essay fact or fiction

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Fact or Fiction: Reading and Writing the Personal Essay

ENGLISH X473

Course Outline

Course Objectives

• Discuss the personal essays of a diverse group of global writers.
• Gain and hone writing skills through practice exercises and student essays.

What You Learn

• History of the essay
• Forerunners of the craft
• Development of the genre over time
• Current “state of the essay”
• Elements of a successful essay
• Avoiding vagueness
• Creating composite characters
• Essay structures
• Elements of voice
• Critical reading
• Giving and receiving of effective criticism to and from other students

How You Learn

• Reading assignments
• Writing exercises
• Discussion participation
• Student essay workshop, which includes the submission of two essays

Fall 2024 enrollment opens on June 17!

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The Line Between Fact and Fiction

Journalists should report the truth. Who would deny it? But such a statement does not get us far enough, for it fails to distinguish nonfiction from other forms of expression. Novelists can reveal great truths about the human condition, and so can poets, film makers and painters. Artists, after all, build things that imitate the world. So do nonfiction writers.

To make things more complicated, writers of fiction use fact to make their work believable. They do research to create authentic settings into which we enter. They return us to historical periods and places that can be accurately chronicled and described: the battlefield at Gettysburg, the Museum of Natural History in New York City, a jazz club in Detroit. They use detail to make us see, to suspend our disbelief, to persuade us it was “really like that.”

For centuries writers of nonfiction have borrowed the tools of novelists to reveal truths that could be exposed and rendered in no better way. They place characters in scenes and settings, have them speak to each other in dialogue, reveal limited points of view, and move through time over conflicts and toward resolutions.

In spite of occasional journalism scandals that hit the national landscape like plane crashes, our standards are higher than ever. Historical examples of nonfiction contain lots of made-up stuff. It appears as if, 50 years ago, many columnists, sports writers and crime reporters—to name the obvious categories—were licensed to invent. The term piping— making up quotes or inventing sources—came from the idea that the reporter was high from covering the police busts of opium dens.

Testimony on our shady past comes from Stanley Walker, the legendary city editor of the New York Herald Tribune. In 1934 he wrote about the “monumental fakes” that were part of the history of journalism and offered:

It is true that, among the better papers, there is a general professional condemnation of fakers. And yet it is strange that so many of the younger men, just coming into the business, appear to feel that a little faking here and there is a mark of distinction. One young man, who had written a good story, replete with direct quotation and description, was asked by the city desk how he could have obtained such detail, as most of the action had been completed before he had been assigned to the story. “Well,” said the young man, “I thought that since the main facts were correct it wouldn’t do any harm to invent the conversation as I thought it must have taken place.” The young man was soon disabused.

In more recent times and into the present, influential writers have worked in hybrid forms with names such as “creative nonfiction” or the “nonfiction novel.” Tom Rosenstiel catalogues the confusion:

The line between fact and fiction in America, between what is real and made up, is blurring. The move in journalism toward infotainment invites just such confusion, as news becomes entertainment and entertainment becomes news. Deals in which editor Tina Brown joins the forces of a news company, Hearst, with a movie studio, Miramax, to create a magazine that would blend reporting and script writing are only the latest headlines signaling the blending of cultures. Prime time news magazines, featuring soap opera stories or heroic rescue videos, are developing a growing resemblance to reality entertainment shows such as “Cops,” or Fox programs about daring rescues or wild animal attack videos. Book authors such as John Berendt condense events and use “composite” characters in supposedly nonfiction work, offering only a brief allusion in an authors note to help clarify what might be real and what might not. Newspaper columnists are found out, and later removed, from the Boston Globe for confusing journalism and literature. A writer at the New Republic gains fame for material that is too good to be true. A federal court in the case of Janet Malcolm rules that journalists can make up quotes if they somehow are true to the spirit of what someone might have said. Writer Richard Reeves sees a deepening threat beyond journalism to society more generally, a threat he calls evocatively the “Oliver Stoning” of American culture.

The controversies continue. Edmund Morris creates fictional characters in his authorized biography of Ronald Reagan; CBS News uses digital technology to alter the sign of a competitor in Times Square during the coverage of the millennium celebration; a purported memoir of a wife of Wyatt Earp, published by a university press, turns out to contain fiction. Its author, Glenn G. Boyer, defends his book as a work of “creative nonfiction.”

To make things more complicated, scholars have demonstrated the essential fictive nature of all memory. The way we remember things is not necessarily the way they were. This makes memoir, by definition, a problematic form in which reality and imagination blur into what its proponents describe as a “fourth genre.” The problems of memory also infect journalism when reporters—in describing the memories of sources and witnesses—wind up lending authority to a kind of fiction.

The post-modernist might think all this irrelevant, arguing that there are no facts, only points of view, only “takes” on reality, influenced by our personal histories, our cultures, our race and gender, our social class. The best journalists can do in such a world is to offer multiple frames through which events and issues can be seen. Report the truth? they ask. Whose truth?

Caught in the web of such complexity, one is tempted to find some simple escape routes before the spider bites. If there were only a set of basic principles to help journalists navigate the waters between fact and fiction, especially those areas between the rocks. Such principles exist. They can be drawn from the collective experience of many journalists, from our conversations, debates and forums, from the work of writers such as John Hersey and Anna Quindlen, from stylebooks and codes of ethics, standards and practices.

Hersey made an unambiguous case for drawing a bold line between fiction and nonfiction, that the legend on the journalists license should read “None of this was made up.” The author of Hiroshima , Hersey used a composite character in at least one early work, but by 1980 he expressed polite indignation that his work had become a model for the so-called New Journalists. His essay in the Yale Review questioned the writing strategies of Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe.

Hersey draws an important distinction, a crucial one for our purposes. He admits that subjectivity and selectivity are necessary and inevitable in journalism. If you gather 10 facts but wind up using nine, subjectivity sets in. This process of subtraction can lead to distortion. Context can drop out, or history, or nuance, or qualification or alternative perspectives.

While subtraction may distort the reality the journalist is trying to represent, the result is still nonfiction, is still journalism. The addition of invented material, however, changes the nature of the beast. When we add a scene that did not occur or a quote that was never uttered, we cross the line into fiction. And we deceive the reader.

This distinction leads us to two cornerstone principles: Do not add. Do not deceive. Lets elaborate on each:

Do not add . This means that writers of nonfiction should not add to a report things that did not happen. To make news clear and comprehensible, it is often necessary to subtract or condense. Done without care or responsibility, even such subtraction can distort. We cross a more definite line into fiction, however, when we invent or add facts or images or sounds that were not there.

Do not deceive . This means that journalists should never mislead the public in reproducing events. The implied contract of all nonfiction is binding: The way it is represented here is, to the best of our knowledge, the way it happened. Anything that intentionally or unintentionally fools the audience violates that contract and the core purpose of journalism—to get at the truth. Thus, any exception to the implied contract—even a work of humor or satire—should be transparent or disclosed.

To make these cornerstone principles definitive, we have stated them in the simplest language. In so doing, we may cause confusion by failing to exemplify these rules persuasively or by not offering reasonable exceptions. For example, by saying “Do not deceive,” we are talking about the promise the journalist makes to the audience. A different argument concerns whether journalists can use deception as an investigative strategy. There is honest disagreement about that, but even if you go undercover to dig for news, you have a duty not to fool the public about what you discovered.

Because these two principles are stated negatively, we decided not to nag journalists with an endless list of “Thou shalt nots.” So we’ve expressed four supporting strategies in a positive manner.

Be unobtrusive . This guideline invites writers to work hard to gain access to people and events, to spend time, to hang around, to become such a part of the scenery that they can observe conditions in an unaltered state. This helps avoid the “Heisenberg effect,” a principle drawn from science, in which observing an event changes it. Even watchdogs can be alert without being obtrusive.

We realize that some circumstances require journalists to call attention to themselves and their processes. So we have nothing against Sam Donaldson for yelling questions at a president who turns a deaf ear to reporters. Go ahead and confront the greedy, the corrupt, the secret mongers; but the more reporters obtrude and intrude, especially when they are also obnoxious, the more they risk changing the behavior of those they are investigating.

Stories should not only be true, they should ring true. Reporters know by experience that truth can be stranger than fiction, that a man can walk into a convenience store in St. Petersburg, Fla., and shoot the clerk in the head and that the bullet can bounce off his head, ricochet off a ceiling beam, and puncture a box of cookies.

If we ruled the world of journalism—as if it could be ruled—we would ban the use of anonymous sources, except in cases where the source is especially vulnerable and the news is of great import. Some whistleblowers who expose great wrongdoing fall into this category. A person who has migrated illegally into America may want to share his or her experience without fear of deportation. But the journalist must make every effort to make this character real. An AIDS patient may want and deserve anonymity, but making public the name of his doctor and his clinic can help dispel any cloud of fiction.

Fired Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle writes:

I used my memory to tell true tales of the city, things that happened to real people who shared their own lives with me. They represented the music and flavor of the time. They were stories that sat on the shelf of my institutional memory and spoke to a larger point. The use of parables was not a technique I invented. It was established ages ago by other newspaper columnists, many more gifted than I, some long since dead.

A parable is defined as a “simple story with a moral lesson.” The problem is that we know them from religious literature or ancient beast fables. They were fictional forms, filled with hyperbole. Mike Barnicle was passing them off as truth, without doing the reporting that would give them the ring of truth.

In the Middle Ages, perhaps, it could be argued that the literal truth of a story was not important. More important were the higher levels of meaning: how stories reflected salvation history, moral truth or the New Jerusalem. Some contemporary nonfiction authors defend invention in the name of reaching for some higher truth. We deem such claims unjustifiable.

The next guideline is to make sure things check out . Stated with more muscle: Never put something in print or on the air that hasn’t checked out. The new media climate makes this exceedingly difficult. News cycles that once changed by the day, or maybe by the hour, now change by the minute or second. Cable news programs run 24 hours, greedy for content. And more and more stories have been broken on the Internet, in the middle of the night, when newspaper reporters and editors are tucked dreamily in their beds. The imperative to go live and to look live is stronger and stronger, creating the appearance that news is “up to the minute” or “up to the second.”

Time frenzy, however, is the enemy of clear judgment. Taking time allows for checking, for coverage that is proportional, for consultation and for sound decision-making that, in the long run, will avoid embarrassing mistakes and clumsy retractions.

In a culture of media bravado, there is plenty of room for a little strategic humility . This virtue teaches us that Truth—with a capital T—is unattainable, that even though you can never get it, that with hard work you can get at it you can gain on it. Humility leads to respect for points of view that differ from our own, attention to which enriches our reporting. It requires us to recognize the unhealthy influences of careerism and profiteering, forces that may tempt us to tweak a quote or bend a rule or snatch a phrase or even invent a source.

So lets restate these, using slightly different language. First the cornerstone principles: The journalist should not add to a story things that didn’t happen. And the journalist should not fool the public.

Then the supporting strategies: The journalist should try to get at stories without altering them. The reporting should dispel any sense of phoniness in the story. Journalists should check things out or leave them out. And, most important, a little humility about your ability to truly know something will make you work harder at getting it right.

These principles have meaning only in the light of a large idea, crucial to democratic life: that there is a world out there that is knowable. That the stories we create correspond to what exists in the world. That if we describe a velvet painting of John Wayne hanging in a barber shop, it was not really one of Elvis in a barbecue joint. That the words between quotation marks correspond to what was spoken. That the shoes in the photo were the ones worn by the man when the photo was taken and not added later. That what we are watching on television is real and not a staged re-enactment.

A tradition of verisimilitude and reliable sourcing can be traced to the first American newspapers. Three centuries before the recent scandals, a Boston newspaper called Publick Occurrences made this claim on September 25, 1690: “… nothing shall be entered, but what we have reason to believe is true, repairing to the best fountains for our Information.”

We assert, then, that the principles of “Do not add” and “Do not deceive” should apply to all nonfiction all the time, not just to written stories in newspapers. Adding color to a black-and-white photo—unless the technique is obvious or labeled—is a deception. Digitally removing an element in a photo, or adding one or shifting one or reproducing one—no matter how visually arresting—is a deception, completely different in kind from traditional photo cropping, although that, too, can be done irresponsibly.

In an effort to get at some difficult truths, reporters and writers have at times resorted to unconventional and controversial practices. These include such techniques as composite characters, conflation of time, and interior monologues. It may be helpful to test these techniques against our standards.

The use of composite characters, where the purpose is to deceive the reader into believing that several characters are one, is a technique of fiction that has no place in journalism or other works that purport to be nonfiction.

An absolute prohibition against composites seems necessary, given a history of abuse of this method in works that passed themselves off as real. Although considered one of the great nonfiction writers of his time, Joseph Mitchell would, late in life, label some of his past work as fiction because it depended on composites. Even John Hersey, who became known for drawing thick lines between fiction and nonfiction, used composites in “Joe Is Home Now,” a 1944 Life magazine story about wounded soldiers returning from war.

The practice has been continued, defended by some, into the 1990s. Mimi Schwartz acknowledges that she uses composites in her memoirs in order to protect the privacy of people who didn’t ask to be in her books. “I had three friends who were thinking about divorce, so in the book, I made a composite character, and we met for cappuccino.” While such considerations may be well-meaning, they violate the contract with the reader not to mislead. When the reader reads that Schwartz was drinking coffee with a friend and confidante, there is no expectation that there were really three friends. If the reader is expected to accept that possibility, then maybe that cappuccino was really a margarita. Maybe they discussed politics rather than divorce. Who knows?

Time and chronology are often difficult to manage in complicated stories. Time is sometimes imprecise, ambiguous or irrelevant. But the conflation of time that deceives readers into thinking a month was a week, a week a day, or a day an hour is unacceptable to works of journalism and nonfiction. In his authors note to the best-seller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil , John Berendt concedes:

Though this is a work of nonfiction, I have taken certain storytelling liberties, particularly having to do with the time of events. Where the narrative strays from strict nonfiction, my intention has been to remain faithful to the characters and to the essential drift of events as they really happened.

The second sentence is no justification for the first. Authors cannot have it both ways, using bits of fiction to liven up the story while desiring a spot on the New York Times nonfiction list.

Contrast Berendts vague statement to the one G. Wayne Miller offers at the beginning of King of Hearts , a book about the pioneers of open-heart surgery:

This is entirely a work of nonfiction; it contains no composite characters or scenes, and no names have been changed. Nothing has been invented. The author has used direct quotations only when he heard or saw (as in a letter) the words, and he paraphrased all other dialogues and statements—omitting quotations marks—once he was satisfied that these took place.

The interior monologue, in which the reporter seems to get into the head of a source, is a dangerous strategy but permissible in the most limited circumstances. It requires direct access to the source, who must be interviewed about his or her thoughts. Boston University writer-in-residence Mark Kramer suggests, “No attribution of thoughts to sources unless the sources have said they’d had those very thoughts.”

This technique should be practiced with the greatest care. Editors should always question reporters on the sources of knowledge as to what someone was thinking. Because, by definition, what goes on in the head is invisible, the reporting standards must be higher than usual. When in doubt, attribute.

Such guidelines should not be considered hostile to the devices of fiction that can be applied, after in-depth reporting, to journalism. These include, according to Tom Wolfe, setting scenes, using dialogue, finding details that reveal character and describing things from a character’s point of view. NBC News correspondent John Larson and Seattle Times editor Rick Zahler both encourage the reporter at times to convert the famous Five Ws into the raw material of storytelling, so that Who becomes Character, Where becomes Setting, and When becomes Chronology.

But the more we venture into that territory, the more we need a good map and an accurate compass. John McPhee, as quoted by Norman Sims, summarizes the key imperatives:

The nonfiction writer is communicating with the reader about real people in real places. So if those people talk, you say what those people said. You don’t say what the writer decides they said. You don’t make up dialogue. You don’t make a composite character. Where I came from, a composite character was a fiction. So when somebody makes a nonfiction character out of three people who are real, that is a fictional character in my opinion. And you don’t get inside their heads and think for them. You can’t interview the dead. You could make a list of the things you don’t do. Where writers abridge that, they hitchhike on the credibility of writers who don’t.

This leads us to the conviction that there should be a firm line, not a fuzzy one, between fiction and nonfiction and that all work that purports to be nonfiction should strive to achieve the standards of the most truthful journalism. Labels such as “nonfiction novel,” “real-life novel,” “creative nonfiction” and “docudrama” may not be useful to that end.

Such standards do not deny the value of storytelling in journalism, or of creativity or of pure fiction, when it is apparent or labeled. Which leads us to the Dave Barry exception, a plea for more creative humor in journalism, even when it leads to sentences such as “I did not make this up.”

We can find many interesting exceptions, gray areas that would test all of these standards. Howard Berkes of National Public Radio once interviewed a man who stuttered badly. The story was not about speech impediments. “How would you feel,” Berkes asked the man, “if I edited the tape to make you not stutter?” The man was delighted and the tape edited. Is this the creation of a fiction? A deception of the listener? Or is it the marriage of courtesy for the source and concern for the audience?

I come to these issues not as the rider of too high a horse but as a struggling equestrian with some distinctively writerly aspirations. I want to test conventions. I want to create new forms. I want to merge nonfiction genres. I want to create stories that are the center of the days conversation in the newsroom and in the community. 

In a 1996 series on AIDS, I tried to re-create in scene and dramatic dialogue the excruciating experiences of a woman whose husband had died of the disease. How do you describe a scene that took place years ago in a little hospital room in Spain, working from one person’s memory of the event?

In my 1997 series on growing up Catholic with a Jewish grandmother, I tried to combine memoir with reporting, oral history and some light theology to explore issues such as anti-Semitism, cultural identity and the Holocaust. But consider this problem: Along the way, I tell the story of a young boy I knew who grew up with a fascination with Nazis and constantly made fun of Jews. I have no idea what kind of man he became. For all I know, he is one of the relief workers in Kosovo. How do I create for him—and myself—a protective veil without turning him into a fictional character?

And finally, in 1999 I wrote my first novel, which was commissioned by the New York Times Regional Newspaper Group and distributed by the New York Times Syndicate. It appeared in about 25 newspapers. This 29-chapter serial novel about the millennium taught me from the inside out some of the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction.

There is certainly an argument to be made that fiction—even labeled fiction—has no place in the newspaper. I respect that. Thirty inches of novella a day may require a loss of precious newshole. But do we think less of John McPhee’s nonfiction in the New Yorker because it may sit next to a short story by John Updike?

It is not the fiction thats the problem, but the deception.

Hugh Kenner describes the language of journalism as:

… the artifice of seeming to be grounded outside language in what is called fact—the domain where a condemned man can be observed as he silently avoids a puddle and your prose will report the observation and no one will doubt it.

British scholar John Carey puts it this way:

Reportage may change its readers, may educate their sympathies, may extend—in both directions—their ideas about what it is to be a human being, may limit their capacity for the inhuman. These gains have traditionally been claimed for imaginative literature. But since reportage, unlike literature, lifts the screen from reality, its lessons are—and ought to be—more telling; and since it reaches millions untouched by literature, it has an incalculably greater potential.

So don’t add and don’t deceive. If you try something unconventional, let the public in on it. Gain on the truth. Be creative. Do your duty. Have some fun. Be humble. Spend your life thinking and talking about how to do all these well.

Fact or Fiction: Reading and Writing the Personal Essay

Featured false Course Number ENGLISH X473 Course Description A diatribe against braggarts? A consolation to a lonely wife? An ode to Japanese design? The personal essay genre encompasses it all. In this class, you read across continents and centuries, from Montaigne to Sedaris, to discover the joy of the form that marries the logic of nonfiction to the dialogue and drama of fiction. What is fact and what is fiction in a personal essay? Through the analysis of the writing of renowned authors, explore the personal essay and its meaning, context and style. In class, practice craft exercises, write and workshop your own essays. Course Object ID 41104 Associated Programs Certificate Program in Writing Associated Academic Area Writing, Editing and Technical Communication Associated Program Streams Nonfiction Nonfiction Writing Version 2841 Is Currently Available Not available

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Fiction and Nonfiction: Understanding the Distinctions

Becoming a skilled writer requires knowing the different genres available. Let’s start with the basics: understanding the difference between fiction and nonfiction.

What’s the Difference Between “Fiction” and “Nonfiction”?

Fiction refers to “something created in the imagination .” Therefore, fictional writing is based on events that the author made up rather than real ones. Nonfiction is “writing that revolves around facts , real people, and events that actually occurred .”

Table of Contents

What does “fiction” mean (with examples).

What Does “Nonfiction” Mean? (With Examples)

How To Write Fiction and Nonfiction Masterpieces

An artist discerns subtle brushstrokes that look identical to the average person. They can also recognize hundreds of colors by their names. Similarly, as writers, we must be familiar with distinct types of prose, with the foundation of that knowledge being the ability to differentiate between fiction and nonfiction .

If you’ve ever been uncertain about these terms, you’re in the right place. We’ll help you get a solid grasp of what fiction and nonfiction mean by providing clear explanations and examples.

Let’s dive in!

Fiction is “written work that is invented or created in the mind.” Put differently, the narrative is imaginary and didn’t actually happen. Novels, short stories, epic poems, plays, and comic books are a few types of fiction writing.

Examples of famous fiction literature include:

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll 

Animal Farm by George Orwell  

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury 

The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling 

Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes 

Fiction can read like this:

On my way to the city of Bolognaland, I noticed that my water-fueled flying car was running low on energy. So, I stopped by the water station and filled up the tank. There, I saw the most beautiful sunset of green, turquoise, and black. As the sun set below the horizon, the two moons—Luminara and Crescelia—took their place in the night sky.

