ABSTRACT
Fictionalists say that some thoughts or sayings are, or can be, or should be regarded as a fiction: the thoughts have value and importance, but, as with fiction in the ordinary sense, this does not consist in their being true. The contrast brings with it an essential contrast of attitudes: the valuable fictions are not or should not be believed, for they are false, or at any rate cannot be known to be true; instead the appropriate attitude is one of acceptance, a state that may guide action without amounting to belief. Fictionalist views have sprung up like triffids in the last 30 years or so, and have been applied to morals, mathematics, elementary physics, modality, composition, propositions, and even to truth itself.
