universe, but they are indeed doing so, repeatedly, just as Dostoevsky described it, over and over again, in an infinite number of places through out the infinitude of the multiverse.
More importantly, there are counterparts to me that look exactly like I do, who had parents exactly like mine, and whose life circumstances are exactly like mine, who nevertheless change their names to Raskolnikov and proceed to live out the plot of Crime and Punishmentin their worlds for the rest of their lives. And still more, because these island universes bear no spatio-temporal relation to our own, these things are happening everywhere and nowhere, yesterday and today, and tomorrow and never before and never again and not at all and all of the time, all of the time.
It is a strange and truthful world in which we live...
-E.L. Borgnine The Poetics of Aggravated Sexual Assault...
To be sure, there exist things that we call fiction, but the most that can be said of them is that they are not true. They are stories about happenings, goings on, and various and sundry events surrounded by circumstances which have failed to obtain in our universe.
Note: I hold to, of course, a strong Correspondence Theory of truth, because the only opposition to the Correspondence theory I have ever encountered developed either out of Creation Science, Gynocentric Feminism, Radical Afro-Centric Historical Revisionism, Standpoint theory, or Papists, or other similar fields subjected on dubious matter. In short I don't buy it. Just like I don't buy creation science, patriarchal oppression, Egyptian supremacy, the moral superiority of a subjective minority, or the existence of jesus.
As the metaphysician David Lewis has established, The World we live in is little more than a single island universe, a singleton member of the infinite set of all possible worlds. Furthermore, in order for something to be possible in this world, that means it happened in another possible world. Finally, actuality is indexical. I can say I live in the actual world and it is true, but someone else, who lives in a world other than this one can also say it and it is also true. The actual world is the one that the utterance actual is uttered in.
The practical consequence of this is that there is no fiction. Nothing is made up, it is a mere catalogue of possibility. Certainly, Gregor Samsa has not turned into an ungeziefer in this world, but there are an infinite number of possible worlds in which he has. The point is even more obvious with less gifted writers than kafka, such as Proust, Tolstoy, or Flaubert.
Take Dostoevsky, for example, the best of a bad bunch. Certainly, Raskolnikov is not murdering landlords and being subjected to trials in our island universe, but they are indeed doing so, repeatedly, just as Dostoevsky described it, over and over again, in an infinite number of places through out the infinitude of the multiverse.
More importantly, there are counterparts to me that look exactly like I do, who had parents exactly like mine, and whose life circumstances are exactly like mine, who nevertheless change their names to Raskolnikov and proceed to live out the plot of Crime and Punishmentin their worlds for the rest of their lives. And still more, because these island universes bear no spatio-temporal relation to our own, these things are happening everywhere and nowhere, yesterday and today, and tomorrow and never before and never again and not at all and all of the time, all of the time.
It is a strange and truthful world in which we live...
-E.L. Borgnine The Poetics of Aggravated Sexual Assault...