To the best of our knowledge, every single aspect of the story written above is imaginary, from Bolognaland to the two moons. However, it’s important to note that not every component of a fictional story has to be created out of thin air. For example, someone could come up with a tale about a man who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, which is an actual place in the United States. A fictional story can incorporate many components that are nonfiction .

The word fiction isn’t always used to describe a type of literature; it can also refer to anything false.

Don’t believe anything he says—it’s all fiction !

The legend of the hidden treasure has been passed down in this family for generations, but most of us think it’s fiction .

A main part of my job as a historian is to separate fact from fiction in ancient manuscripts.

“Fictional” vs. “Fictitious”

Fictional and fictitious both relate to things or people that are made up and are often used interchangeably. However, fictional typically describes something that originates from literature , movies , or other forms of storytelling , and fictitious can refer to something that is false and intended to deceive . In other words, it carries more of a negative connotation.

What Does “Nonfiction” Mean?

Nonfiction refers to “literature that is based on facts, real events, and real people.” Nonfiction writers aim to compose everything as truthfully and accurately as possible. However, sometimes authors enhance certain parts to make them more interesting, or they are required to change specific facts, like names, for privacy reasons.

Memoirs, biographies, articles, essays, and even personal journal entries are a few types of nonfiction texts.

A few examples of famous published nonfiction works include:

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

Educated by Tara Westover

The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben 

Here’s a piece of nonfiction text:

Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa on June 28, 1971. His mother is Maye Musk, and his father is Errol Musk. Musk has two siblings, a younger brother named Kimbal and a younger sister named Tosca. 

This text is accurate and based on facts; therefore, it is considered nonfiction . But please note that it is not exemplary of nonfiction works—they’re not all boring, rigid, and monotonous. Skilled nonfiction writers weave rhetorical devices, interesting facts, and more to keep readers engaged.

Is it “Nonfiction” or “Non-Fiction”?

This word can be spelled as a hyphenated ( non-fiction ) or non-hyphenated ( nonfiction ) compound word . The spelling depends on which English dialect you’re writing in.

In American English, nonfiction is more commonly used. Both forms are found in British English, but non-fiction is slightly more prevalent.

How To Write Fictional and Nonfictional Masterpieces

We should reiterate that fiction and nonfiction writing can overlap. That means that some fiction includes components of nonfiction and vice versa .

What’s vital to remember is that fiction writing is mostly made up of fabricated stories, whereas nonfiction writing is mostly composed of the truth.

Written masterpieces can be found in all genres, including fiction and nonfiction . When it’s time for you to work on yours, make sure you entrust LanguageTool as your writing assistant. As a multilingual, AI-driven, spell, grammar, and punctuation checker, LanguageTool rids your texts of various types of errors while ensuring you stay productive to reach your goals.

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Chapter 16: Distinguishing Between Facts and Opinions

What is the difference between fact and opinion.

Master readers must sort fact from opinion to properly understand and evaluate the information they are reading.

A fact is a specific detail that is true based on objective proof. A fact is discovered.

An opinion is an interpretation, value judgment, or belief that cannot be proved or disproved. An opinion is created. Objective proof can be physical evidence, an eyewitness account, or the result of an accepted scientific method. Most people’s points of view and beliefs are based on a blend of fact and opinion.

Separating fact from opinion requires you to think critically because opinion is often presented as fact. The following clues will help you separate fact from opinion.

Recognizing Fact and Opinion

Fact:  a specific detail that is true based on objective proof such as physical evidence, an eyewitness account, or the result of an accepted scientific method.   Example: Kanye West was born June 8, 1977 .

Opinion : an interpretation, value judgment, or belief that cannot be proved or disproved. Opinions often include biased words (beautiful, miserable, exciting, frightful).

Kanye West is superior to all other hip-hop artists.

To test whether a statement is a fact, ask these three questions: —Can the statement be proved or demonstrated to be true? —Can the statement be observed in practice or operation? —Can the statement by verified by witnesses, manuscripts, or documents?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, the statement is not a fact. Instead, it is an opinion. With that being said, many statements blend both fact and opinion.

Kanye West, the best hip-hop artist around, was born June 8, 1977.  

This statement has both a fact and opinion. If you don’t have both options as one answer choice on a test, then choose opinion.

There are various ‘levels’ of opinions:

An  informed opinion  is developed by gathering and analyzing evidence.

Example: a news reporter writing an editorial about a political candidate and why we should vote for him or her.

An  expert opinion  is developed through much training and extensive knowledge in a given field.

Example: a doctor giving a patient advice about diet and exercise

Beware! Expert and informed opinions may sound factual, but they still are OPINIONS!

Ask Questions to Identify Facts

To test whether  a statement is a fact, ask these three questions:

• Can the statement be proved or demonstrated to be true?
• Can the statement be observed in practice or operation?
• Can the statement by verified by witnesses, manuscripts, or documents?

If the answer to any of these questions is  no , the statement is  not  a fact. Instead, it is an opinion. With that being said, many statements blend both fact and opinion.

Note : Biased Words to Identify Opinions

Be aware of biased words, words that express opinions, value judgments, and interpretations. They are often loaded with emotion.

Biased words:

• unbelievable

Note Qualifiers to Identify Opinions

• Be on the lookout for words that qualify an idea.
• A qualifier may  express an absolute, unwavering opinion using words like always or never.
• It can also express an opinion in the form of a command as in must, or the desirability  of an action with a word like should.
• Qualifiers may indicate different degrees of doubt with words such as seems or might.

Words that Qualify Ideas

Think Carefully About Supposed “Facts”

Be aware of false facts, or statements presented as facts that are actually untrue. Sometimes authors mislead the reader with a false impression of the facts.  Ex: political and commercial advertisements. Sometimes an author deliberately presents false information.Be aware of opinions that sound like facts. Facts are specific details that can be researched and verified as true.  However, opinions may be introduced with phrases like in truth, the truth of the matter, or in fact.

Example:  In truth, reproductive cloning is expensive and highly inefficient.

Reading Critically: Evaluate Details as Fact or Opinion in Context

• Because the printed word seems to give authority to an idea, many of us accept what we read as fact. However, much of what is published is actually opinion.
• Master readers questions what they read.
• Reading critically is noting the use of fact and opinion in the context of a paragraph or passage, the author, and the type of source in which the passage is printed.

Evaluate the Context of the Author

Even though opinions can’t be proved true like facts can, many opinions are still sound and valuable.  To judge the accuracy of the opinion, you must consider the source; the author of the opinion.

• Authors offer two types of valid opinions: informed opinions and expert opinion.
• An author develops an informed opinion by gathering and analyzing evidence.
• An author develops an expert opinion though much training and extensive knowledge in a given field.

 Evaluate the Context of the Source

• Often people turn to factual sources to find the factual details needed to form informed opinions and expert opinions.
• A medical dictionary, an English handbook, and a world atlas are a few excellent examples of factual sources.

Reading a Textbook: The Use of Graphics, Fact, and Opinion in a Textbook

Most textbook authors are careful to present only ideas based on observation, research, and expert opinion. Textbook authors often use pictures, drawings, or graphics to make the relationship between the main idea and supporting details clear. Master readers must carefully analyze these graphics in order to discern facts from opinion as they are interpreted.

Watch this video to see more examples of facts and opinions:

CC Licensed Content, Shared Previously

Content adapted from  an open course from Broward, licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license .

Video Content

“ Distinguishing fact from opinion ” by Snap Language

Integrated Reading and Writing Level 1 Copyright © 2018 by pherringtonmoriarty and Judith Tomasson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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The New Outliers: How Creative Nonfiction Became a Legitimate, Serious Genre

Lee gutkind on the birth and surprising history of a different type of narrative form.

Many of my students, and even some younger colleagues, think—assume—that creative nonfiction is just part of the literary ecosystem; it’s always been around, like fiction or poetry. In many ways, of course, they are right: the kind of writing that is now considered to be under the creative nonfiction umbrella has a long and rich history. Many, of course, look to Michel de Montaigne as the father of the modern essay, but, to my mind, the more authentic roots of creative nonfiction are in the eighteenth century: Daniel Defoe’s historical narratives, Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, Thomas Paine’s pamphlets, and Samuel Johnson’s essays built a foundation for later writers such as Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau.

That is to say, even if the line between fact and fiction was perhaps a little fuzzy in the early days, it’s not hard to find rich nonfiction narratives that predate the use of the word “nonfiction” (1867, according to the Oxford English Dictionary ) and were around long before the first recorded use of the phrase “creative nonfiction” (1943, according to research William Bradley did for Creative Nonfiction some years ago).

But in a lot of important ways, creative nonfiction is still very new, at least as a form of literature with its own identity. Unfortunately, it took a long time—longer than it should have, if you ask me—for the genre to be acknowledged in that ecosystem. And, of course, you’ll still encounter people who are unfamiliar with the term or want to make that dumb joke, “Creative nonfiction: isn’t that an oxymoron?”

Be that as it may, there’s no real doubt at this point that creative nonfiction is a serious genre, a real thing. You probably won’t find a “creative nonfiction” bookshelf at your local bookstore, and maybe it’s not on the menu at Amazon the way “fiction” is, but nonfiction narratives are everywhere. Newspapers, formerly the realm of straight journalism, with its inverted-pyramid, who-what-where-when-why requirements, have welcomed personal essays not only on their op-ed pages but in many different sections. Memoir, labeled a “craze” in the 1990s, is a mainstay of the publishing industry. Twenty or so years ago, almost no one was publishing essay collections, and even the word “essay” was the kiss of death if you wanted a trade publisher to consider your work, but now essay collections are routinely on best-seller lists. And, increasingly, even non-narrative creative nonfiction like lyric essays and hybrid forms have gained legitimacy and commercial viability.

So, you might ask, what happened? How did we get to this era of acceptance and legitimacy? The genre’s success, I believe, a gradual process over almost a half-century, emerged in many important ways from an unlikely and dominant source. I am not at all sure I would be writing this today, or that you would be reading this in an almost thirty-year-old magazine devoted exclusively to creative nonfiction, if not for the academy, and specifically departments of English.

Now, if you’ve been following my writing over the past thirty or so years, you may be surprised to hear me say this. After all, I’ve written a great deal about the power struggles that went on in the early 1970s, when I was teaching at the University of Pittsburgh and to a lesser degree at other universities and trying to expand the curriculum to include what was then called, mostly because of Tom Wolfe, “new journalism.”

I find that many of my students today aren’t very familiar with the New Journalists—Wolfe, Gay Talese, Gail Sheehy, Jimmy Breslin, Barbara Goldsmith, and Jane Kramer, among others—and it’s probably also true that some of the work from that time hasn’t aged terribly well. Sure, sometimes some of these writers went a little overboard, like Tom Wolfe, for example, interrupting his sentences with varoom-varooms and other stylistic flourishes. He was being playful and maybe a bit silly and arrogant, or it might seem so today, but he was also trying to loosen things up, to not be as predictable and sometimes downright boring as journalists then could be, and in that regard, he was quite successful.

You have to realize that the New Journalists were doing some very exciting stuff, seemingly groundbreaking. They were writing in scenes, recreating dialogue, manipulating timelines, and including themselves—their voices and ideas—in the stories they were writing. Stuff we pretty much take for granted now, but back then, with journalists especially hampered and handcuffed by rules and guidelines, so liberating.

Remember this was all happening in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when rule breaking, change, and defying the establishment were in the air everywhere, and the idea of the “new” in journalism captured the tone and spirit of the times. But I am not just talking here about journalism. Other writers, recognized for their literary achievements, were also taking chances, pushing boundaries. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood , his “nonfiction novel,” stunned and obsessed the literary world when it was published first in the New Yorker in 1965 and then, the following year, as a book. In 1969, another novelist, Norman Mailer, was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the National Book Award for Arts and Letters for The Armies of the Night , about the Washington, DC, peace demonstrations . Mailer was awarded a second Pulitzer in 1980 for his intense, thousand-plus-page deep-dive into murder, obsession, and punishment, The Executioner’s Song , which became a centerpiece of a national conversation about the death penalty. Mailer’s award for his self-described “true-life novel” was for fiction, but all three books, if published today, would be considered creative nonfiction.

I couldn’t see why this kind of work—which was as exciting to students as it was to me—didn’t belong in the classroom. In an English department. Not just as a one-off work, to be taught once in a while, but as part of the curriculum. Why wasn’t there a category for writing that wasn’t poetry or fiction or essay or journalism but that could bring the various literary and journalistic techniques used in all of those forms together into one unique work of art and craft? Why didn’t this amalgam of literary and journalistic richness belong . . . somewhere?

Thinking back, I didn’t really belong either. I had pushed my way into the English department first as a part-time lecturer and then as tenure-track faculty by campaigning for this new or different way of writing nonfiction. And to be honest, I think I began to succeed, to make inroads, because, for one thing, most faculty at the time did not want to teach this stuff—nonfiction—especially if it was called or related to journalism. It’s also true I was a bit of an interloper—I was a published author in what might be described as a more commercial vein (books about motorcycles, baseball, backwoods America, targeted to general audiences), a rarity in English departments. And worse, I was a lowly BA. No advanced degrees.

But in many ways, I was also fortunate; during this time, with student protests confronting the old guard on campuses, I got by as a token of change, tolerated but not yet completely accepted. I felt like a misbehaving adolescent, rough around the edges and not yet ready to grow up, learn the rules, and pay my dues. I didn’t even know how to pay my dues. There were few options. Creative-writing programs, ubiquitous today, were rare and in many ways faced resistance in English departments.

Of course, part of the resistance to creative-writing courses, generally, was just the kind of turf defending that goes on in any academic department, where resources can be unfortunately scarce. Giving a tenure slot to a novelist or a poet, after all, can mean losing a tenure slot and resources for research and travel for a literature PhD.

But I think the resistance to creative nonfiction as being part of creative writing went even deeper and had something to do with how we define literature. I remember one particularly contentious debate back in the early 1970s, after one of my students had made a presentation arguing for an entire course devoted to new journalism. (I’d been incorporating pieces into my classes, but there was no entire course devoted to the stuff.) One of the English professors slammed a pile of books—classics—down on the table; his argument, I think, was that my student should have to prove he’d read those works before he was remotely qualified to weigh in on the curriculum. Anyway, perhaps predictably, it turned into a heated debate about which particular works were classics, a debate the department chair ended by observing, “After all, gentlemen, we are interested in literature here—not writing .”

(Were there women in the room? Of course there were.)

Now, what was going on here? Why didn’t these professors think of this writing as literary? And I mean not just contemporary works like In Cold Blood but the work that came before it, too—the nonfiction written by H. L. Mencken and Mark Twain, James Baldwin and Jack London, not to forget the father of English journalism, Daniel Defoe. And what about pioneering narrative journalists like Nellie Bly and Ida Tarbell? I guess I have a few theories.

First, the lack of a unifying name—what to call it—was definitely a complicating factor. “New journalism” wasn’t great because (the argument went, in English departments, at least) journalism was a trade, not a literary pursuit. There were other names floated—“the literature of fact,” “literary nonfiction,” “belles lettres” (which is what the National Endowment for the Arts was using at that time). But using the word “literary” to describe contemporary writing, meaning that a person would have to say “I write literary nonfiction” … well, that felt sort of presumptuous, didn’t it? “Creative” sort of had the same problem; who was to say what that meant, and it also sort of implied that other kinds of writing weren’t creative, and that didn’t feel good, especially to the scholars. And to the journalists, “creative” sounded like it meant you were making stuff up. As for “belles lettres,” well . . . it just sounded pretentious.

Even more than that, I think there was something about the writing itself—and the writers—that felt threatening. Not just because of the rule breaking. So much of this new nonfiction was about real people and events and was often quite revelatory. We were really a no-holds-barred crew. Wherever there was a story we were there, boots on the ground, bringing it to life—and often revealing the darkest side of things, of war, of poverty, of inherent societal racism. And revealing our own foibles and flaws along the way. And it wasn’t just Mailer and Capote and Baldwin who were writing this stuff, but real people capturing their own lives and struggles in dramatic detail. The “new” whatever you wanted to call it was truly an awakening.

Students, undergrads mostly, at first, especially recognized and were energized by the appeal. Suddenly the doors were open to other options far more interesting than the inverted pyramid or the five-paragraph essay, and considering these new possibilities for what to write about and, more important, how to write their stories was liberating, challenging, and downright enjoyable. Student interest and subsequent demand invariably led to more courses, and more courses led to more writers and scholars who would agree to teaching what had once seemed so controversial.

I should also point out that as the dialogue and debate about nonfiction began to grow, in the 1980s and early 1990s, I was traveling widely. I got invitations from not just universities, but also book clubs and local conferences, from Wyoming to Birmingham to Boston, and met not only with students but also with many of these “real” people who wanted to write. Some were professionals—doctors, teachers, scientists—but there were also firefighters, ambulance drivers, and what we then called homemakers, all with stories to write. They, too, saw the appeal of this nonfiction form that let you tell stories and incorporate your experiences along with other information and ideas and personal opinions.

These folks cared much less than the academics did about what it was called. But—after the dust had settled to a certain extent in academia; after the English department at Pitt had agreed, first, to a course called “The New Nonfiction” and then, nearly two decades later, to a whole master’s program concentrating on creative nonfiction writing (the first in the country, I believe), which later became an MFA program; and after the NEA, in 1989 or so, also adopted the term “creative nonfiction,” a tipping point for sure—well, it mattered tremendously to those folks that it had a name, this kind of writing they wanted to do. It brought a validation to their work, to know that there was a place or a category where their work belonged. The writing itself wasn’t necessarily anything new—people had been doing it forever, if you knew where to look for it—but now people were paying attention to it, and they had something to call it.

And then, a little later, when this journal (now, this magazine) started publishing, in 1993, that added another form of legitimacy. And, in fact, work from many of those writers I met during those years on the road was published in the first few issues of Creative Nonfiction . In the early issues of the journal, we attracted all kinds of writers who were, perhaps, tired of being locked in or limited. We published journalists and essayists and poets, all of them exploring and reaching.

All of this did not happen overnight. English departments did not jump right in and embrace nonfiction; it was, as I have said, a much more gradual and often reluctant acceptance, but clearly an inevitable—and eventually gracious—one, maybe mostly for practical reasons. Creative writing programs were becoming quite profitable, especially at a time when literature and liberal arts majors were waning. Adding nonfiction brought in an entirely new breed of students, not just literary types, but those interested in science and economics or those students who were just interested in finding a job after graduation. Learning to write true stories in a compelling way could only enhance future opportunities.

It may well be that English departments resisted change for various reasons at the beginning, but they also opened the doors and provided a place—a destination—for all of us creative nonfictionists to come together, dialogue and share our work, and earn a certain legitimacy that had been denied to us at the very beginning. I had no idea at the time I started teaching that creative nonfiction would become such a mainstay, not just in the academy, but as a force and influence in literature and in publishing. That was not my intent, and I was certainly not the only “warrior” who took up the fight. But I don’t think this fight could have taken place anywhere else but in the academy, where intellectual discourse and opportunities for new ideas can so richly flourish and be recognized. I have no idea whether an outsider like me, beating the bushes for support of a genre or an idea that did not seem to exist, could survive in an English department or anywhere else in the academy today; the atmosphere, the politics, the financial pressures, the tone of the times is so very different.

Even then, it was very much a minor miracle that I, uncredentialled and tainted, as some thought, by commercialism, was accorded such an opportunity. And that all of my campaigning and annoying persistence were tolerated. It would have been easy to eliminate me. But as much of an interloper as I was, I was rarely shut down; I could always speak my mind. And even though many of my colleagues were pretty damn unhappy about the new journalism and, later, creative nonfiction, they eventually came to recognize the popularity and potential of this new genre and, I think, to respect and appreciate the dedication and excitement displayed by our nonfiction students.

As the program grew and other universities followed suit, we outliers not only began to fit in, but also began to thrive. We added depth and substance not just to writing programs, but to the entire department. And as our students published, won awards, became popular teachers in their own right, we added more than a little bit of prestige.

What happened at Pitt and later at other English departments isn’t so very different than what happened as our genre evolved. Fifty years ago, we were hardly a blip on the radar, an add-on or an afterthought, a necessary annoyance at best. Today, we are not just a part of the literary ecosystem, we are its most active and impactful contributors—leaders and change makers and motivators where we once did not belong.

__________________________________

This essay originally appeared in Issue #76 of  Creative Nonfiction under the title “ I’d Like to Thank the Academy .”

Lee Gutkind

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Introduction: Fact, Fiction, or Opinion? (Part 1 of 3)

Every day, each of us is bombarded with information from all different kinds of sources. We have access to news 24 hours a day and even checking social media will often be accompanied by a newsflash or summary of something happening in the world as friends share stories and tidbits they have seen on TV, read in a paper, or heard in conversation. While on the surface all of this sharing seems to be a way to help us stay connected, it can have a downside. The American Psychological Association found that for many Americans all of this constant bombardment of news can cause anxiety, fatigue, and even loss of sleep or energy. On the one hand, it is important to stay informed and be aware of what is happening in the world around us, but on the other hand,  in order to reduce our anxiety and increase our grasp on reality, it is important to be able to separate fact, fiction and opinion.

Katharine Graham, a prominent news publisher wrote, “Truth and news are not the same thing!” Being able to make decisions about information and its truthfulness help us feel more in charge of what is happening around us, as well as keep us from worrying or being upset about things that may not even be real.

But how do we make these decisions? There are a few guidelines and sources available to help make this determination. First of all, it’s important to understand that a fact is a true statement that can be verified or objectively proven. A fact is true and correct no matter the source. An opinion, however, is a statement that has an element of belief; it tells how someone feels. An opinion is not always true and can’t be proven by concrete data or information and can vary according to who is presenting the information.

