Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Call “fictional assertions” sentences that look or sound like assertions, but which are produced as parts of fictions or in talk engaged with fictions.  Two popular views about fictional assertions are either that they are genuinely assertions, but differ in content from the content they would have had if asserted literally;  or that they are not assertions at all, but perhaps have some other force.  In this paper, I will defend a view, similar to one suggested by Max Köbel, that fictional assertions have the same content as their literal counterparts and are genuinely asserted.