Example: The song, “Blinding Lights” by The Weeknd, is number two on the top 100 Billboard charts for the week of March 20. This is a fact. No matter which source that lists Top 100 songs, “Blinding Light” will be listed as number two on the charts. To contrast, a fan wrote about this song saying, “I’m impressed brother. Nobody can touch ya with this one bro....vibe gives me chills bro and I haven’t felt this feeling from a song in years!” This comment reflects one person’s belief and may or may not be shared by others.

When we’re looking at news stories, it’s important to take a minute to decide if what we are hearing is fact, or true information based on several sources, or opinion, a belief being shared. Even if this belief is shared by a group of people, if the statement cannot be validated by something concrete or proven, it is still an opinion. The interesting thing about opinions is they are only proven right or wrong depending if you also have the same opinion. If you were a Weeknd fan and really love “Blinding Lights, you might agree with the guy that said he hadn’t had the feeling from a song in years. If you are not a fan, may not agree with him, but that doesn’t make his opinion wrong for him or yours wrong for you! One thing you can both agree on is the fact that their song is listed at number two on the Billboard charts.

Let’s look at another example of opinion and fact that you may have recently heard in the news.  With regards to using bandanas or scarves for face mask covering it was said, “In many cases the scarf is better than face masks; it's thicker.” This statement cites no expert or medical resource to support its validity. Listening further, you might discover the following statement: “You might hear the claim that scarves can work better than masks; this is not supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's guidance to health care workers. While scarves may offer some protection, the CDC's advice describes scarves as a possible last resort if masks are not available.”

In trying to figure out what to believe when there is so much information coming at you, go with the facts that are supported by scientific research or authority. Anyone can make a statement about their beliefs, but don’t hesitate to ask for their source or evidence backing up their idea. 

An important thing to remember is that opinions aren’t always false. You can form an opinion based on factual information. For example, you may have the opinion that washing your hands for 20 seconds several times a day is a good way to be safe from contracting viruses. Another person may have the opinion that washing hands doesn’t matter and doesn’t protect us. The first opinion is factual and the second opinion is fiction. When listening to opinions be sure to dig deeper to discover the information that the opinion is based on! It’s easy for any politician, newscaster or friend to give an opinion without adequate or accurate information. To be well informed, be sure to check the sources of those opinions.

There are lots of tools that we can use to help us determine if information we are receiving is fact or opinion. The first tool you can use is your own common sense. Does what you are hearing seem reasonable? Can you find this information someplace other than the source that is sharing it at the moment? Does it feel right? Sometimes this can be hard to do because as human beings we tend to believe information that supports opinions or ideas that we have. This is called confirmation bias and leads us often to believe things that may or may not be true. Opinions can be based more on emotion, beliefs, or wishful thinking.

Check out Part 2 and Part 3 of this lesson series too!

Global Warming: Fact or Fiction Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Executive Summary

Global warming poses a unique challenge to world major economies including US. Yet, current mechanisms adopted by national governments specifically United States are insufficient to prepare for the negative impacts caused by this disaster.

According to (Bily, 2006), global warming is the average persistent increase in the atmospheric temperature near the earth’s surface leading to changes in global climate patterns over a given period of time.

This paper is designed to address the issue of global warming and to explain two opposite point of views on its impact. Some of us might be skeptical on the topic ‘global warming’ prodigies and the potential impact it has on our economy. Without any doubt, some of the chemicals emitted to the atmosphere have extremely long term negative effects, hitherto, the federal government has no mandate to enforce compliance measures for some of these threats that can potentially harm our economy.

The nation instead is relying on US Climate Change Action Plan which adopts non compulsory programs to specific market sectors to reduce these emissions. Although the impacts are always unlikely, they are plausible. The congress must therefore make a radical decision lest our children not revel the sweet ocean breeze and the cool atmosphere we are releasing today.

Global warming has led to an persistent increase in average summer temperatures. The increase in temperature level has started since 1981 while the most serious and high temperature has been recorded in 1970.

Even though there has been a substantial reduction in solar output while still the surface temperature has continued to rise. Nowadays summer days last longer than before besides being unbearable. In fact, in the Blue Ridge foothills on the Southeastern part of US, the temperature is always at 70s with the leaves showing their bright autumn colors.

This is an evidence of global warming that has started and will continue eroding our country’s economy if not addressed in timmely manner. Occurrence of hurricanes such as Katrina will be more destructive than occurance in a year of 2005 which cost the economy over $125 billion. Increased high temperature raises the probability of drought and instigate wildfires especially in grassland and forest areas. (Bily, 2006)

Global warming has led to multiple floods and droughts. Some of the latest statistics shows that floods have seriously hit 14 countries in Africa, UK, Malaysia, North Korea and the Midwest of the US, while drought and water shortages have in the past, plagued areas of the Middle East and the South Eastern US.

These crucial impacts should not be ignored if we are passionate about this country. Let us not put our children’s future on the environmental limbo, when today we have the opportunity to adopt those strategies that can save the future of this nation. (Jenkins.& Jackson ,2012).

First of all, global warming has serious negative effect on health of course. Greater part of North America in 2006 has experienced great heat wave leading to deaths of over 140 people including those having air conditioner installed. In 2003, the situation was worse in Europe when almost 70,000 lives were lost. Widespread outbreaks of diseases such as Malaria, dengue fever, tick borne encephalitis, have increased in the past due to alternating periods of drought and deluges. (Jenkins.& Jackson ,2012).

The thickness of Arctic sea and green land ice sheets have reduced, while Antarctica had lost almost 152 cubic kilometers by 2005.

All these calamities notwithstanding, we still doubt the reality of global warming. We still have some doubts in regards to the calculations made on the basis of existing data. Some of us therefore think that the increase in temperatures could be a natural occurrence. Finally some pessimists’ argue that adoption of policy on emissions and carbon production could lead to loss of jobs in the country. Despite all these, global warming is not a fiction as some of us tend to believe, it is a reality that is with us. (Haugen, Musser & Lovelace ,2010).

Scientists and other professionals have conflicting opinions on the evidence of global warming. Regardless of all these opinions, it is a fact that chemicals with extreme life times are emitted to the atmosphere, though there effects and long term impacts are not fully known.

It is axiomatic to argue that there is a need for a more comprehensive research on how these emissions can be reduced or stopped. Basing on negative evidences which are presented in this paper, it is a fact that our economy will be at limbo when environmental concerns are not addressed in time.

As a congress, we must think of the present and the future generation, just the way the founding fathers of United States of America laid a foundation for us. The citizens of this country have entrusted us with the power to make these solemn declaration that global warming is a disaster which must be treated with all sense of urgency it deserves. Let us think ‘favorable temperatures’, let us think ‘green environment’, and let us think of the future generation. May God bless United States of America.

Bily, C.A. (2006). Global warming, Greenhaven Press: San Diego.

Haugen, D. M., Musser S., Lovelace K.,(2010). Global warming. Greenhaven press:Detroit.

Jenkins, A.& Jackson R. (2012). Global climate change: How do we know? National Aerotics and Space Administration. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2018, November 20). Global Warming: Fact or Fiction. https://ivypanda.com/essays/global-warming-fact-or-fiction/

"Global Warming: Fact or Fiction." IvyPanda , 20 Nov. 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/global-warming-fact-or-fiction/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'Global Warming: Fact or Fiction'. 20 November.

IvyPanda . 2018. "Global Warming: Fact or Fiction." November 20, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/global-warming-fact-or-fiction/.

1. IvyPanda . "Global Warming: Fact or Fiction." November 20, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/global-warming-fact-or-fiction/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Global Warming: Fact or Fiction." November 20, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/global-warming-fact-or-fiction/.

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Lens | essay: icons as fact, fiction and metaphor, lens: photography, video and visual journalism, follow lens:.

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Essay: Icons as Fact, Fiction and Metaphor

For the Lens blog, Philip Gefter, formerly a picture editor at The Times who writes regularly about photography, has adapted an essay from his new book, “ Photography After Frank ,” published by the Aperture Foundation.

Truth-telling is the promise of a photograph — as if fact itself resides in the optical precision with which photography reflects the way we see the world. A photograph comes as close as we get to witnessing an authentic moment with our own eyes while not actually being there. Think of all the famous pictures that serve as both documentation and verification of historic events: Mathew Brady’s photographs of the Civil War; Lewis Hine’s chronicle of industrial growth in America; the birth of the civil rights movement documented in a picture of Rosa Parks on a segregated city bus in Montgomery, Ala. Aren’t they proof of the facts in real time, moments in history brought to the present?

Of course, just because a photograph reflects the world with perceptual accuracy doesn’t mean it is proof of what spontaneously transpires. A photographic image might look like actual reality, but gradations of truth are measured in the circumstances that led up to the moment the picture was taken.

In John Szarkowski’s seminal book, “The Photographer’s Eye,” Robert Capa is referred to as “the great war photographer.” Capa’s most famous picture, “Death of a Loyalist Militiaman, Cerro Muriano, Córdoba Front, Spain, September 5, 1936,” commonly known as “The Falling Soldier,” was taken in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. Though long considered a defining war picture, its veracity has also inspired decades of debate among scholars, curators and critics. While the picture’s iconic stature rests on the precise moment captured when the Spanish soldier was shot, the possibility that it was staged undermines the historic proof it has come to signify.

New evidence reported by the Guardian has reignited the debate. José Manuel Susperregui, who teaches at the University of the Basque Country, recently published a book that includes research challenging the stated location of “The Falling Soldier.” Several previously unseen Capa pictures in the archives of the international Center of Photography, taken in the same sequence as “The Falling Soldier,” show a broader view of the landscape behind him. Mr. Susperregui uses these additional images to make a convincing case that they were taken in the Espejo countryside, some 25 miles from Cerro Muriano. This information, along with the many stories about Capa staging the picture, add to the intrigue, now rekindled in the Spanish press on the occasion of the International Center of Photography ‘s traveling exhibition, “ This Is War! Robert Capa at Work ,” which just opened at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.

“Everyone engaged with this photograph is trying to find out the truth,” Willis Hartshorn, the director of the center, said in a phone conversation. “The new information about the landscape is compelling.” Nothing is conclusive yet, Mr. Hartshorn added “We’re all trying to build the research together,” he said.

The impulse to define, perfect, or heighten reality is manifest in a roster of iconic photographs that have come to reside in the world as “truth.” Mathew Brady, for instance, rarely set foot on a battlefield. He couldn’t bear the sight of dead bodies. In fact, most pictures of the battlefield attributed to Brady’s studio were taken by his employees Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan — both of whom were known to have moved bodies around for the purposes of composition and posterity.

In “Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg, 1863,” by Gardner, the body of a dead soldier lies in perfect repose. His head is tilted in the direction of the camera, his hand on his belly, his rifle propped up vertically against the rocks. There would be no question that this was a scene the photographer happened upon, if it weren’t for another picture by Gardner of the same soldier, this time his face turned from the camera and his rifle lying on the ground.

In the Library of Congress catalog, the photograph “Dead Soldiers at Antietam, 1862,” is listed twice, under the names of both Brady and Gardner. In the image, approximately two dozen dead soldiers lie in a very neat row across the field. Could they possibly have fallen in such tidy succession? Knowing what we do about Gardner’s picture of the lone rebel soldier, the possibility lingers that he moved some of these bodies to create a better composition. Or it could be that other soldiers had lined the bodies up before digging a mass grave for burial.

Whatever circumstances led to this picture, it is at least verifiable that the Battle of Antietam took place on this field. We know that many, many soldiers were killed. Evidence of the battle remains — the soldiers that died on that date, the battlefield on which they fought, the clothes they wore, and so on. Just how much of the subject matter does the photographer have to change before fact becomes fiction, or a photograph becomes metaphor?

Lewis Hine’s 1920 photograph of a powerhouse mechanic symbolizes the work ethic that built America. The simplicity of the photograph long ago turned it into a powerful icon, all the more poignant because of its “authenticity.” But in fact, Mr. Hine — who cared about human labor in an increasingly mechanized world — posed this man in order to make the portrait. (In the first shot, the worker’s fly was open.) Does that information make the picture any less valid? Isn’t it a sad fact that the flaws in daily life should prevent reality from being the best version of how things really are? In our attempt to perfect reality, we aim for higher standards. A man with his zipper down is undignified, and so the famous icon, posed as he is, presents an idealized version of the American worker — his dignity customized, but forever intact. Still, the mechanic did work in that powerhouse and his gesture was true enough to his labor. The reality of what the image depicts is indisputable. Whether Hine maintained a fidelity to what transpired in real time may or may not be relevant to its symbolic import.

Despite its overexposure on posters and postcards, “Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville, 1950,” (“Kiss at the Hôtel de Ville”) by Robert Doisneau, has long served as an example of photography capturing the spontaneity of life. How lovely the couple is, how elegant their gesture and their clothing, how delightful this perspective from a café in Paris! What a breezy testament to the pleasure of romance! But despite the story this picture seems to tell — one of a photographer who just happened to look up from his Pernod, say, as the enchanted lovers walked by — there was no serendipity whatsoever in the moment. Mr. Doisneau had seen the man and woman days earlier, near the school at which they were studying acting. He was on assignment for Life magazine, for a story on romance in Paris, and hired the couple as models for the shot. This information was not brought to light until the early 1990s, when lawsuits demanding compensation were filed by several people who claimed to be the models in the famous picture. Does the lack of authenticity diminish the photograph? It did for me, turning its promise of romance into a beautifully crafted lie.

Ruth Orkin was in Florence in the early 1950s when she met Jinx Allen, whom she asked to be the subject of a picture Ms. Orkin wanted to submit to The Herald Tribune. “American Girl in Italy, Florence, Italy, 1951” was conceived inadvertently when Ms. Orkin noticed the Italian men on their Vespas ogling Ms. Allen as she walked down the street. Ms. Orkin asked her to walk down the street again, to be sure she had the shot. Does a second take alter the reality of the phenomenon? How do you parse the difference between Mr. Doisneau’s staged picture and Ms. Orkin’s re-creation?

The birth of the civil rights movement is often dated to a moment in 1955 when Rosa Parks, a black woman, refused to give up her seat on a crowded city bus to a white man. Many people assume that the famous picture of Mrs. Parks sitting on a bus is a record of that historic moment. But the picture was taken Dec. 21, 1956, a year after she refused to give up her seat, and a month after the United States Supreme Court ruled Montgomery’s segregated bus system illegal. Before she died in 2005, Mrs. Parks told Douglas Brinkley, her biographer, that she posed for the picture. A reporter and two photographers from Look magazine had seated her on the bus in front of a white man. Similar photo opportunities were arranged on the same day for other civil rights leaders, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Here is a staged document that has become a historic reference point, and a revealing parable about the relationship of history to myth.

As a witness to events, the photojournalist sets out to chronicle what happens in the world as it actually occurs. A cardinal rule of the profession is that the presence of the camera must not alter the situation being photographed. The viewer’s expectation about a picture’s veracity is largely determined by the context in which the image appears. A picture published in a newspaper is believed to be fact; an advertising image is understood to be fiction. If a newspaper image turns out to have been set up, then questions are raised about trust and authenticity. Still, somewhere between fact and fiction — or perhaps hovering slightly above either one — is the province of metaphor, where the truth is approximated in renderings of a more poetic or symbolic nature.

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Beautiful photos;

We need to distinguish between the general statement and the particular statement in the strictly linguistic and philosophical sense.

If the Paris picture were words, it would say, “people in Paris kiss”. But the photo implies that THESE people in Paris kiss. These people do not. These two act at kissing. Clearly, photos are NOT as good as words at conveying truth as it is usually impossible to tell if a photo is a general statement (staged) or a particular moment (a truly captured moment in time).

But photos can be visual art and that speaks to us in primordial ways and can be motivational.

I think the lesson is that photos can lie and frequently do.

Excellent piece. I’ve been exploring the influence of imagery on writers and writing on my blog “In This Light” and have been particularly interested in how Appalachia is shown and perceived. The last paragraph in this piece about the difference between the photograph as photojournalism and the photograph as metaphor is key.

” a camera is filter through which the reality of an existential moment ( the world plus the camera plus all the people)pours onto the film which preserved the visual aspects of that moment as photographed from where you are, physically as well as in terms of awareness and depth. writing about a visual medium tends to make the simple complex. If you want to make photographs all you do is point the camera at whatever you wish ; click the shutter whenever you want if you want to judge a good photograph ,ask yourself; is life like that? the answer must be yes and no,but mostly yes” Charles Harbutt

The man in the photo of Rosa Parks is Nick Chris, a newspaper reporter. Chris, now deceased, concluded his career at the Houston Chronicle. I worked on staff with Nick at the HouChron. Steve Ueckert, recently retired from the Houston Chronicle

The Rosa Parks example seems fairly obvious. I doubt a photographer, had he even been there ready to take the shot, would have had any inkling what a historic moment it would turn out to be.

The closing line is much to the point: “Still, somewhere between fact and fiction — or perhaps hovering slightly above either one — is the province of metaphor, where the truth is approximated in renderings of a more poetic or symbolic nature.” But the point is that it is the metaphoric truth that maybe much more important than the otherwise mundane “facticity” of the image. Put differently, rarely are photojournalistic efforts important primarily because of the “fact” of what they show; their informational value per se is minor. What makes photojournalism important is that it shows us “how to see” the world in a particular way. In short, it is fundamentally a “public art” and its power and importance is a function of that artistry. For a full consideration of the manifestations of such artistry I would suggest (and this is self-promotion), the blog //www.nocaptionneeded.com .

Another classic is the Soviet Army photo of a solder raising the Red Flag over the Berlin Reichstag in 1945 , supposedly during a heated battle with bullets whizzing by him. The first release shows his extended arm with 2 wrist watches attached. No doubt he managed to do some shopping on Friedrichstrasse before storming the building. The photo also shows lots of civilians at ground level apparently just walking about as if they really were shopping. Needless to say, the second version shows the watches gone as well as the shoppers. More of a war scene.

On the one hand recreating an event so the photographer may capture it is completely un-ethical, posing a person for a portrait is not.

A portrait, even an environmental portrait, may be posed and often is. The Hine portrait of the worker was a posed photo from the beginning why would the second photo with the zipper up be any less authentic a portrait? I say it is incumbent upon the portrait photographer to correct an error such as an unzipped fly when photographing a portrait. If, however, an unzipped fly is in some way relevant to the subject than leaving it down serves a purpose.

Please distinguish between portraiture and photojournalism. Staging a shot, a la Doisneau, is un-ethical and should be labeled an illustration, staging a portrait is a portrait.

Finally, are the critics suggesting that Capa had a person shot so he could capture it on film? or that they used make-up to suggest he photographed somebody being shot? I have a hard time imaging even the most cynical, fame hungry photographer arranging to have somebody killed for their benefit.

yeah, if the soldiers in brady’s photos were not actually dead.

what’s the point of news photos if they don’t carry the news in fact?

For a fascinating discussion about how meaning in photography can be denoted or connoted, I suggest reading Roland Barthes’ compelling essay “The Photographic Message.”

On the civil war photos:

First, this question is necessarily a bit graphic. I’ve always had problems with the two gettysburg photographs from Devil’s Den. My understanding is that Gardner took these photos on July 6. The fighting around Devil’s Den occurred primarily on July 2. The initial question is why the soldier’s body doesn’t exhibit signs of bloating as seen in other photos such as the field where Reynolds fell — although fighiting in that area occurred on July 1. Furthermore, rigor mortis sets in within hours after death and lasts for up to 72 hours, after which the bodies decomposition takes over and muscles loosen. Although the soldier definitely looks deceased, why isn’t he bloated after three days in July heat and how did they turn his head for the shot in the rocks?

As for the Antietam photo, my understanding is that these men had been lined up for burial.

Photographs don’t lie, but photographers (and editors and caption writers) do. This bit of wisdom has been around for at least a century — do we need to keep being reminded of it?

BTW – contrary to Gefter’s suggestion, there are several photos by Orkin of Jinx Allen in Florence — Orkin and Allen did the series to convey the experience of traveling as a single woman:

//www.orkinphoto.com/american_girl.php .

When seen together, there’s little doubt as to the amount of staging in the iconic ‘ogling corner’ photograph. There’s no difference, on this level, between Orkin’s and Doisneau’s.

Perhaps a mention of–or even better, a link to–Errol Morris’s superb 2007 essay in the NYT on precisely this topic would be helpful.

The essay was about Roger Fenton’s “Valley of the Shadow of Death.”

//morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg-part-one/?ref=opinion

–Matthew

Although this topic is especially important in considering documentary photographs — since people make decisions and form attitudes based on them, sometimes without being aware of it — I think it has wider application.

In general, how much of the value we place on a photographic image is based on what’s actually in the photograph, and how much of it is based on what we’re told about the photograph?

For example: given that it’s nearly indistinguishable from the output of thousands of other photo students, would anyone care much about Francesca Woodman’s work if it didn’t have such a poignant backstory?

I belived the first paper to report the new information about the Capa photo was El Periodico, I think published in Barcelona. Just to set the record straight as to where the new research surfaced first. I could be corrected if anyone saw it somewhere else first. But I know El Periodico published before Guardian or Independent or AP. – Robert Stevens

Staged photographs are illustration, rather than photo-journalism.

Making an iconic photographic illustration to represent an historic event or universal human experience is not unethical — and, as Mr Gefter says, can be of considerable value.

If the photographer lies, and says that it was not staged, then we have an ethics problem.

An extension of this might be painters who work from photographs in secret, but lie, and say they only work from life, or plein-air.

For me, the kind and degree of manipulation that will rob a photograph of its value depends on the kind and degree of value we assign to it. Categorizing all the reasons a photo might be of value would take a book, but I’ll mention just three: We admire some pictures because they are icons of a fact or force of history. Others strike us because they evocatively capture an aspect of the human condition. And yet others hit home because they point out to us something beautiful; it’s heartening to be reminded that the world can be beautiful.

Almost all of the pictures you discuss, if not all of them, fall to some extent into all three categories. But, as exemplars of the first category, I would point particularly to the photos of the very-recently-dead soldier of the Spanish Civil War (Capra), the less-recently-dead soldiers of the American Civil War (Brady/Gardner/O’Sullivan), and the still-very-much-alive soldier of the American Civil Rights Movement (Look magazine). The Parisian kissers (Doisneau) and Florentine oglers (Orkin) seem to me to be in the second category. The picture of the powerhouse mechanic (Hine) is the only one I would cite as a model of the third category.

Paradoxically, I guess, as long as he or she isn’t trying to defraud us by being unfaithful in some non-incidental way to history, I’m willing to cut the photographer quite a bit of slack for pictures in the first category. These particular pictures here are not frauds: soldiers did and still do die in civil wars, and Rosa Parks did start a revolution by sitting in the front of a bus while a white man sat behind her. The manipulations that attended the creation of these pictures are invisible, and they´re of utterly superficial elements.

I’m much more averse to manipulation in the case of pictures in the second or third category. The affirming power of such pictures — unlike those in the first category — hangs on the unstated premise, which is also a promise, that this is life . Break that promise, as it seems to me Doisneau did, and you lose me. Like a movie, his picture is of what life could be , but it doesn’t depict what life is — especially since the charm of such a kiss springs from the spontaneity and obliviousness of two lovers surrounded by the passing multitude.

The Hine doesn’t suffer from the kind of fundamental defect that invalidates the Doisneau. An unzipped fly is not incidental (which is why Hine was right to retake the picture), but a zipped-up one is.

That leaves Orkin’s picture. You ask how we parse the difference between the fact that it was re-created while Doisneau’s was staged. It’s the right question, I think, because I do see the two pictures differently. That’s because the Orkin delivers on the promise that this is life , as we know from the fact that in all non-incidental respects the scene came together entirely spontaneously when Orkin took her first picture.

Those photos are historical documents, even if they were staged. It doesn’t matter, actually. These photos represent a certain way of life, of thinking, a set of believes that the people that composed them held dear to them. The Kiss, for instance, represents the joie de vivre, the spontaneity of young love even if the people in the picture were models. Would anyone think less of a master paint just because the people on it posed for the ocassion? Certainly not.

Or see at the photo of the Militiamen falling. What it does matter if Cappa staged it? The picture still conveys the feeling of helplessness of the Spanish Republic, of the People fighting for and dying for an ideal of Freedom.

Art has a truth in itself. Thus why we still feel deep emotions when looking at a Sixteenth Century painting, or at an Assyrian relief (see the Wounded Lioness… it is so poignant, that each time I see it I can’t stop the tears coming up!).

There are no lies in a work of art, because it is the observer who gives them value, meaning, and content. Of course, they can have a propaganda intention, or better said: most of them has a propaganda intention behind them -like the famous Napoleon Crossing the Alps-. Though, as that propaganda is obvious, and to be workable needs to reach the inner soul of their pretended market, the lie is no more: there is a truth in them. We need to be just more thorough to decypher the hidden truth. And that where lies most of the fun, of the beauty, of the work of art; in the glimpse of a past, in the process of discovery of those subtexts that are there, waiting for us, like long lost friends.

‘But in fact, Mr. Hine — who cared about human labor in an increasingly mechanized world — posed this man in order to make the portrait. (In the first shot, the worker’s fly was open.) Does that information make the picture any less valid? Isn’t it a sad fact that the flaws in daily life should prevent reality from being the best version of how things really are?”

Does anybody in their right mind look at the Hines photo and actually think that Mr. Hine just happened upon that scene? Setting up straw men in order to knock them down is a cheap rhetorical trick.

By the way has the New York Times ever heard back from Edgar Martins?

[The Times continues to await a statement from Mr. Martins. — Lens]

If you have to give further information [a “back story”] about a photograph; it is a failure. Being posed has nothing to do with its value as art, but it has everything to do with its value as a historical record.

I don’t have to know anything further about “The Raising of the Flag on Iwo Jima” not the camera make, type, the film, the photograper or the situation. The photo stands on its own merits – it’s a great photograph, but it is not a “historical record.

It is amazing how the picture “American Girl” still creates the debate: was it posed.? It decidedly was not, and I am still alive and ready to describe that day, that moment in August l951 when Ruth Orkin and I were in Florence, and the photograph was taken. It was not staged, nor was it posed. Period. Ruth and I were literally fooling around, thinking of ways to show what it was like as a single American woman, traveling in Europe at that period. We had met the night before, and thought it would be a caper. I was not, and am not a professional model. We were walking toward the Piazza della Republica at l0:30 in the monring. Ruth ahead of me. She turned around to see the l5 men looking at me. Delighted, she asked that I stop, turn around, go back a few paces, and walk forward again. That was literally it. And I am still here to tell the story. Two shots, in two minutes, that captured the spirit of Florence on that August mornig. Jinx Allen (Ninalee Allen Craig)

Honesty is an integral part of documentary photography. When the photographer deceives, he is dishonest. If Capa, for instance, staged his picture in order to deceive his audience, he was dishonest, which discredits him as a photographer. I believe it is as simple as that.

We know that photojournalists often deceive. The editors of newspapers/magazines deceive even more often. These men/women all have an agenda to lie, to propagate, to make money, to win prizes, to become famous, whatever.

There was a time when photographs taken on film at least afforded one the opportunity to investigate the extend to which a photographer lied. In the age of digital photography, it has become just about impossible to determine whether the contents of a photograph has been manipulated, or the extend to which it was manipulated.

I was so glad to read that Jinx Allen is still alive and was, in this case, able to debunk the debunkers. Her comment made my day!

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Telling fictional stories and engaging with the fictional stories of others is an important and pervasive part of human culture. But people not only tell and engage with fictional stories. They also reflect on the content of stories, and on the way these are told. Grappling with the many issues such reflection uncovers has long been a concern of professional academics in language departments and other academic programs with a focus on language. Philosophers should be included on this list. The concept of fiction gives rise to a number of intriguing and complex philosophical issues, and the philosophy of fiction has now become an acknowledged part of mainstream philosophy, with a history that goes back at least to the early debates about the role of poets and dramatists found in the works of Aristotle and Plato. The issues in question broadly relate to fiction as a mode of representation—a way of describing individuals and events—that is strikingly different from representation concerned with truth, the latter long a dominant theme in philosophy. Not only is faithfulness to truth in the ordinary sense not a requirement in fiction; fiction may even depart from truth in the things it talks about, which typically include nonexistent individuals and even members of nonexistent kinds (Holmes and hobbits, for example)—see the entry on fictional entities .

There are also more indirect reasons for taking fiction seriously as a philosophical topic. The last few decades have seen a surge of interest in interpreting prominent yet (arguably) philosophically problematic areas of enquiry—areas as far apart as mathematics and morality—as involving something akin to fiction, a position known as fictionalism about those areas. On such views, we should not believe the central claims of the area because of their commitment to entities like numbers and objective moral facts; instead we should treat them the way we treat a distinctively fictional claim like “Sherlock Holmes was a brilliant detective”: something we know not to be literally true (after all, there never was a Sherlock Holmes) but accept as true in some derivative or at least nonliteral sense (unlike “Holmes was a plodding policeman”, say). The continuing rise of fictionalism presents us with a new reason for treating fiction as a significant philosophical topic, since it is a position that is difficult to motivate independently of an understanding of what is distinctive about fiction (Armour-Garb and Woodbridge 2015). (For more on fictionalism and its ties to fiction, see the entry on fictionalism .)

One fundamental question raised by the notion of fiction is a conceptual one: What makes something a work of fiction as opposed to a work of non-fiction? A first attempt at saying what fiction is might portray it as a kind of writing whose product is a written text (a work of fiction) that misrepresents how the world actually is, although not in order to deceive intended readers. This opposes it to non-fiction; even if a work of non-fiction misrepresents the world, it is not intended by its author to be recognized as something that misrepresents the world.

It doesn’t take much to see that this rough characterization is in fact far too rough. A work of fiction needn’t be a written text, but could be a picture (or series of pictures) or a representation in some other medium like film. And the characterization lets in too much: a newspaper article attacking some political position by engaging in the relentless use of irony, say, is not a work of fiction but a work of non-fiction that uses irony.

The problem of saying how fiction differs from non-fiction is just one of the hard problems faced by the philosophical study of fiction. Another problem is that of specifying the sense in which a fictional sentence can be true despite misdescribing how matters stand in the world. (A sentence like “Sherlock Holmes was a brilliant detective”, for example, is not true if it is construed as a claim about brilliant detectives our world has known, but counts as true if it is stated as an answer to a quiz question “Who was Sherlock Holmes?” By contrast, “Sherlock Holmes was a plodding policeman” would count as false in this context.) But in what sense can the sentence be true, given that the world does not contain any such person as Sherlock Holmes? One promising thought is that when we hear the sentence as genuinely true we regard it as elliptical for something like “ In the Holmes stories , Sherlock Holmes was a brilliant detective”. On this suggestion it is the truth of the latter prefixed sentence that provides the sense in which “Sherlock Holmes was a brilliant detective” counts as true. But even if this is right, what still needs explaining is what it is for such a prefixed sentence to be true. What makes “In the Holmes stories, Sherlock Holmes was a brilliant detective” true (but not “In the Holmes stories, Sherlock Holmes was a plodding policeman”), when there never was such a person as Sherlock Holmes? In addition to the problem of how to understand the notion of truth in a work of fiction, there is also a deep puzzle about the way we respond emotionally to such truths. When we engage with fiction, we often do so at a highly specific emotional level—we may not only be enthralled by elements of the plot but also affected by what befalls particular characters. Thus, we may find ourselves feeling pity for Anna Karenina as we near the end of Tolstoy’s novel because we are aware of Anna’s suffering. But the claim that we pity Anna Karenina is deeply puzzling: we know there is no Anna Karenina, and that it is only true in Tolstoy’s novel that Anna Karenina is suffering, so how can there be genuine pity for Anna? This is the so-called paradox of fiction, one of a batch of puzzles that have been raised in the philosophy of fiction about our engagement with works of fiction.

These are by no means the only philosophical questions thrown up by fiction. In fact, the paradox of fiction immediately suggests others. Taken at face value, a statment like “Sherlock Holmes was a brilliant detective” seems at best to be true in a work of fiction rather than true outright. By contrast, a statement like “Many readers pity Anna Karenina” seems to be true outright. (The same goes for other statements relating fictional characters to the real world, for example “Conan Doyle created Holmes”, “Frodo doesn’t exist”, and “Holmes is more famous than any real detective”.) This raises the thorny issue of the ontological commitments of talk involving fiction. If it is genuinely true that many readers feel pity for Anna Karenina or that Doyle created Holmes, then presumably there are things—Anna Karenina and Holmes—about whom this is true. But how is the claim that there are such objects consistent with the obvious truth that Holmes and Anna Karenina don’t exist? And what could such nonexistent objects be like? We leave detailed commentary on such ontological and metaphysical questions to the entry on fictional entities . The present entry is devoted to the nature of fiction and its “truths”, including our emotional engagement with these truths—topics that can be discussed independently of whether one is a realist or an antirealist about fictional entities. Before we begin, it is worth noting that the study of these topics is not the province of philosophers alone. Just what is fiction, for example, is a question that also engages narratologists and historians of fiction (see, e.g., Gallagher 2006, Walsh 2007), although they approach the issue from different academic perspectives, often with somewhat different aims in mind. The present entry focuses mainly on the work of philosophers.

1.1 Semantic and Linguistic Accounts

1.2 fiction as making up stories, 1.3 fiction as authorial pretense, 1.4 fiction as make-believe, 1.5 speech-act accounts, 1.6 fiction, pretense, and cognitive psychology, 1.7 new challenges, 2.1 truth in fiction as truth in the worlds of fiction, 2.2 truth in fiction as make-believe truth, 2.3 truth in fiction and the role of “authors”, 2.4 impossible fictions, 3. truth through fiction, 4. the paradox of fiction, 5. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the nature of fiction.

In whatever way we characterize the fiction/non-fiction distinction, the distinction is widely recognized as important. We care which category a work belongs to. We read Lord Macaulay’s The History of England (1848) to learn about the overthrow of James II and its aftermath, and criticize Macaulay for departures from fact or for bias: these detract from its value as a work of non-fiction. Historical novels such as Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865–1867) or Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009) also display bias and they depart in numerous ways from fact, but the bias and inaccuracies don’t lessen their value as works of fiction. And when a writer passes off a work as a work of non-fiction, deliberately hiding the fact that much of its content was made up, we see that as fraudulent. (There are numerous examples. One famous case is “Jimmy’s World”, written for the Washington Post in 1980 by journalist Janet Cooke; the article won her a Pulitzer Prize that she later returned.)

Not everyone agrees that the distinction matters. Some have argued that all discourse is on a par, that there is no writing that is per se fictional or non-fictional. According to Stanley Fish, for example,

when we communicate, it is because we are parties to a set of discourse agreements which are in effect decisions as to what can be stipulated as a fact. It is these decisions and the agreement to abide by them, rather than the availability of substance, that make it possible for us to refer, whether we are novelists or reporters for the New York Times. (Fish 1980: 242)

Other writers make much of the fact that even non-fiction writers select and structure what they write about and how they write about it. But even if we grant all this, we don’t need to succumb to the kind of skeptical position such authors argue for. It remains the case that fiction writers by and large accept a distinction between the real world and the fictional worlds they generate. The generation of such worlds, which often contain individuals, objects, and even kinds of objects, that are very different from those in the real world, is not simply a consequence of broad principles about how we always stipulate and select and structure how we see the world. In short, even those inclined to a kind of constructivist anti-realist metaphysics on the basis of the sorts of arguments Fish appeals to might nonetheless still admit a robust fiction/non-fiction distinction.

But what might such a distinction look like? What makes a representation like a written text a work of fiction ? Dictionaries often contrast fiction with fact or reality, so one tempting thought is that something is a fiction just if it is false, or contains falsehoods: a purely semantic characterization of “fiction”. This seems to have been Nelson Goodman’s view: “Literal falsity distinguishes fiction from true report” (Goodman 1978: 124). As a number of authors have pointed out, however, being false may be one meaning of the word “fiction”, but it is not the only meaning, and it is not the meaning at play when we nowadays call something a work of fiction (Lamarque and Olsen 1994; Cohn 1999). If it were, then any work that contains mistakes, say a physics text book, would count as a work of fiction.

(This is not to say that there is no connection between these two meanings of “fiction”. Works of fiction typically contain numerous falsehoods, and some have even speculated that the negative meaning of fiction as falsehood may have “delayed the lexical move of calling novels ‘fiction’ to a time when this genre had become a well-established, highly respected literary form” [Cohn 1999: 3].)

Even if fiction in the intended sense can’t be defined in terms of the notion of falsity alone, it might be thought that more complicated semantic accounts will have a greater chance of success. Thus, Cohn herself thought that fiction in the intended sense was “a literary nonreferential narrative” (1999: 17), where being “nonreferential” means that the work need not, and does not exclusively , refer to the real world outside the text, and that any references when it does “are not bound to accuracy” (1999: 15).

But such an account inherits one problem that also affects the simpler view of fiction as falsehood. Not only is nonreferentiality, like falsity, not sufficient for a text to be a work of fiction (consider a history of science text that contains a description of a failed scientific theory like phlogiston theory); it is also not necessary . Works of fiction may be wholly true, and in that sense refer exclusively to the real world outside the text. Imagine a work of historical fiction written about real persons, where, unbeknownst to the author, the parts that the author thought she was making up capture exactly what really happened. That wouldn’t make the work a work of non-fiction (Currie 1990: 9). In addition, the idea that references to the real world outside the text are not bound to accuracy surely needs to be weakened. Historical novels depend on their being more or less right about a large part of their historical setting.

Problems such as these have made semantic accounts of fiction relatively unpopular with philosophers. The same is true of approaches that look for textual differences between works of fiction and non-fiction. There seems to be no feature of style or syntax that marks off a work as fictional rather than non-fictional. For any proposed feature, say the use of footnotes or indices in works of non-fiction or the use of the imperfect tense in fiction (cf. Recanati 2000), one can find works from the other category that simply mimic the feature. Certain literary scholars and linguists have suggested an exception should be made for free indirect discourse, a literary device whereby a character’s first-person take on events is presented via third-person narration (as in this line from Emma by Jane Austen, a master of this literary device: “He was afraid they should have a very bad drive. He was afraid poor Isabella would not like it. And there would be poor Emma in the carriage behind” [Austen 1815 [1841: 114]). These theorists think free indirect discourse is peculiar to fiction (see especially Banfield 1982). But there is substantial evidence to show that other writing may also display this feature (see Fludernik 1993); even Hemingway used it in his early journalistic writings (Blinova 2012), and it is prominent in works of New Journalism, such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966). At best, the appearance of free indirect discourse suggests that the work is a work of fiction; it doesn’t imply it (Friend 2012). And the use of free indirect discourse is scarcely necessary for being a work of fiction. Many works show no sign of it.

A more promising approach to understanding the fiction/non-fiction distinction focuses not on semantic notions or stylistic features, but on the author’s inventiveness in producing a text, whatever its semantic or stylistic character. The best known such account is Harry Deutsch’s “fiction as making up stories” (Deutsch 2000, 2013). Deutsch insists “we cannot be left without a sharp distinction between fact and fiction” (2000: 149) even if we think, as Goodman did, that facts are themselves fabricated. Crucial to the notion of fiction, he thinks, is that, unlike fact, it is the product of creative, imaginative activity on the author’s part, activity in which the author makes something up “out of whole cloth”. His own distinctive take on this view explains the kind of fabrication involved in fiction-making as the author’s stipulatively ascribing properties to individuals, but where these properties match properties possessed by pre-existing objects from the “fictional plenitude”, a domain that contains not only every conceivable object and event but also an enormous range of impossibilities (Deutsch 2000: 155–6).

Deutsch is particularly critical of a contrasting view, to be discussed later, according to which what is necessary and sufficient for a work to be a work of fiction is specified in terms of imaginative activity on the part of the work’s readers rather than its author (Deutsch 2013: 366ff). But focusing on the author seems to have its own problems. First, it suggests that works like Cooke’s “Jimmy’s World” and James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003), both of which were substantially made up although passed off as works of non-fiction, thereby count as works of fiction, contrary to the usual classification of such works (see Friend 2012; Friend agrees that we might pejoratively call A Million Little Pieces “just one long fiction”, but sees this as an example of the ambiguity of the word “fiction”). In response, Deutsch insists that, whatever our judgment about Frey’s A Million Little Pieces , the case of Cooke is clear:

[she] exercised her authorial imagination. She did everything an author of fiction would normally do. … If there ever was a case of fiction masquerading as fact, this is it. (Deutsch 2013: 369)

A second point, to be discussed below, is that numerous works of non-fiction involve creative interpolations on the part of the author. If so, Deutsch’s approach faces the danger that all such works should be classified as part fiction, part non-fiction. But Deutsch denies that on such a “fiction as making up stories” approach the inclusion of salient fictitious elements is sufficient to make something a work of fiction (2013: 368)—it all depends on the level of imaginative activity exhibited by the work.

Deutsch’s view is not the only one to highlight the central role of the author in the definition of fictionality. A number of authors think that fiction-making involves a special kind of speech act on the part of the author, one that differs sharply from assertion (see especially Currie 1990, to which we return below). Unlike Deutsch’s account, such views have the capacity to classify works like “Jimmy’s World” as non-fiction on the grounds that authors assert the content of such works; even if much of this content is made up, authors intend readers to take it as factual. Just how to characterize a special speech act of fiction-making or story-telling is no easy matter, however. Take Nicholas Wolterstorff’s view that story-tellers engage in “presenting or offering for consideration” propositions for audiences to reflect on (Wolterstorff 1980). But even scientists do this when putting forward speculative theories, so it is hard to see how this sets fiction apart from non-fiction. John Searle has in fact argued that attempts to define a special illocutionary act of fiction-making are doomed to failure, since they entail that fictional discourse must differ in meaning from ordinary assertoric discourse (Searle 1975: 323–4; Predelli 2019 offers a sympathetic reconstruction of the argument). He proposes that we should instead understand fiction-making in terms of pretense: authors pretend to assert what they are saying (1975: 324). More generally,

the author of a work of fiction pretends to perform a series of illocutionary acts, normally of the representative type [such as assertion], (1975: 325)

but without any attempt to deceive. For Searle, therefore,

the identifying criterion for whether or not a text is a work of fiction must of necessity lie in the illocutionary intentions of the author

(that is, their presence in the case of non-fiction writing, their absence in the case of fiction-making), and not in features of the text (1975: 325).

Searle’s appeal to the notion of pretense has been very influential, but as stated the account seems inadequate in a number of ways. As he himself admits, many works of fiction contain claims that seem to be put forward as serious assertions (he cites the opening lines of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina , 1877), and so his theory at best defines what makes a fragment of a work fictional, not what makes a work fictional (Searle 1975: 331–2). (Searle’s account shares this feature with a number of other accounts; we look at ways in which theorists have responded below.) Furthermore, not only is pretense not necessary for something to be (part of) a work of fiction, it is also not sufficient: one can pretend to engage in an illocutionary act for all kinds of reasons other than the fact that one is writing fiction—one might just be engaging in mimicry or verbal irony, for example (Currie 1990: 17).

Despite the latter problem, pretense has played, and continues to play, a large role in the way philosophers understand fiction. Kripke, for example, claimed as early as his 1973 John Locke Lectures that writing fiction involved pretense, a view he then used to argue against attempts to use fiction in the defense of a descriptivist theory of reference for names (Kripke 2013: 23). David Lewis too saw story-telling as pretense: in his seminal work on truth in fiction he claimed that “the story-teller [pretends] to be telling the truth about matters whereof he has knowledge” (Lewis 1978 [1983: 266]). Neither claimed to be defining fiction in terms of pretense, however. Lewis, for example, acknowledges that sometimes one pretends in order to deceive, unlike the story-teller (Lewis 1987 [1983: 266]).

The problems faced by pretense accounts of fiction that only consider what authors do have made some philosophers look instead at the role that readers play. Indeed, approaches that look at the role of readers (or, more generally, consumers) of fiction have now become standard in the literature. Kendall Walton’s version of such a view appeared in his ground-breaking Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Walton 1990). Walton focuses on the way a text can be used as a resource in games of make-believe in which participants pretend, imagine, or make believe that the world is as the text represents it as being. (Walton’s view, it should be stressed, applies to representational entities in general: dolls, globs of mud, paintings, sculptures, and so on, not just literary texts.) Just as children use tree stumps as props in a game of make-believe in which the stumps count as bears, so a community of readers can use a text as a prop in a game of make-believe in which the text is treated as a record of events, situations, conversations, etc. Any text whose function is to serve as a prop in a game of make-believe, thereby prescribing imaginings about its content, counts as a work of fiction for Walton. (Function is determined by a number of factors such as author’s intentions and views about how the work can be appropriately used; Walton 1990: 91.) If readers let their imaginings be directed in this way, they are then participating in a game of make-believe that is authorized by the work.

For Walton, then, what is necessary for a text to count as a work of fiction is that it is supposed to serve as a prop in a game of make-believe, one that requires readers of the text to make believe its content. Note that this does not exclude the author from having a similar attitude to the work. Authors too may imagine or make believe or pretend that what they are saying is true (cf. Searle), but what is crucial to a work of fiction is that this is a requirement on consumers of fiction. (For this reason, day-dreaming out loud does not count as fiction.) Walton argues that this make-believe view prevents most biographies, textbooks, newspaper articles, and the like, from being works of fiction, since it is

not [their] function, as such, to serve as props in games of make-believe. They are used to claim truth for certain propositions rather than to make propositions fictional. (1990: 70)

But there is a complication. Walton intends the account to provide a sufficient condition for being a work of fiction, not just a necessary condition. In proposing this, he self-consciously departs from our ordinary, intuitive concept of fiction, which he sees as only “a rough everyday classification” (Walton 1990: 72) in urgent need of refinement (among other problems, the ordinary concept of fiction is liable to treat certain works, for example, didactic dialogues like Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713), as both non-fiction and fiction; Walton 1990: 72). But that means that his new way of construing the fiction/non-fiction distinction does not align with the usual way of understanding it, since many works of apparent non-fiction—many newspaper articles, biographies, real-life adventure tales, and so on—are written in a way that is designed to engage readers’ imagination and so satisfy the conditions for being works of fiction. Thus, he writes

Some histories are written in such a vivid, novelistic style that they almost inevitably induce the reader to imagine what is said, regardless of whether or not he believes it. (Indeed, this may be true of Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru .) If we think of the work as prescribing such a reaction, it serves as a prop in a game of make-believe. (Walton 1990: 71)

Similarly, there is

no doubt that [Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song —a novelistic retelling of the execution of Gary Gilmore] … has the function of prescribing imaginings (Walton 1990: 80)

and so counts as fiction for Walton. Walton even thinks that any metaphor is a fiction since a metaphor prescribes imagining (Walton 1993), and that objects that were not produced to function in this way, such as naturally produced cracks in a rock, could be treated as props that prompt imaginings, and so could turn out to be a work of fiction (Walton 1990: 87).

For many critics (e.g., Currie 1990: 36; Lamarque & Olsen 1994, 48; Davies 2001: 264; Stock 2017) these are unwanted consequences for an account of fiction. Excitingly told histories are still histories and so should be classified as non-fiction; and the fact that cracks in a rock might prompt imaginings just shows that the rock could be treated as a work of fiction, not that it could turn out to be a work of fiction. These critics worry that Walton’s conception of fiction is far broader than the traditional one (to mark this point, Friend 2008, 152, distinguishes what she calls “walt-fiction” from fiction in the usual sense), and insist that it is the latter notion that needs analysis or explication. In the case of this traditional notion, they think we should let the author’s intentions determine fictionality, just as Searle proposed, but, unlike Searle, they propose that this be done by focusing on how the author intends an audience to respond to a text rather than on the author’s own attitude to the text. One influential proposal of this type, defended by Greg Currie in The Nature of Fiction (1990), holds that authors engage in a special illocutionary act of fictive utterance, which Currie then proceeds to describe in terms of Gricean reflexive intentions (cf. Grice 1957). In a fictive utterance, the author produces a text with fictive intent, in the sense that he

intends that we make-believe the text (or rather its constituent propositions) and he intends to get us to do this by means of our recognition of that very intention. (Currie 1990: 30)

We can then say that

a work is fiction iff (a) it is the product of a fictive intent and (b) if the work is true, then it is at most accidentally true. (1990: 46)

The second clause is added because Currie thinks that truth alone does not disqualify a text from being fiction; an author may write a story that, quite by chance, ends up correctly describing actual events. But if it is no accident that the work is true—if the work is somehow the result of the represented facts being the way they are (for example, by the author recording these facts from memory, even repressed memory)—then the work is non-fiction rather than fiction (Currie 1990: 47).

Currie is aware that as it stands this account needs finessing, since many fictional works have a basis in actual fact. But for the most part Currie has remained true to this fictive utterance account of fiction. Later work changes some of the scaffolding of the theory, but not its essential structure. For example, Currie (1995a) introduces a broader philosophical conception of imagination—simulation—that covers both mental imagery and propositional imagining; he further suggests that “readers of fiction simulate the state of a hypothetical reader of fact” (Currie 1997: 144), and in doing so may also simulate the mental states of the characters with whom they (as simulators of the hypothetical reader of fact) are emotionally engaged. (Matravers 2014: ch. 3 criticizes the view that such simulation is distinctive of fiction.)

Other authors offer variations on Currie’s fictive utterance account. Lamarque and Olsen, for example, think that in the case of fiction an author presents sentences, aiming

for the audience to make-believe (imagine or pretend) that the standard speech act commitments associated with the sentences are operative even while knowing they are not. (Lamarque & Olsen 1994: 43)

To attend to the sentences in this way is to adopt the fictive stance towards them, and it is an author’s invitation that readers adopt the fictive stance that makes something a work of fiction rather than non-fiction. Readers who adopt the fictive stance towards the sentences can infer neither that the author believes them nor that they are true.

Lamarque and Olsen thus retain Currie’s view that there is a negative association between awareness that certain sentences are true and their status as fiction. But as we already saw when discussing semantic accounts of fictionality and, later, Searle’s pretense account, any such negative association highlights a further problem. Some works of fiction, perhaps most, make authorial pronouncements that are taken by both author and readers to be true (historical novels are an obvious example). Works of fiction often contain true descriptions of their geographical, historical, political, and social setting, while works that belong to particular genres require true descriptions of this kind if they are to be successful instances of the genres (consider the setting of historical fiction like Vidal’s Lincoln (1984) or social-political fiction like Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), or the descriptions of the practice of policing and forensic science in Cornwell’s Scarpetta series, for example; see also Gibson 2007: ch. 5; Matravers 2014). So there are parts of many, if not most, works of fiction that are non-accidentally true, and so the works should not straightforwardly count as fiction according to the criteria set out by Currie and by Lamarque and Olsen.

Those in the fictive utterance tradition have responded to this problem in different ways. One response is to invoke a further distinction between the fictionality of statements contained in the work and the fictionality of the work itself, taking the former as fundamental. Currie, for example, claims that his account is primarily an account of the fictionality of statements contained in a work, with the fictionality of the work depending on the status of such statements “in some perhaps irremediably vague way” (Currie 1990: 49). Most fictional works, Currie thinks, are “a patchwork of fiction-making and assertion” (1990: 48–9). (For criticisms of such a “patchwork” theory of fiction, see, for example Friend 2008, 2011; Stock 2011, 2017.)

The second kind of response to this issue is more holistic. David Davies, for example, thinks that the primary focus of the fiction/non-fiction divide should be on narratives rather than whole works (works might contain a series of narratives). What makes a narrative fictional or non-fictional are the author’s purposes and the constraints she works under (Davies 2007). If, for example, she feels herself bound by the “fidelity constraint” (roughly, that one should only mention events that one believes to have occurred, in the order in which they occurred), she is writing non-fiction, whereas if she is motivated by some more general purpose in story-telling such as the desire to entertain her audience she is writing fiction. As a result, even a narrative that tracks actual events can be fiction if the author’s story-telling purposes override the fidelity constraint (Davies 2007: 47). (For criticism of Davies’s narrative view of fiction, see Friend 2008, Stock 2017.)

By contrast, Kathleen Stock’s account of fiction allows that fictions may include propositions that are put forward simply because they are important truths, and so material that should be believed and not just imagined (e.g., the comments on slavery and Christianity in Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851)). For Stock, such beliefs are not outliers, for she thinks that even if a person imagines something that she also believes , she will (be disposed to) conjoin this in thought with other propositions that she does not believe (Stock 2011; 2017, 147). Stock then defines a fiction as, roughly, as a collection of fictive utterances in Currie’s sense that are subject to the condition that where there is more than one fictive utterance present, the author must also intend the reader or hearer to imagine them conjunctively. A fictional work , she thinks, is different. It is something usually carefully constructed and usually either written down for posterity, or performed publicly. By contrast, a fiction may be uttered only once, in a brief conversation with a single interlocutor (Stock 2017: 169–74).

These accounts all take authorial intention to be essential to being a fiction. For Walton, by contrast, the emphasis on authorial intention mistakes what are at best consequences of the author’s having constructed a fiction for an essential feature of fiction (Walton 1990: 87). He thinks that this is borne out by the fact that

[o]ne may well read a story or contemplate a picture (which is a fiction) without wondering which fictional truths the author or artist meant to generate. (1990: 88)

All this confirms, he thinks, that the basic concept of a fiction is best thought of as attaching to objects whose function is to serve as a prop of a certain sort in games of make-believe rather than to illocutionary actions (1990: 87). (For further discussion of Walton’s arguments on this point, see Stock 2017: ch. 7.)

In the previous subsection we considered views, beginning with Currie’s, that take awareness that certain sentences are true to count against their status as fiction, or that look to more holistic features of the text to show why this awareness does not compromise their status as fiction. These views all hold that merely appealing to the imagination does not capture what is essential to fiction; they attempt in different ways to identify what else is necessary. In the next section we look at some influential new challenges to these views, but in the present section we adopt a different orientation. In order to narrow down the sense in which fiction on the ordinary, intuitive understanding prompts imaginings we describe some work on make-believe or pretense in the cognitive sciences. As we will see, there are some clear points of contact between this work and some of the views considered above.

Consider in particular the popular “multiple models” theory according to which an agent engaging in make-believe entertains a representational model—the pretend (or, more broadly, imaginary ) model —that is different from the representational model she normally uses—the reality model . The reality model in this set-up represents how the agent believes things actually unfold, while the pretend model represents how things unfold in an imaginary world, a world of make-believe (Perner 1991). Nothing, however, prevents the pretend model from also storing actual beliefs, as may happen with fictions that import representations of the real world. The point is simply that once they are stored in the pretend model, those beliefs have to be evaluated with respect to the imaginary rather than the real world. The pretend model thus becomes part of an offline reasoning mechanism in which beliefs are disconnected from actions occurring in the real world. In particular, such beliefs don’t lead to the sort of actions that would result if they were part of an online reasoning mechanism, which is what the reality model is (Nichols & Stich 2003).

But there is a problem with seeing the availability of a two-model account as a sufficient condition for the relevant kind of make-believe. There are people suffering from various clinical syndromes who also activate distinct models of this kind, prompting them to exhibit incoherent patterns of behavior. Thus, consider people affected by the Capgras syndrome. While saying that a close relative has been replaced by an impostor, they also behave in a friendly manner towards this “impostor”. Such people are perhaps best interpreted as people whose odd beliefs are not integrated into a single belief system (Young 2000).

A friend of the two-model account may say that people affected in this way are to be classified differently from those engaging with fiction: their “imaginary” beliefs are not quarantined from their “real” ones. But note that the simultaneous yet distinct activation of the imaginary and reality models also accounts for the cognitive situation of agents who are somehow dissociated—subjects who experience a world of their own and still do not lose their grip on the real world. Sleepwalkers are a clear case. A sleepwalker may mobilize both the reality model, allowing her to avoid obstacles while walking, and an imaginary model, in which she represents the world she is dreaming about. Despite this, she is not engaged in make-believe (Meini & Voltolini 2010).

One way of answering this challenge is to invoke Leslie’s identification of fiction with metarepresentation (Leslie 1987). On this view, the required quarantining of imaginary beliefs involves a metarepresentational level. The difference between a subject who engages in make-believe and a dissociated subject lies in the fact that the former acknowledges that the representations entertained in the pretend model are not to be lumped together with the representations that she entertains in the reality model. Following a line of thought that can already be found in Vaihinger, who originally drew a connection between fiction and awareness (1911 [1924]: 80, 98–9), Lillard writes:

a pretender must be aware of the actual situation and the nonactual, represented one, or else (s)he is mistaken, not pretending. (2001: 497)

Proponents of such a view construe this kind of awareness as a second-order representation that operates on first-order representations; it involves a recognition that, insofar as the imaginary representations are stored in the pretend model, it can’t be inferred that they represent the real world. Note that Currie himself moves in this direction when arguing that metarepresenting is required for pretending, as a way of combining his intentionalist account of fiction with simulationist accounts (Currie 1998).

Some critics, however, think this idea is too demanding, that it presupposes too intellectualist a view of pretending and hence of fiction (see Perner 1991: 19–20, 35). For in order to have a metarepresentation of a representation, one surely needs to represent it to oneself as a representation, and young children in particular do not possess a notion of representation (1991: 19–20, 35). Others think this criticism presupposes a disputable conceptualist account of representing, and hence also of metarepresenting (Meini & Voltolini 2010). Perner himself recognizes that merely simultaneously entertaining distinct representations in different models is not sufficient for make-believe, and suggests that the two models have to be integrated into a single all-encompassing model which nests both the pretend and the reality models. It is far from clear, however, that this account is any less intellectualist than the metarepresentational one that Perner criticizes, given the way it appeals to the idea of nesting. Leslie had already pointed out that we invoke a nesting of this kind when, from outside of a fiction F and typically from the perspective of reality, we speak of F itself when we say “In fiction F , p ” (Leslie 1987). Doing so, however, requires possession of a notion that is even more conceptually demanding than the notion of representation, namely the notion of fiction itself, so this appeal to nesting should not be seen as unproblematic (Meini & Voltolini 2010: 50).

The various accounts of fiction discussed so far in this section disagree on numerous points, and, although pretense or imagination-based accounts are probably the most widely supported, each one faces challenges and there is no consensus as to which version is correct. But perhaps the most radical challenge to all of these attempts to specify the nature of fiction has come from theorists who think that the enterprise of finding necessary and sufficient conditions for what it takes to be a work of fiction should be abandoned. Such theorists think that there are genuine borderline cases and cases that are, in some sense, admixtures of fiction and non-fiction, and that such cases show that it is wrong to try to capture the notion of fiction in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. (Note that the main target for this challenge are theorists who think that there are intuitive concepts of fiction and non-fiction that are worth articulating in the first place. As we saw earlier, Walton’s approach is different: he urges replacement of the traditional distinction.)

While Walton proposes replacing the intuitive fiction/non-fiction distinction, Derek Matravers urges another path (Matravers 2014): the philosophy of fiction should simply stop caring about this distinction and shift its focus to the distinction between “confrontations” (situations that involve our immediate environment, and thereby afford the possibility of action) and “representations” (situations represented to us as happening at other times or in other places, thereby denying us the possibility of action). On the surface, it is hard to see this way of cashing out representations as particularly illuminating, since it puts fictional representations in the same basket as some scientific representations (2014: 53) and even historical representations. But Matravers discerns one significant difference among representations: where they lie on the “thin” to “thick” continuum. Thin representations (say, a physics text) merely aim to pass on information and do not stimulate the imagination, while thick representations, such as exciting histories and vivid novels, do. But Matravers insists that nothing in the way we engage with thick representations separates fiction from non-fiction, and that this is amply borne out by empirical studies of text-processing by psychologists (see, for example, Green & Brock 2000):

The experience of reading de Quincey’s “The Revolt of the Tartars” is the same whether we believe it is non-fictional, believe it is fictional, or (as is most likely) we are ignorant of whether it is non-fictional or fictional. (2014: 78)

Because of this, Matravers finds

[t]he traditional distinction, between representations that are fiction and representations that are non-fiction, … entirely unhelpful. (2014: 47)

A number of commentators, however, have denied that such empirical studies really do have the implications that Matravers sees in them. For Lamarque, for example, the modes of reading of literary critics and historians involve different normative practices that determine what questions are asked and where attention is directed (Lamarque 2016). And Stacie Friend argues that even ordinary readers approach works of fiction and non-fiction with different expectations (Friend forthcoming).

Friend agrees, however, that our engagement with works of fiction and non-fiction alike involves a combination of imagining and belief. Some works of non-fiction contain striking invented and hypothetical elements (e.g., Tacitus’s Histories , which contains made-up battle scenes; Dutch (1999), Edmund Morris’s authorized biography of Ronald Reagan, in which Morris inserts himself into the story as the fictional narrator; and works of history that actively countenance the implications of certain counterfactuals). At the same time, facts about what actually happened are the dominant focus of some works of fiction such as Vidal’s Narratives of Empire series. Friend thinks that such cases undermine accounts of the fiction/non-fiction distinction by theorists like Currie, Lamarque & Olsen, Davies, and Stock (see Friend 2008, 2011, 2012, forthcoming).

To deal with these and other hard cases, Friend recommends against trying to find necessary and sufficient conditions for being a work of fiction, although not by relinquishing the emphasis on works in favor of more basic units like fictional statements and narratives. Instead, fiction and non-fiction should be regarded as very broad genres in which particular works are embedded, where a genre is a way of classifying representations that guides appreciation. Borrowing from ideas in Walton’s “Categories of Art” (Walton 1970), Friend argues that classifying a work as a work of fiction or non-fiction depends on a range of features. A feature is standard for a genre if possession of the feature tends to place the work in that genre; contra-standard if possession tends to exclude the work from the genre. (Features are variable if works can have or lack them without this affecting membership in the genre, such as the number of chapters a work contains). Thus, containing made-up material counts as standard for the genre of fiction but contra-standard for non-fiction, while being faithful to the facts counts as standard for non-fiction but contra-standard for fiction. (As Friend notes, such a classification may itself change over time; the kind of inventive embellishment found in Tacitus’s Histories , for example, was once regarded as standard for historical non-fiction, but is now regarded as contra-standard [Friend 2012: 192–3].)

A crucial claim of the ensuing genre theory of fiction/non-fiction is that having contra-standard features for a genre does not simply exclude a work from that genre. Capote’s In Cold Blood , for example, is a striking piece of non-fiction precisely because it possesses certain features that were, at the time of its writing, contra-standard for non-fiction. What explains the fact that we nonetheless class it as non-fiction has much to do with other features of the work, including the reliance we place on authorial intention: Capote took himself to be writing a kind of literary journalism (Friend 2012: 194), just as Tacitus took himself to be writing history after the fashion of his time. (Friend is somewhat unclear about the content of such intentions, however. Presumably they can’t be understood as intentions to write a certain kind of fiction or non-fiction, on pain of circularity, although it is hard to see how else to construe them.)

For Friend, then, the classification of a work as fiction or non-fiction may depend heavily on context: a weighing up of various standard and contra-standard features that is strongly, but defeasibly, influenced by authorial intentions. This opens the view to the objection that the classification is too subjective for the distinction to count as theoretically important (Voltolini 2016). Friend’s answer is that placement of a work in either the genre of fiction or non-fiction directs our attention to different aspects of the work, and even influences us to adopt a specific reading strategy appropriate to works in the genre (Friend 2012: 202ff.; Friend forthcoming)—a very different view from that of Matravers, who discerned no interesting way in which our engagement with fictional representation differs from our engagement with non-fictional representations.

Those who favor other accounts have not been quiet in their opposition to Friend’s proposal. Both Currie and Davies, for example, have defended their versions of the fictive utterance theory by offering more nuanced accounts of the way the fictional status of a work depends on the fictional status of its parts (Currie 2014; Davies 2015). Thus, Currie argues that a work’s fictional status supervenes on its intentional profile, which specifies the communicative intentions behind the utterances that produce the work (Currie 2014). One consequence of this view is that if a work uses as much imaginative reconstruction and invention of events as a fictional work does (on our current understanding of this notion), then all else being equal we should also count the first work as fiction. Currie takes this to imply that Tacitus’s Annals and Histories , with their many made-up elements, count as fiction rather than non-fiction—despite the fact that Tacitus took himself to be writing non-fiction history (for objections, see Friend 2012). By contrast, Davies again emphasizes that the fictional status of a work depends on the fictional narrative(s) found in a work, which he now construes as the fictive content readers are asked to make-believe of a real setting: if the narrative serves to comment on something asserted in the work then it is a work of non-fiction; if what is asserted serves to comment on the narrative the work is fiction (Davies 2015, esp. 54). On this criterion, he thinks, Tacitus wrote non-fiction.

Stock agrees. On her account, if a work contains utterances that are not fictive in her sense (that is, if they express propositions that readers are meant to believe but that they are not supposed to conjoin in thought with other propositions they are merely meant to make-believe), the work counts as non-fiction. It follows, she thinks, that we should count works like Tacitus’s Histories and Annals and Morris’s Dutch as non-fictional patchworks of the fictive and non-fictive (Stock 2017: 160). Manuel García-Carpintero (2013) offers another way of keeping a tight fiction/non-fiction distinction. He defends a version of Currie’s view that fiction-making prescribes imagining, but instead of appealing to the psychological attitudes of those engaged in fictive acts, as Currie does, he understands such prescriptions in terms of constitutive rules that specify the commitments someone incurs when engaging in fiction-making, as opposed to the constitutive rules that are involved in assertive acts. On this normative view, claims that are asserted as true can be part of a work of fiction, since, given the author’s purposes, one and the same fictive utterance may be subject to both the norm of fiction-making and the norm of assertion, as a performance of a direct as well as of an indirect speech act as it were (2013: 356f.). But García-Carpintero accepts that works of non-fiction can include invitations to imagine as well, and he thinks that works like Tacitus’s Histories and Annals straightforwardly count as a patchwork of fact and fiction. (For discussion, see Stock 2017: 161–3.)

2. Truth in Fiction

Whatever the right theory of the nature of fiction, (nearly) everyone agrees that there are paradigm cases of works of fiction. Many of the sentences in such works are, of course, not true since in paradigm cases of fiction much of the content is made up. For example, the sentence

It was the end of November, and Holmes and I sat, upon a raw and foggy night, on either side of a blazing fire in our sitting-room in Baker Street. ( The Hound of the Baskervilles : ch. 15)

is not true at any real context of utterance since there is no Sherlock Holmes, and no Dr. Watson to utter the sentence. More generally, sentences that purport to describe the world depicted in a work of fiction are often false (or at least not true) since they misdescribe the world as it actually is; “Holmes was a detective living at 221B Baker Street, London”, for example. Still, this sentence sounds true, whereas a sentence like “Holmes was a short-order cook living in Paris” sounds false. One way of capturing this point is to say that fictional sentences are elliptic for sentences with an “in the story” prefix (Lewis 1978 [1983]): what is true is that in The Hound of the Baskervilles Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes sat reminiscing in their sitting-room in Baker Street on a raw and foggy night in November, just as it is true that in The Hound of the Baskervilles (and virtually all the Holmes stories) Holmes was a detective living at 221B Baker Street, London.

This shifts the problem of how to understand the kind of truth that sentences have in a work of fiction to the actual truth of sentences of the form “In work of fiction F , φ ”. How should we understand such prefixed sentences? It can’t simply be that a such a sentence is true if and only if φ is explicitly stated in the text of F . For one thing, some things are not true in a work despite being explicitly stated—the internal narrator of a story may be highly unreliable (for example Charles Kinbote in Nabokov’s Pale Fire [1962]). In addition, to identify something as an (obvious) truth of fiction we often have to rely on various (uncontentious) interpretive moves that belong to the pragmatics rather than semantics of language – what is stated may go beyond what the words explicitly say (this is so even in the case of a paradigm fictional truth like “Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street”; see Hanley 2004).

Put the problem of the unreliable narrator aside for now, and assume that normal practices of interpretation apply when identifying the fictional truths stated in a work of fiction. Philosophers of fiction have been mainly interested in the second problem: that of characterizing what it is for a sentence to be true in a work despite not being stated in the work. A first attempt might focus on the background of actual fact that is available to readers of the work: given that London is the capital of Great Britain, the fact that the Holmes stories say that Holmes lived in London suggests that it is also true in the Holmes stories that Holmes lived in the capital of Great Britain. The simplest way to capture this thought would be to say that it is true in a fiction that p iff p is a logical consequence of the set of propositions that are represented as true in a story, combined with the set of all actual truths. But this suggestion won’t do. Many actual truths are inconsistent with what is stated in a story, and so can’t be drawn upon in this way to yield claims about what is true in the story. (It is actually true, for example, that London did not have as inhabitant a famous detective called “Holmes” who lived at 221B Baker St. But it is not true in the Holmes stories that Holmes lived in a city that did not have as inhabitant a famous detective called “Holmes” who lived at 221B Baker St.) We need to filter out the background that we can legitimately draw upon when we determine what is true in a work.

David Lewis provided the classic discussion of this issue in his “Truth in Fiction” (first published in 1978, reprinted with postscripts in 1983). His approach has two core ideas. The first is that we should adopt a pretense view of fiction. A fiction is a story told by a particular person on a particular occasion, and to tell a story is typically to pretend that one is relating an account of things that really did happen. The second core idea is the one mentioned above: stories are related against a background of (known) facts and beliefs, thereby ensuring that there is more to truth in fiction than is stated in stories. The novelty of Lewis’s approach is the way he understands this background and its impact in terms of the machinery of possible worlds and the semantics of counterfactuals. To put the point in technical jargon, Lewis treats in-the-fiction operators as special intensional operators.

Lewis offers two main analyses. On Analysis 1, the background against which a story is told is just actuality, appropriately filtered to remove whatever is at odds with the story. Truth in a fiction is just what would have been true had the fiction been told as known fact. In terms of Lewis’s possible world analysis of counterfactuals (Lewis 1973), this can be rendered as:

• Analysis 1 A sentence of the form “In fiction F , φ ” is non-vacuously true if and only if some world where F is told as known fact and φ is true differs less from our actual world, on balance, than does any world where F is told as known fact and φ is not true. (1978 [1983: 270])

Analysis 1 easily captures the fact that it is true in the Holmes stories that Holmes had a liver, for example (despite no mention being made of this in the stories). It also captures the fact that the fictional truth of many claims is simply left indeterminate (while it is true in the stories that Holmes had a liver, for example, it is not true in the stories that he had an average-sized liver). But the analysis also seems to catch too much (Lewis 1978 [1983]; Currie 1990; Phillips 1999; Walton 1990; Wolterstorff 1980). Given a story S , take any truth p that has no bearing on the events described in S . On Lewis’s Analysis 1 it will then be true in S that p , whether or not anyone believes that p . If, for example, Napoleon had exactly 100,001 hairs on his head at the battle of Austerlitz, it will then be true in the Holmes stories that he did.

If the unknown proposition p has implications for the events in the story, another problem arises. Take the example mentioned by Lewis. Suppose, as many think, that the swamp adder in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (1892) was intended by Doyle to be a Russell’s viper (Lewis 1978 [1983: 271]; but cf. Byrne 1993: 25, note 5). In the story, Holmes concludes that the murder victim in the story was killed by the snake’s climbing down a fake bell-rope. The Russell’s viper is a constrictor, however, so it cannot physically climb ropes, and hence Analysis 1 suggests that it is true in “The Speckled Band” that Holmes bungled (Lewis 1978 [1983: 271]). But this would clearly be the wrong conclusion to draw: what is true in the story is that Holmes was right. The fact that Conan Doyle was ignorant of a little known biological fact should not affect what is true in the Holmes stories.

This example suggests that it is (often) better to conceive the background in epistemic terms. (But maybe not always; as Lewis points out, there is a contested critical tradition that uses psychoanalytic views to interpret literary texts, as in the claim that Hamlet had an Oedipus Complex. Such a claim is probably best understood in terms of Analysis 1 .) Lewis’s Analysis 2 provides such an epistemic orientation. It treats “background” as beliefs that are overt in the author’s community, where

a belief [is] overt for a community at a time iff more or less everyone shares it, more or less everyone thinks that more or less everyone shares it, and so on. (1978 [1983: 272])

Take the collective belief worlds to be the worlds where all the overt beliefs are true. Truth in fiction is what would have been true in the collective belief worlds, had the fiction been told as known fact:

• Analysis 2 A sentence of the form “In fiction F , φ ” is non-vacuously true iff whenever w is one of the collective belief worlds of the community of origin of F , then some world where F is told as known fact and φ is true differs less from w , on balance, than does any world where F is told as known fact and φ is not true. (1978 [1983: 273])

Analysis 2 rules out the case of the hairs on Napoleon’s head since there is no number h such that people collectively believed that Napoleon had h hairs at the battle of Austerlitz (at best they accepted very rough upper and lower bounds that allowed for 100,001 hairs but also considerably more or fewer). And the analysis rules out the case of the Speckled Band since the reception of the story by its readers showed that the relevant collective belief worlds are all worlds in which there is nothing to prevent swamp adders from climbing ropes. (In this case, the belief probably did not exist before people began reading the story, but was acquired as a result of trusting the author.) But the analysis also has some strikingly counterintuitive consequences. Take a typical Victorian novel that nowhere takes a stance on whether God exists. On Analysis 2 it will nonetheless be true in this novel that God exists, simply because Victorian England was overtly theistic so that the collective belief worlds are all worlds in which God exists (Walton 1990). Similarly, it will be true in many works that there are ghosts, and that women are markedly inferior to men.

In the later postscripts to his paper, Lewis considers some needed revisions to his two accounts. He conjectures, for example, that a story’s explicit content and background may need supplementing by “carry-over” of truths from other fictions if we are to capture what is true in a story (Lewis 1978 [1983]; Hanley 2004). But the most widely discussed revision that Lewis mentions, and the one that has generated most debate, concerns the case of impossible fictions—fictions that cannot be told as known fact in any possible world. We turn to this debate below (Sec 2.4) after reviewing two other influential accounts of truth in fiction.

Some final remarks about the notion of worlds that features in Lewis’s account and the many accounts inspired by his approach. Lewis’s worlds are possible worlds. He himself construes these as maximal connected spatio-temporal objects (Lewis 1986), although many others take them to be abstract entities of some kind (see the entry on possible worlds .) One can accept Lewis’s account of truth in fiction while preferring one of these alternative metaphysical conceptions of possible worlds. The important point is that the notion of a possible world, no matter how conceived, is a piece of modal machinery that has many other roles to play in metaphysics. It should not be confused with the notion of a fictional world, appealed to by philosophers and non-philosophers alike. Fictional worlds present themselves as realms, created by authors and generally incomplete and sometimes inconsistent, that are more or less distant from the real world but despite the distance are at least partially accessible from the real world (thus, we can know about Holmes and admire him from a distance, even if we can’t help him solve crimes). But although we often talk about fiction in terms of fictional worlds, making literal sense of such talk is fraught with difficulty (Pavel 1986 makes the attempt; Walton 1978 is a salutary reminder of what can go wrong), and philosophers have tended to take such talk with a grain of salt, construing fictional worlds instead as sets of fictional truths (Walton 1978; Walton 1990: 64–7) or as sets of worlds rather than single worlds (Lewis 1983: 270; Ross 1979: 49–54). Some have used the notion of a fictional world construed in some such way to provide a kind of linguistic counterpart to the mental reality and imaginary models discussed in 1.6, by appealing to the idea of a context of utterance or interpretation. (For more on the relevant notion of context, see the entry on theories of meaning .) On such a view, saying that a sentence is aimed at correctly representing a fictional world means that the sentence is to be interpreted relative to a context that contains the fictional world rather than the actual world as its world parameter. Consider a sentence like “Othello was jealous”. As uttered in a context that contains the actual world as its world parameter, this sentence is not true since “Othello” refers to nothing there. But the very same sentence is true in a fictional context that contains the fictional world of Othello as its world parameter, for at that world “Othello” refers to the jealous Venetian soldier of Shakespeare’s play. This account arguably also accommodates the problem of how fiction can contain real truths, as in historical fiction. In such cases, one and the same sentence, say “Napoleon invaded Russia”, can be both actually and fictionally true, keeping the very same content in both the real and the fictional context.

This kind of account yields an alternative construal of in-the-fiction operators. Rather than being a special kind of intensional operator, as it is on Lewis’s account, an in-the-fiction operator turns out to be a context-shifting operator. Take someone’s utterance of the sentence ‘In Shakespeare’s Othello, Othello was jealous’. The operator is context-shifting to the extent that the context relative to which we are to interpret the embedded sentence ‘Othello is jealous’ is different from the context of utterance of the sentence as a whole, since the latter is centered on the actual world, rather than the fictional world of Othello. (See Recanati 2000, Predelli 2005, Bonomi 2008. Predelli 2008 offers a variation on such accounts.)

Walton’s account of truth in fiction rests on his distinctive account of a work of fiction as a prop in a game of make-believe, where the function of the prop is to prescribe imaginings. Unlike Lewis, he doesn’t place stress on the idea that fictional statements are implicitly prefixed with an in-the-fiction operator. For Walton, a proposition is fictional—true in the fiction—just in case participants in such a game of make-believe are supposed to imagine it as true (Walton 1990; for some recent reservations about this account, see Walton 2013, 2015). There are two types of fictional truth: the primary fictional truths are evident in the work itself, while the implied fictional truths are generated from the primary ones. The problem of how to generate implied fictional truths from primary fictional truths is essentially the problem that Lewis faced, and the principles that Walton describes—the Reality Principle and the Mutual Belief Principle—are close to Analysis 1 and 2 , but without the commitment to the machinery of possible worlds. Letting \(p_1\)… \(p_n\) be the primary fictional truths of fiction F , the Reality Principle holds that it is true in F that q iff had \(p_1\)… \(p_n\) been the case, q would have been the case, while the Mutual Belief Principle holds that it is true in F that q iff the following was mutually and openly believed in the society from which F originated: had \(p_1\)… \(p_n\) been the case, q would have been the case.

Walton acknowledges that each principle has counterintuitive consequences (see Walton 1990: ch. 4 on the contrast and interplay between the two principles). Lewis himself noted this in the case of the Reality Principle, but as we remarked above the same seems true of the Mutual Belief Principle. In addition, neither principle seems able to handle cases in which genre conventions generate fictional truths. Consider an otherwise typical zombie story that never explicitly says that zombies move by stumbling forward rather than by running (Woodward 2011: 163). Because this way of moving is a conventional feature of zombies in the zombie story genre, it will be true in the story that zombies don’t run, even though the question “Do zombies run?” is probably not answerable by appeal to either principle (Woodward 2011: 163; Lewis 1978 [1983: 274]; Walton 1990: 161–9). Walton himself thinks that the moral to be drawn from such difficulties is that these principles are no more than rules of thumb, and that there is no single, general principle that governs the practice of critics and appreciators of fiction (1990: 139). A rather different approach to these problems is taken by Stacie Friend, who argues that problems ensue if we insist on principles , taken as ways of inferring implied fictional truths from primary fictional truths. Instead of defending the Reality Principle , she defends what she calls the Reality Assumption , the thesis that everything that is really true is also fictionally the case, unless it is excluded by the work (Friend 2017).

There is a further concern about the apparatus Walton employs, one that also affects Lewis’s account. To apply the above rules of generation, we need to be able to determine a work’s primary fictional truths, those that are evident in the work or, in Lewis’s terms, those that are part of what is told as “known fact”. These present no trouble if we have a reliable narrator, but what if the narrator is unreliable? With Lewis as his focus, Currie imagines a situation in which the Holmes stories are written in a “tone of understatement and irony”, so that Holmes appears only somewhat successful even though in the story he is “spectacularly successful” (Currie 1990: 70). Given that the worlds to be considered are worlds in which the story is told as known fact, the worry is that, for Lewis, Holmes is only somewhat successful in the stories. Walton’s answer to this kind of problem is to allow free rein to the kind of pragmatic interpretive moves that are used in ordinary communicative exchanges (see Walton 1990: ch. 4). If there is evidence of understatement and irony, we should make allowances for that when determining what is true. Lewis has a broadly similar answer. In a footnote Lewis points out that there are all kinds of ways of telling stories. Storytellers may present themselves as quite unreliable (mad, naïve, etc.), or as translators of some work rather than the person who wrote it, and so on. He adds that

in these exceptional cases also, the thing to do is to consider those worlds where the act of story-telling really is whatever it purports to be—ravings, reliable translation of a reliable source, or whatever—at our world. (Lewis 1978 [1983: 266 fn. 7])

Hence if the author pretends to be recounting a true story in a tone of understatement and irony, then the worlds of the story are those worlds in which the teller really does tell a true story in a tone of understatement and irony, not worlds where his actual words are to be taken literally (cf. Hanley 2004).

Currie’s answer to the problem of the unreliable narrator is quite different. His account of what is true in fiction eschews any appeal to worlds in favor and appeal to the beliefs of someone he calls the fictional author :

• C “In the fiction F , φ ” is true iff it is reasonable for the informed reader to infer that the fictional author of F believes that φ (Currie 1990: 80).

Here the fictional author is “that fictional character constructed within our make-believe whom we take to be telling us the story as known fact” (Currie 1990: 76), and the “informed reader” is a reader who knows the relevant facts about the community in which the work was written (1990: 97). The view also offers a distinctive way of dealing with the problem of unreliable narrators. When the evidence suggests that a narrator is unreliable, we are supposed to construct a hidden, completely reliable and knowledgeable fictional author who is “speaking with the voice of one of the (unreliable) characters in the story” (1990: 125); the reader figures out what is true in the story by forming an impression of the beliefs of the author, based on the text of the story and facts about its community of origin. While many commentators have lauded the move away from possible worlds, a number have doubted that positing such an author is adequate to the task of explaining truth in fiction (e.g., Byrne 1993; Howard-Snyder 2002; Swirski 2014), even complaining that it seems gratuitous to postulate “some shadowy meta-narrator who has all true beliefs but is choosing not to reveal himself” just to deal with a narrator who is unreliable (Matravers 1995; see Currie 1995a, 1995b for further discussion, and Currie 2010 for a more sceptical perspective on internal narrators). Other philosophers have offered alternative accounts of the (real, hypothetical, …) authors whose beliefs or intentions determine what is true in fiction. Stock, for example, argues for an extreme intentionalism on which, with some important qualifications aside, what is true in a fiction is what the real author intends her audience to imagine as being true (Stock 2017). Others prefer more moderate appeals to the real author (e.g., Livingston 2005, for whom fictional truth rests on what it is appropriate to make believe, given a goal of understanding fictive utterances in the author’s artistic context).

Alex Byrne has a final criticism that he thinks affects Currie’s and Lewis’s accounts of truth in fiction in equal measure. It is easy to see that if F is a fiction then the sentence “In fiction F , F is told as known fact” is true for both Lewis and Currie. Byrne (1993) labels this consequence of the two views idealism , and he offers two objections. First, certain fictions are what Currie calls mindless : fictions in which there is no intelligent life, and so no one to tell the tale. In such stories, it is false that there is someone who is telling the story. Second, postulating knowing tellers would suggest quite extraordinary epistemic capacities on the part of these tellers in the case of fictions that carry detailed information about the psychology of characters, say. Currie’s response to the first kind of complaint is that the postulation of a teller for every tale is simply a staple of literary and aesthetic theory (Currie 1990: 75–6). If so, not worrying about how the teller got her information (it is enough that she must have got it somehow or other; cf. Hanley 2004) might be another such staple.

One worry about such a response is that it seems little different from saying we should treat the story as if it were told from a God’s eye point of view. But the response is probably best treated as an instance of something far more general: an appropriately dismissive attitude to certain sorts of questions. Walton calls questions of this type “silly questions”. One of his many examples concerns the way Othello is able to come up with superb verse—in English too!—despite his great distress; another one concerns the way narrators in literary works tell of events they could not possibly know about (Walton 1990: 174ff). In Walton’s view, we should simply stop worrying about the apparent threat posed by questions of this kind, perhaps by disallowing or de-emphasizing offending fictional truths (such as that Othello was a great literary talent, or that the narrator was somehow able to determine that the characters in a novel “lived happily ever after” (1990: 177–8)). Such questions are “largely if not entirely irrelevant to appreciation and criticism” (Walton 1990: 238). If this is right, there is little reason to think that idealism of the kind Byrne objects to constitutes a fatal defect in the approaches of either Currie or Lewis.

Byrne himself defines truth in fiction in terms of what a Reader can infer about what the Author invites him to make-believe, where the Reader and Author are idealised entities identified in terms of pragmatic principles of interpretation. This allows Byrne to explain how it can be true in a story that there is no one left to tell the tale and why it is rarely true in stories that there exists someone with unexplained and extraordinary epistemological powers who knows the deepest thoughts of others (Byrne 1993). The same conclusion is available on some other author-based views, such as those of Livingston 2005 and Stock 2017. In fact, all such approaches promise to deliver a fairly direct way of defusing “silly questions” concerning truth in fiction.

Whatever the best way of dealing with the issue of “idealism”, it is an issue that affects Lewis and Currie in equal measure. But there is another issue that some take to be an important reason for preferring an author-based account like Currie’s to a possible worlds-based account like Lewis’s, namely what sense to make of truth in impossible fictions, a topic we turn to next.

Some works of fiction describe scenarios that are impossible: not just physically impossible (like fantasy stories), but metaphysically or logically impossible (like certain time-travel stories and stories that deny mathematical facts such as Ted Chiang’s “Division by Zero”, 1991). Early in his paper, Lewis completes Analyses 1 and 2 with the clause: “‘In fiction F , φ ’ is vacuously true iff there is no possible world where F is told as known fact”. That clause implies that anything whatsoever is true in impossible stories. But he then notes that some such stories involve venial contradictions, contradictions due merely to a slip-up on the author’s part (the Holmes stories, for example, since these sometimes locate Dr. Watson’s old war wound in his leg and sometimes in his shoulder). To avoid the unpalatable conclusion that anything whatsoever is true in these stories as well, Lewis suggests towards the end of “Truth in Fiction” that any such story should be represented as a series of minimally revised consistent versions of the original, with truth in the story being truth in all the minimally revised consistent versions (Lewis 1978 [1983: 274–5])—what he later called the method of intersection . On this view, it is true in the stories that Dr. Watson had a war-wound, but it is not true in the stories that he had one on his shoulder and it is not true in the stories that he had one on his leg.

Postscript B to the original article shows a change of mind. To preserve what he calls the “distinctive peculiarity of inconsistent fiction” (Lewis 1983: 277), Lewis now suggests we adopt the method of union : what is true in a fiction is what is true in at least one consistent fragment, so that we can have “In fiction F , \(\phi\)” is true and “In fiction F , \(\neg \phi\)” is true, but never “In fiction F , \(\phi \land \neg\phi\)” is true.

Yet, as Lewis himself acknowledged, this account does not work with blatantly inconsistent stories whose contradictions are not venial, and with respect to these stories he takes a hard line: “we should not expect to have a non-trivial concept of truth in blatantly impossible fiction” (Lewis 1978 [1983: 275). Many disagree, offering examples of such stories where the issue of truth and falsity appears to arise much as it does for consistent stories. Currie’s (1990) example is of a story that turns on the hero’s disproof of Gödel’s incompleteness results. Such a story simply can’t be divided into consistent fragments. Similarly, consider Graham Priest’s story of Sylvan’s Box, which involves the discovery of a box belonging to the late Richard Sylvan that is at once empty and non-empty (Priest 1997, 2005). (Other examples may include stories about donkeys that talk and pigs who lead revolutions, as well as fictions in which actual people and fictional characters interact, for example, Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author [1921]; cf. Byrne 1993; Woodward 2011; for an even more radical take on the inconsistency in fiction, see Woods 2018.) Some bite the Lewisian bullet at this point. Hanley (2004), for example, argues that some such fictions may be susceptible to the method of union; in other cases, the best way to interpret them is simply to doubt the reliability of their narrators. Nolan (2007) similarly argues that our intuitive judgment of what is true in the fiction in such cases tracks the narrator’s beliefs rather than the represented facts.

Most writers agree, however, that there can be a coherent notion of truth in fiction even for “blatantly” inconsistent fictions (see, for example, Byrne 1993; Le Poidevin 1995; Phillips 1999; Gendler 2000; Weatherson 2004, Priest 2005, Proudfoot 2006). But even when there is agreement about this, there is no agreement about the resources needed to capture such a notion of truth. Some think that the best and perhaps most obvious solution to the problem of inconsistent fiction is a generalization of Lewis’s own approach: we should admit appropriately selected impossible worlds to the set of worlds that realize what is told in such a story (see Priest 1997, 2005; Woods 2003: ch. 6; Berto 2012: chs. 7, 8; Jago 2014; cf. also the entry on impossible worlds ).

Impossible worlds, however, are for many a difficult pill to swallow. Lewis himself makes a throwaway remark that might suggest a moderate alternative – he adds:

or perhaps we should expect to have [a non-trivial concept of truth in blatantly impossible fiction] only under the pretense—not to be taken too seriously—that there are impossible possible worlds as well as possible possible worlds. (1978 [1983: 275])

(such a view would be a kind of extended modal fictionalism—see §1.5 of the entry on modal fictionalism ). Lewis makes a further appeal to this idea in a letter to Graham Priest (9 January, 2001), although only to assert that the idea is of limited usefulness. In his words,

I agree with you about the many uses to which we could put make-believedly possible impossibilities, if we are willing to use them. The trouble is that all these uses seem to require a distinction between the subtle ones and the blatant ones (very likely context-dependent, very likely a matter of degree) and that is just what I don’t understand. (Lewis 2004: 177)

Currie’s diagnosis of the problem of truth in impossible fictions is very different. He thinks that worlds simply constitute the wrong currency for characterizing the notion of truth in fiction, even when authorial and community belief is added to the mix (as on Analysis 2 ). Currie thinks that once we understand the notion of truth in fiction in doxastic terms as what we can reasonably take the fictional author to believe ( account C above), the case of radically inconsistent fiction presents no further problems. There is no bar, he thinks, to supposing that someone believes impossible propositions, even simple impossible propositions like \(7+5 ≠12\), and so there can be no objection to the claim that even blatantly impossible propositions can be true in a work of fiction.

But while this may work for the simplest cases, it is not clear that we can be so sanguine about others. Thus, consider stories like Gendler’s story of the Tower of Goldbach in which \(7+5 ≠ 12\) and \(7+5=12\) (Gendler 2000), or Priest’s story of Sylvan’s box, empty and non-empty at the same time. It is one thing to allow that such contradictory propositions are both true in the relevant story; understanding how it can be reasonable to attribute belief in both propositions to a fictional author may be more difficult. Or consider a story in which everything whatsoever is true (imagine a story in which God or Sylvan discloses this to Priest). Even those who think that there is no bar to believing impossible propositions are likely to reject as incoherent the thought that someone can believe all propositions (cf. Priest 2000).

Note that the problem of impossible fictions affects Walton’s make-believe account rather differently. Truth in fiction for Walton is a function of prescriptions to imagine, and he is relatively sanguine about such prescriptions in the case of impossible fictions. Even contradictions, he suspects, can be imagined in the relevant sense, but he adds that even if they can’t, his account of fictionality or fictional truth is safe. He offers two options: first, there might be prescriptions to imagine a contradiction even if actually imagining it is not possible; secondly, there might be separate prescriptions to imagine p and not- p , but not their conjunction (Walton 1990, 64–6).

The second way is an analogue of Lewis’s method of intersection. Perhaps the first way is needed to deal with the case of blatant contradictions, but as Walton notes even this is far from clear. While imagining a contradiction may well not be possible if imagination relies purely on mental imagery, the kind of imagining invoked in fiction is very different: what is at stake here is propositional imagining and it is difficult to motivate the claim that imagining even blatant contradictions is impossible. Attempts to do so tend to rest on quite contentious views of what propositional imagining must involve (cf. Everett 2013; cf. also Kung 2016 on the telescopic versus stipulative views of imagining).

After his discussion of truth in fiction, Lewis acknowledged in Postscript B that some people value fiction “mostly as a means for the discovery of truth, or for the communication of truth” (Lewis 1983: 278), that is, genuine truth, not merely fictional truth. It is possible that Lewis simply meant that sentences like “In the Holmes stories, Holmes is a detective” are really, and not just fictionally, true, for this fact captures the sense in which it is really true, say, that Holmes is a detective and really false that he is a rockstar. But the problem of whether fiction-involving sentences communicate truths does not end here. There are various other ways of understanding how fiction might make such a contribution. To begin with, some statements true in a work of fiction are also genuine truths, included because the author wanted an appropriately realistic setting for the work (e.g., historical statements in works of historical fiction) or in order to acquaint readers with facts that the author regards as morally or politically significant (consider, for example, the fiction of Charles Dickens, Upton Sinclair, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn). Whatever the reason, such cases suggest that fiction can serve as a means for readers to discover genuine truths.

Philosophers and literary theorists by and large agree with this claim (Friend 2006; Lamarque & Olsen 1994). Even on imagination-based theories of fiction, there is nothing to prevent statements that readers are invited to imagine as true from also being known as fact. This is consistent, however, with acknowledging that learning from fiction is not always easy, since it requires an ability to tell whether an apparently factual claim in a work of fiction has been included in the fiction because of its truth or for other reasons. More generally, a number of psychological studies suggest that readers often lack the ability to tell truth from falsehood in fiction, failing to adequately scrutinize information when engaging with fiction while being more careful in the case of non-fiction (see, for example, Prentice & Gerrig 1999; Wheeler et al. 1999; Butler et al. 2012). While this propensity on the part of readers doesn’t show that they are never able to gain factual knowledge rather than mere (true) belief from engaging with works of fiction, it may make it harder than it first appears. One plausible suggestion is that where there is knowledge rather than mere belief, this happens because readers have acquired a competence at reliably discriminating truth from falsity in works of that genre (Friend 2014).

But learning factual truths is not what philosophers and literary theorists usually have in mind when they think of fiction as a means for the discovery, or communication, of truth. They have in mind truth that has deeper human significance, like the universals that Aristotle claims in The Poetics to find in the works of poets, or the kind of truth about human nature, for example, that Samuel Johnson finds in Shakespeare (“he has not only shewn human nature as it acts in real exigencies, but as it would be found in trials, to which it cannot be exposed”; Johnson 1765). Many philosophers thus embrace what is commonly called (literary) cognitivism, which claims that literary fiction can contribute to readers’ knowledge in a way that adds to the literary or aesthetic value of a work (Davies 2007; Gaut 2005).

But knowledge in what sense? Like Aristotle, a number of cognitivists think that literature can form the basis of propositional knowledge, even if there is dispute about what kind of propositions can be known and how they are known (Novitz 1987; McCormick 1988; Carroll 2011; Kieran 2004; Kivy 1997; Elgin 2007; Mikkonen 2013). A common claim is that literature provides knowledge about moral values, especially about the particular moral requirements of concrete situations (cf. the appeal in Nussbaum 1990 to the later novels of Henry James). Some think literature can also provide a kind of conceptual knowledge, such as insight into a moral concept like sympathy (John 1998). Others have thought it can even teach deep psychological truths or truths about our place in the world. In many cases, however, the “truths” readers claim to find in literature will be quite contestable, with different works presenting different points of view. Even then, however, it might be argued that readers at least acquire knowledge of possibilities. Consider, for example, a work like Céline’s Journey to the End of Night (1932), whose underlying hypothesis is that all humans and their institutions are abhorrent. Even Putnam, who is broadly sympathetic to cognitivism, agrees that all we really learn from Céline’s work is how the world looks to someone who accepts that hypothesis, which is merely “knowledge of a possibility” (Putnam 1978).

Many cognitivists, however, think that the knowledge we acquire from literary fiction is not centrally a kind of propositional or even conceptual knowledge, but a kind of practical knowledge. For example, literature can cause us to attend to the world in a more focused way, enriching our perceptual experience and emotional and moral understanding (Diamond 1995; Nussbaum 1985, 1990, 2001; Gibson 2007; Robinson 1995 [1997]). One way it might do this is by being a source of what Davies calls categorial understanding (2007: 146), yielding new categories through which to understand the world, for example quixotic and Kafkaesque (Goodman 1978: ch. 4). It can also provide phenomenal knowledge: knowledge of what it is like to be a certain kind of person or be in a certain kind of situation, and so knowledge that can be put to use in planning or to help us understand other people or the moral complexity of situations (Kieran 1996; Currie 1998; Putnam 1978; Carroll 2002; Swirski 2007).

Many are sceptical. Anti-cognitivists think that, whether or not a work’s aesthetic or literary value would be enhanced by contributing knowledge. Echoing Plato’s famous charge in The Republic , Jerome Stolniz (1992) has argued that there is no proper domain of artistic knowledge: significant truths found in literary works are the proper subject of other areas of enquiry, not literature. Even if one does acquire beliefs from literary works, the works themselves don’t supply the warrant for the beliefs, and so can scarcely be said to yield knowledge. Furthermore, to the extent that we do learn from literature it is either hard to articulate what we learn, or the truths turn out to be cognitively trivial; Pride and Prejudice (1813), for example, may teach us little more than the banal “Stubborn pride and ignorant prejudice keep attractive people apart” (Stolniz 1992: 193). Others have raised doubts about the ability of literary fiction to yield the kind of substantial practical knowledge that is often claimed for it. Reading Styron’s historical novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) may make us think we know what it was like to be a black slave in early nineteenth century Virginia, but it is surely more likely that exposure of this kind simply generates the illusion of knowledge (Harold 2016).

Cognitivists have fought back in a number of ways. Propositional cognitivists have argued that literature does offer support for its knowledge claims, say by taking them as live hypotheses to be tested (Kivy 1996, Novitz 1987) or by allowing readers to draw on latent memories and other available resources (Carroll 2011) as well as argumentative resources explicitly found in the text (Mikkonen 2013). And both propositional and non-propositional cognitivists have acknowledged that there is no certain route to knowledge through literature; as in the case of our acquiring factual beliefs on the basis of reading fiction, literary works can make us less knowledgeable (believe falsely or behave unwisely) as well as more knowledgeable.

A final point. As we have seen above, literary cognitivists think that a work of literary fiction can contribute to readers’ knowledge in a way that adds to the value of the work; anti-cognitivists deny that it can contribute the kind of knowledge cognitivists focus on. More radically, however, one of the best-known concerns about literary cognitivism is that, even if literary works do provide readers with knowledge, the knowledge they yield doesn’t contribute to their literary value. Such a non -cognitivist view is associated in particular with the work of Lamarque and Olsen, who have offered an influential argument for a “no-truth” theory of literary fiction (Lamarque & Olsen 1994). On this view, while we may well be able to learn from literature, the truth of a claim made by a literary work is never relevant to the work’s literary value; all that is relevant is a work’s theme and how it is presented. Not surprisingly, this view has also proved highly contentious, with many commentators critical of the separation of theme and truth (see, for example, Rowe 1997; Gaut 2005; Kivy 2011).

Whether works of fiction provides readers with knowledge (and, if so, what kind), there is little doubt that authors of such works often aim to communicate what they take to be salient truths in the hope of affecting their readers in some way. Upton Sinclair, for example, wanted readers of The Jungle (1906) to recognize the poor treatment of workers in Chicago slaughter-houses, and to respond to this treatment with anger. Even more familiar, however, is the way authors try to get readers of a work of fiction to respond emotionally to the fictional truths they encounter in the work, rather than any actual truths. To take a classic example, on reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina , a reader may feel deep pity for Anna Karenina because of her increasing despair as Vronsky distances himself from her, an emotion Tolstoy no doubt expected and intended. But this generates a famous puzzle: how can a reader feel pity for Anna, knowing that Anna doesn’t exist? This puzzle, commonly known as the paradox of fiction or the paradox of fictional emotions , involves a triad of seemingly compelling but incompatible claims about emotional responses generated by engaging with fiction. For a representative formulation:

• (A) People experience emotions for fictional objects and situations, knowing them to be fictional
• (B) People do not believe that fictional objects and situations exist
• (C) In order to experience an emotion for an object or situation, one must believe that it exists

(A broadly equivalent formulation is found in Gendler’s entry on imagination .) The question is how best to resolve the inconsistency among these claims; that is, which of (A)–(C) to give up so that consistency is restored, and why these and not others.

Different solutions to the paradox provide different answers to such questions, although it is worth noting that the paper that introduced the paradox to the philosophical world, Colin Radford’s “How can we be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina?” (Radford 1975) took a rather different line from other solutions. His Irrationalist solution (our classification follows Levinson 1997) holds that people’s apparent ability to respond emotionally to fictional characters and events is “irrational, incoherent, and inconsistent” (Radford 1975: 75). They regard (C) as a normative constraint on rational agents, but their actual behavior and beliefs, as described in (A) and (B), show that they fail to conform to this constraint.

Dissatisfaction with Radford’s account resulted in numerous publications that have kept discussion of the problem alive. Most, in fact, favor a rejection of (A) or (C). Among those who reject (A), some deny (A) on the grounds that it misdescribes the nature of our affective responses. According to the Non-Intentionalist solution the affective states in question are not emotions but more akin to object-less states like moods or reflex reactions (Charlton 1970: 97), while for the more popular Surrogate-Object solution (A) misidentifies the target of emotional responses to fiction: they really have as their objects (parts of) the fictional work itself; or perhaps the descriptions or thought contents afforded by the fiction (Lamarque 1981); or on another formulation real individuals or phenomena that resemble the persons or events of the fiction (see, for example, Charlton 1984).

A third way of denying (A) is Kendall Walton’s well-known Make-Believe solution to the paradox (Walton 1990, 1997; see also Currie 1990). According to Walton, it is fictional in the imaginative games of make-believe that people play on the basis of their reading works of fiction that they experience emotions for fictional objects and situations. In reality they don’t. A reader of Anna Karenina (1877) doesn’t really pity Anna Karenina, but what she does experience are various characteristic psychological and bodily effects of her imagining that Anna Karenina has suffered greatly. Originally, Walton called states of this kind quasi-emotions (in this case, quasi-pity); the fact that a reader experiences quasi-pity in the course of her imagining is what makes it fictional in her game of make-believe that she feels genuine pity for Anna Karenina. A case of real pity, by contrast, requires the quasi-pity that an agent experiences to be the result of her genuine belief that someone is suffering or has suffered (Walton 1990: 251), and only when this is its cause will the quasi-pity also be accompanied by appropriate behavior: an attempt to console if consoling is within one’s power, say. (Walton’s classic example of the absence of appropriate behavior is that of not running out of the theatre, even though in the grip of quasi-fear, while watching a horror movie in which the Green Slime turns towards you.) Walton clarifies his view in Walton 1997, where he emphasizes that he regards fictional emotions not so much as special kind of states, but as emotions that are merely felt in the context of engaging with fiction rather than actuality. What Walton cannot allow, however, is that it is genuinely true that people have emotions in this sense towards fictional characters like Anna Karenina. No relational claims of this kind can be genuinely true for Walton, since he denies that there are any fictional characters. (Whether his rejection of fictional characters is required by his reasons for rejecting (A) is another question. For more on this question, see the entry on fictional entities .)

Walton’s view has been subject to much criticism (for a survey, see Neill 2005). Before we turn to its main rivals, it is worth observing that Walton’s main reason for not counting fictional emotions as real emotions (the lack of characteristic associated behavior) is also the main reason why few commentators nowadays accept the Suspension of Disbelief solution, which involves rejecting (B) and maintaining that when readers of fiction emotionally respond to the characters they read about they are acting on an implicit belief that these exist. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who coined the term, may have held a version of this view; cf. Coleridge 1817: ch. 14 [in vol. 2, p. 2].) For discussion, see Radford 1975, Schaper 1978, and Carroll 1990.)

Far more popular are views that reject (C) and hold that we have real emotions towards fictional objects despite believing that they don’t exist. A possible reason for this is that, unlike the two other statements of the triad, (C) strikes many as a piece of articulated theory (the so-called cognitive theory of emotion) rather than a commonsense claim (cf. Gendler 2008). One way of rejecting (C) is the Surrogate-Belief solution, which maintains that an emotional response to a fictional character requires no more than the belief that the character exists in the world(s) of the fiction (cf. Neill 1993). Another solution—and possibly the most widely accepted of all—is the Anti-Judgmentalist solution, which denies that emotional responses to objects logically require beliefs concerning the existence and emotion-prompting features of objects; instead, it is enough if we imagine, “mentally represent” (Lamarque 1981), or entertain, such objects “in thought” (Carroll 1990). (See also Stecker 2011, which regards this solution as in some sense the default solution; he thinks other solutions are nonetheless worth investigating because of the way they shed light on the way our reactions to fiction often differ from standard emotional reactions.) Versions of such “thought theories” are also defended in Moran 1994, Smith 1995, Feagin 1996, and Gendler 2008. But note that such views face the problem that the objects of the emotions mobilized by fiction are either understood in some nonstandard way, for example as thought contents (cf. the objection in Walton 1990 to Lamarque 1981) or, more generally, as abstract rather than concrete entities; or they are understood as nonexistent objects, a category many philosophers find ontologically problematic. (For a useful overview of the various solutions, see Gendler & Kovakovich 2006. See also the entry on fictional entities .)

This entry has focused on a number of central issues in the philosophy of fiction: the nature of fiction; what it means to say that something is a truth of fiction; what (and in what sense) we can learn from fiction; and how we can have emotional responses to characters of fiction. There are other issues in the philosophy of fiction that could have been discussed in this entry, a number of them the subject of related entries. Consider the question of what makes something a correct interpretation of a work of literary fiction. This topic, which is connected to the issue of truth in fiction, became of intense interest to both philosophers and literary theorists following the publication of Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946), although the topic of interpretation itself has a long history going back as far as Greek antiquity (see the entry on hermeneutics ). There are also problems involving our reasons for seeking out works of fiction of various kinds. The previous section discussed the so-called paradox of fiction, but as it turns out this is a relative newcomer to the set of problems that involve our engagement with works of fiction. There is also the much-debated puzzle of why we enjoy works of tragedy (and even horror); sadness and fear are scarcely emotions that we would normally welcome, let alone enjoy, yet people readily engage with works of tragedy. (The so-called paradox of tragedy received a famous treatment, still debated in contemporary philosophy, at the hands of Aristotle in the Poetics , who also used tragedy as an example of how we can learn from fiction.) A newer problem, although discussion goes back to at least Hume, is the so-called problem of imaginative resistance: given the ease with which readers of fiction can entertain all kinds of implausible fictional scenarios, even impossible ones, what explains the impediments we face when asked to imagine certain sorts of situations, for example ones in which morally horrendous acts like torturing an innocent person are considered morally right? (For an overview of these puzzles, see the supplement to the entry on imagination ). Juxtaposing these various problems and issues not only gives a good indication of the thematic richness of contemporary philosophy of fiction, but also reminds us of its long history.

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We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to Paul Oppenheimer for his unstinting help and support.

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The Biology Corner

Biology Teaching Resources

Evolution: Fact, Fiction, or Opinion

This lesson can be used to introduce evolution and establish what your students already understand (or misunderstand) about evolutionary theory.   

Statements can be printed and cut into slips and students work in small groups to categorize each statement as either Fact, Fiction, or Opinion.   

The included answer key has quick explanations as well as links to authoritative sources to explain the positions, sources from Berkeley’ Understanding Evolution and New Scientist .

Evolution misconceptions are fairly common for beginning biology students.  For example, many think that evolution leads to greater complexity, or that natural selection is the only process that results in evolution.   

What your students know depends greatly on how much was covered (or not covered) in previous classes.

A google doc link is included for editing or adding new statements.

The exercise also serves as a starting point for discussions about what facts, models, and theories are within the context of science.

HS-LS4-1  Communicate scientific information that common ancestry and biological evolution are supported by multiple lines of empirical evidence

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The Case for Reading Fiction

• Christine Seifert

It’s an easy way to build emotional intelligence.

When it comes to reading, we may be assuming that reading for knowledge is the best reason to pick up a book. Research, however, suggests that reading fiction may provide far more important benefits than nonfiction. For example, reading fiction predicts increased social acuity and a sharper ability to comprehend other people’s motivations. Reading nonfiction might certainly be valuable for collecting knowledge, it does little to develop EQ, a far more elusive goal.

Some of the most valuable skills that managers look for in employees are often difficult to define, let alone evaluate or quantify: self-discipline, self-awareness, creative problem-solving, empathy, learning agility, adaptiveness, flexibility, positivity, rational judgment, generosity, and kindness, among others. How can you tell if your future employees have these skills? And if your current team is lacking them, how do you teach them? Recent research in neuroscience suggests that you might look to the library for solutions; reading literary fiction helps people develop empathy , theory of mind , and critical thinking .

• CS Christine Seifert is a professor of communication at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she teaches rhetoric, strategy, and professional writing

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Home — Application Essay — Liberal Arts Schools — Fact or Fiction: College Admission Essay Sample

Fact or Fiction: College Admission Essay Sample

• University: Baylor University

About this sample

Words: 533 |

Published: Jul 18, 2018

Words: 533 | Pages: 1 | 3 min read

If I had been asked a couple months ago to describe my dream job, I could have told you my dreams to the last detail. It would have started something like this: 'I walk into a hospital every day, greeted by friends and colleagues. I want to do general surgery in order to help those who need it. I want to spend time with the families, help them, and let them know that I am able to take care of their loved ones.' Of course, that’s what I would have said before. Now, it’s a completely different story.

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Fast forward, ask me now, and see what I say. My response would be something like this: “.......". I don’t even have a clue where to begin! Sure, being a surgeon has been my dream since I was just a kid. It’s what I always remember wanting to do. Yet now that I’m older I find myself thinking it through so much more than ever before. Helping people is important to me, yes, but now I’m forced to look ahead, and as I do, there is so much more to consider. What is my family life going to look like? Where will I have to go to find work? Will I be able to travel? Spend time with my kids? Have a social life? There is so much extra baggage that goes with being in the medical field, that now it may only be a dream.

Consequently, if it’s a realistic dream you are asking for, I don’t know where to begin. I find myself hoping to be medical. Yet I know that it can’t happen, because my dream lifestyle doesn’t accommodate for it. So that makes my dream job look more laid back. Maybe because I’m so close to my father, a pastor, that’s the type of career I can see myself in. The career where I get to spend as much time as I need to with my family, and when I need to take off of work, I can do it; never having to miss a parent teacher conference, a recital, or a performance. Maybe because I love spending time with my mom, a high school counselor, that’s the type of career I see myself in. The career where I can spend the summers free from worries, and I can spend that valuable time with my family. Taking my kids out for ice cream, or watching them swim in the pool.

Yet how often are dreams real, tangible things? So if it’s merely a dream you are looking for, that I can describe. I walk into the hospital, greeted by friends and colleagues. I chat with patients and I do surgery. I help people. However, then my son calls, and needs to be picked up from school. So I drop everything, leave the hospital, and go to spend time with him. My wife wants to take a weekend and do something romantic. So I take off work and sweep her off her feet. Then I come back to work and continue to live a medical dream.

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Is it a dream? Yes, but there’s no harm in dreaming.

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Global Warming: Fact or Fiction

This essay will examine the debate surrounding global warming. It will assess the scientific evidence supporting global warming, counter-arguments, and the implications of this debate for policy and public perception. Moreover, at PapersOwl, there are additional free essay samples connected to Fiction.

How it works

• 1 Introduction:
• 2 Side One of the Issue:
• 3 Side Two of the Issue:
• 4 Conclusion:
• 5 Reflection:
• 6 References

Introduction:

Global Warming is the theory that the atmosphere of the earth is gradually increasing as a result of the increase in levels of greenhouse gases and pollutants being released. Since the Industrial Revolution, Earth’s global average temperature has increased by 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (The World Counts, 2014). There are generally two opinions regarding the argument of global warming: those who believe it is occurring and those who do not. People who believe in the issue back their opinions up using scientific evidence, while those who deny the issue generally do because they do not believe in science, they claim there is no solid evidence, or that the cause of the change in Earth’s temperature has no known cause (Why Do Some People Think Climate Change is a Hoax?, 2017)

Side One of the Issue:

The first source was an article titled, Climate change evidence: How do we know?.

This article was posted by NASA, which is a huge organization full of experts on outer space, making them very credible. The article is quite recent, as it was published in April of 2018. This means that the content found within the article is updated with the most recent information, data, and statistics. The purpose of the article is to inform the public of proof that climate change is indeed occurring. The article is factual and full of evidence proving the author’s point. The author is impartial because he/she is not proving any personal opinions, but facts and data. This source is incredibly useful because it contains the numbers needed for not only scientists, but anyone in need of the information. The information of the article has been reviewed by the NASA team. The source is incredibly reliable considering where it comes from, and its lack of personal opinion. The content has not been swayed based on any religious beliefs, political affiliations, etc. A limitation of the source is since NASA believes in global warming, they will only provide evidence that supports the theory.

The second source supporting the theory of climate change is, Global Warming by the Union of Concerned Scientists. This source comes from an organization of scientists who want to stop human influence on global warming. The publishing date is not given, as this is not a specific article, but the website of the organization. The purpose of the website is to inform readers of the causes and impact of global climate change. It also gives readers evidence of how global warming has affected specific areas of the U.S. The authors want to provide possible solutions to global warming, specifically what regular people can do to help out. The information is factual and appears to be very well researched, as other sources have the same facts. The information has clearly been reviewed by the organization. The information is objective because they are solely facts, making the source reliable. The source is not biased and does not appear to be altered by personal beliefs. A limitation to the site is a lack of references, however, as said previously, other sources have the same information.

Side Two of the Issue:

The first source that denies the theory of climate change is Top Ten Reasons Climate Change is a Hoax . The source comes from The News-Review and was published in April of 2018. The author does not have any listed credentials, making their credibility questionable. The purpose of the article was to try and argue that the idea of climate change is about money. The information is objective, and although the author used data, they only used data that proved their own point. The entire article is an opinion and is found in the opinion section of the website. This source is useless because none of the information is relevant or accurate. The source has probably not been reviewed considered that this is one person’s own personal opinion. The article is completely unreliable, and the author tries to argue that 30,000 scientists are either lying, or are unintelligent. The information has been swayed by political opinion because their only argument against climate change is that the idea was evoked from a disagreement about money. The author also felt the need to state the political party of the people he/she was disagreeing with, which only diminishes their credibility because it shows the argument they are trying to make is based not off of facts and evidence, but on political affiliations.

The final source that does not support climate change is, Catastrophic man-made global warming”” is a complete hoax. The source comes from a member of GlobalClimateScam by the name of ElmerB. The article was published in January 2015. The author does not have any credentials, considering that they are a random user on the site. The purpose of the information is to argue that global warming is fake. The author attempts to use evidence, however, the evidence is false. The author claims that polar bears are thriving, however, their habitat is melting, and their number are decreasing. The source is subjective and the author is using their own opinions to sway readers. The source is not useful because some of their evidence is false, making it obvious that the article was not reviewed. Much of the evidence they used is taken out of context, or they twisted facts/data in a way that made their opinion appear to be correct.

Conclusion:

The sources supporting the theory of global warming appear to be more credible than those who attempt to debunk it. This is because of the origin of the sources, the information being correct as well as recent/updated, and the plethora of certifications given to the authors. On the other hand, the sources for the global warming deniers completely lacked any credibility. The authors, like ElmerB, were random users on lesser-known sites, posting in the opinion section. Their facts were inaccurate, such as the claim that polar bears are thriving, while the author of the first article tried to accuse thousands of experts on global warming of either being uneducated or lying.

Reflection:

A benefit to my conclusion is an overall summary of the credibility of both sides to the question of whether or not humans are speeding up global warming. Based on the sources, readers are given insight into what kind of evidence both sides are using to support their argument. Specifically, readers of the sources who are trying to decide a position to support when considering human involvement in climate change should be able to see that the sources and evidence that argue humans are, in fact, speeding up global warming are much more credible than those that deny it. One major limitation to this research is the fact that only four sources could be used in total to decide whether an entire side of an argument is valid or not. More sources are needed in order to evaluate the credibility of both sides to such a large controversy in science.

Climate change evidence: How do we know? (2018, April 04). Retrieved May 16, 2018, from https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

E. (2015, January 23). Top Ten Reasons Climate Change is a Hoax. Retrieved May 16, 2018, from http://www.globalclimatescam.com/opinion/top-ten-reasons-climate-change-is-a-hoax/

Global Warming. (n.d.). Retrieved May 16, 2018, from https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming

Nikirk, J. (2018, April 17). “”Catastrophic man-made global warming”” is a complete hoax. Retrieved May 16, 2018, from http://www.nrtoday.com/opinion/letters/catastrophic-man-made-global-warming-is-a-complete-hoax/article_ff895c54-2ba1-55d7-9b81 0520235bc043.html

Temperature Change Over the Last 100 Years. (2014, October 21). Retrieved May 16, 2018, from http://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/Temperature-Change-Over-the-Last-100Years

Why Do Some People Think Climate Change is a Hoax? (2017, November 24). Retrieved May 16, 2018, from https://www.bestvalueschools.com/faq/why-do-some-people-think-climate-change-is-a-hoax/

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Climate Change Myths: Sorting Fact from Fiction

There’s no consensus on global warming. Climate models are inaccurate. Temperature records are unreliable. Earth’s climate has changed before. Oceans are cooling. Human CO2 emissions represent a tiny percentage of overall CO2. Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas.

And so on, and so on. We’ve heard them all.

Climate change is one of the most contentious issues facing society today. The question of how (or whether) we respond to climate change ultimately is a matter for policymakers to decide, but politics cannot (and should not) be separated from good science.

With that in mind, Marc Airhart with the University of Texas at Austin has developed a series of reports that track research conducted by climate scientists’ at the Jackson School of Geosciences on eight of the most common myths about climate change. All told, the reports provide an informed perspective on this important public policy debate.

Myth No. 1: What global warming? Earth has actually been cooling since 1998. Some people skeptical of global warming claim that Earth’s global surface temperatures have been falling or have leveled off since 1998. They point to data now several years out of date from U.K. researchers that put 1998 as the warmest year on record. They also point to an unusually cool summer in North America in 2009 followed by an abnormally cold winter across the northern hemisphere. People who had to shovel record snows from their driveways or live without power during ferocious snowstorms in the northeastern United States began to doubt decades of scientific evidence on global warming. Continue reading this myth …

Myth No. 2: Increased carbon dioxide (CO2) can’t contribute to global warming: It’s already maxed out as a factor and besides, water vapor is more consequential. Some climate skeptics claim that the carbon dioxide (CO2) currently in the atmosphere is already “saturated” in its ability to absorb longwave radiation from Earth and therefore additional CO2 in the air won’t make a difference — won’t, that is, absorb more heat. They also argue that water vapor is a more potent greenhouse gas and therefore increases in CO2 shouldn’t be a concern. These claims have been made in recent years by Hungarian physicist Ferenc Miskoczi and other scientists. They were repeated in the Skeptic Handbook, published in 2009 by science writer Joanne Nova. Yet the seed of the argument actually goes back more than a century. Continue reading this myth …

Myth No. 3: You can’t trust climate models because they do a lousy job representing clouds and aerosols. Climate modelers have traditionally had a hard time incorporating clouds because clouds are very complex. On the one hand, by reflecting sunlight, they tend to cool Earth. On the other, they tend to hold in heat from the surface, which is why cloudy nights tend to be warmer than clear nights. The models also divide the atmosphere up into blocks much larger than clouds, so it’s difficult to create realistically sized clouds. Continue reading this myth …

Myth No. 4: There have been big climate changes in the past, such as the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period, so why can’t recent climate changes just be explained by natural variability?

People who dispute evidence of recent global warming sometimes point to two episodes in the past 1,000 years called the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period — times when northern hemisphere temperatures were higher or lower than average for decades or even centuries — as examples of internal variability, a kind of natural randomness in the climate system that can’t be explained by any specific forcing. If true, perhaps internal variability could explain the current rapid global warming, skeptics argue. In other words, maybe our current warming is just an unlucky roll of the dice, a blip rather than a long term trend. Continue reading this myth …

Myth No. 5: Natural forces such as solar variability, cosmic rays or volcanic eruptions can explain the observed warming.

Nearly all of the heat at the surface of Earth comes from radiation from the sun. Perhaps, as one hypothesis goes, that radiation has become more intense in recent decades and is making the planet warmer. A second, more complicated hypothesis involving the sun proposes that higher solar activity tends to suppress the levels of cosmic rays, high energy particles from space, hitting our atmosphere. Cosmic rays help form water droplets and clouds. Clouds are thought to have an overall cooling effect on the planet. Still with us? So in this view, if the sun is more active, then there are fewer cosmic rays, less cloud cover, and a warmer Earth. Continue reading this myth …

Myth 6. The urban heat island effect or other land use changes can explain the observed warming.

The urban heat island effect is a well documented phenomenon caused by roads and buildings absorbing more heat than undeveloped land and vegetation. It causes cities to be warmer than surrounding countryside and can even influence rainfall patterns. Perhaps, the argument goes, ground based weather stations have been systematically measuring a rise in temperature not from a global effect but from local land use changes. Continue reading this myth …

Myth 7. Natural ocean variability can explain the observed warming.

The oceans are the largest single reservoir of heat in the climate system. And they do have internal cycles of variability, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO). These cycles have impacts on the sea surface temperature in specific regions that vary from year to year and even from decade to decade. So perhaps, the argument goes, we just happen to be in a warm period that will last a few decades and the oceans will eventually switch back to a cool period. Continue reading this myth …

Myth No. 8: In the past, global temperatures rose first and then carbon dioxide levels rose later. Therefore, rising temperatures cause higher CO2 levels, not the other way around.

Ice cores from Dome C in Antarctica record surface temperatures and atmospheric concentrations of CO2 going back over 800,000 years. During that time, several ice ages came and went. After each ice age ended, temperatures rose first and then several centuries later, CO2 concentrations rose. This lag, some skeptics conclude, proves that CO2 increases are caused by global warming, not the other way around. Continue reading this myth …

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Science Fact or Fiction

The late 19th and 20th centuries have seen advances in technology and scientific understanding the likes of which have not been seen before in such a short amount of time in known Human history. In the last hundred and fifty years science has advanced so much that one would barely recognize the lifestyle of Humans before all these technological wonders. In fact, if the scientists and thinkers of pre-industrial society had had a glimpse of the technology available to the average early 21st century man they would probably surely think some sort of sorcery was involved and would not believe for one moment that all these technological innovations were based on concepts of the governing laws of the universe that have applied all through mankind’s history. In fact, modern science looks pretty solid when one examines all of its wondrous creations and the fact that new ones keep coming out daily. For instance, it would appear that modern science has correctly solved the understanding of concepts and principles which govern how electricity flows in a circuit. After all, computers, hair dryers, TV’s and other such electronic devices use this scientific understanding to function properly and in turn most people use such devices every day, thus is this science proven every time such a device is used successfully? It is easy to classify such scientific understanding as fact when devices built upon the science work and work very dependably at that. However is this science fact as would appear, or is merely conjecture based upon an observable phenomenon? Perhaps something entirely different happens when we throw the switch on a light bulb and it illuminates than what science says happens. Even though the light bulb lights up every time, that does not necessarily mean that the scientific understanding of how the light bulb works is true.

Take for instance the scientific principles of projectile motion. In a simplified form, current physics explains that projectile motion is composed of two components. A y component which describes the objects path in a vertical direction and the x component which describes the object’s motion in relation to a horizontal direction. This explanation show that projectiles travel in an arc and its has been proven countless times through experiment upon experiment since its original conception. However, the modern principles of projectile motion is not how scientists have always explained the phenomenon. In fact, the theory proposed by medieval scientists in drastically different from what is now accepted. This scientists of yesterday tried to explain projectile motion from what they observed and the most likely example of projectile motion that a medieval scientist would have seen would be a catapult or some other similar device. When someone on the ground observes such a device in action it is hard to see that the object moves in an arc because the object is usually observed from the back (hopefully not the front) rather than from the side. Scientists would observed that object appeared to move up at a fairly constant rate then go smashing into the ground some distance later. Thus, the theory that they adopted to explain this motion was that an object had a certain amount of energy when it was thrown. This energy, which they called “impetus” caused the object to go up in a straight line at whatever angle it was fired at and once the object reached its maximum height, it used all of its impetus and fell straight down in a vertical line to the ground. This theory of projectile motion existed for some time and it was not until scientists such as Galileo started conducting sound scientific experiments that the modern ideas of projectile motion were formed.

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Thus it is evident that even if a device (the catapult in the above example) harnesses some phenomenon, the explanation for the phenomenon is not necessarily true just because the device works. This example instead shows what science really is. Science is an attempt by Humans to explain the world around us. When something is observed, a scientist begins to propose ideas as to why something is happening the way it is. The scientist uses all the current scientific theories to support his new idea and also uses experimentation to test the new idea. Over time through experimentation the idea is refined and if it appears to be sound then it is accepted as theory. However, in the future a new breakthrough may come about which renders this old theory obsolete and scientists at the time of the discovery will realize that the previous theory that was accepted as truth was completely wrong. Perhaps many theories widely believed today will become obsolete upon new discoveries in the future and future scientists will dismiss ideas many modern scientists hold as truths just as modern scientists easily dismiss the medieval idea of impetus. Thus the question arises once again of whether science is fact or plausible fiction.

Science is fact, however it is a different kind of fact than that of absolute truth. Science is best defined as “scientific fact”. Scientific fact is a generally accepted explanation of reality and it is open at all times to inquiry. This idea of a scientific fact is definitely not an absolute fact, as absolute truths exist only in the realm of mathematics. Rather, facts in the context of science are explanations which seem to explain a phenomenon and which hold in line with other accepted scientific facts. Furthermore, there are varying degrees of scientific fact. For instance, theories in paleontology and sub atomic theory are much more prone to change over time with further scientific discovery than the concepts of Newtonian physics which have been unchallenged for hundreds of years. Therefore it is clear that as scientific fact exists for longer and longer periods of time without being disproved and that new theories are built upon the original theory that also appear to be valid, then that scientific fact approaches closer to absolute fact than theories which are newly formed. However, it is core to science being science that no theory can every be 100% absolute truth. Only by constantly questioning a scientific idea and searching for a better explanation is progress made and hence if one began accepting scientific facts as absolute facts, progress would cease.

Thus science can be explained in terms of multiple scientific facts. However if these scientific facts can be disproved at any time, how are they any different than convincing fiction? Scientific fact as stated above attempts to approach absolute truth but can never actually be absolutely true, however as ideas are constantly improved upon they become closer and closer to this untouchable absolute truth. Sound scientific facts can be reproduced by any scientist and are given more plausibility each time they are successfully reproduced. This is how science is more fact in the sense of an absolute fact rather than being fiction. If a scientific theory apparently explains a phenomenon, can be reproduced multiple times and it agrees with other scientific facts then it is more likely truth than just a convincing fiction. Convincing fiction on the other hand is something that is false at its core, but appears to be true via various convincing arguments. Science does not fall under this category because science is developed using methods such as the scientific method that require a scientist to be very thorough and hence ideas which appear to be true, but which are in reality fiction, will be weeded out through experimentation. There is somewhat of a gray area between this convincing fiction and scientific fact because of the idea of various degrees of scientific fact as mentioned above, however good science which follows the scientific method is differentiated from the plausible fiction simply from the fact that it is reproducible and that it agrees with other widely accepted ideas. Science is constantly built upon itself and if one was to classify all science as convincing fiction then that would mean that all science is inherently false, instead the idea of science as scientific fact allows for the idea that science is true which allows for further scientific advancement because one can rely on previous scientific ideas and treat them as fact to build new theories which if also are scientifically proven will further validate the original theory.

Thus scientific ideas which are developed through the appropriate means of scientific method and which are reproduced by other scientists can be accepted as fact in the context of science. This scientific fact is seen as being inherently true due to the fact that it is built upon former scientific ideas that have been time tested and which approach as close to absolute truth as possible. Although a new piece of information can come to light that totally disproves a theory, the likelihood of disproving most core theories (ie. gravity) is relatively slim due to the fact that ideas that have been built upon the core theory have also been scientifically proven and accepted as scientific fact. Therefore core science is much more fact than fiction as it is proven via extensive experimentation and the newer more controversial theories are also more fact as they are built upon the core theories which are close to being absolute truth.

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