ABSTRACT
Although not all fictions are literature, so much literature is fictional that fiction is a central concept in people's literary practices and, therefore, an unavoidable topic for any philosophy of literature. Games of make-believe typically involve the players' knowledge that they are playing a game, even if they cannot recite all of the rules of the game. Gricean theories are also superior to any simple reception model for identifying fiction—any view that maintains that something is a fiction, if the audience takes it to be one. Such theories are plagued by indeterminacy, since different audiences may disagree about whether or not something is a fiction. Although Gricean accounts of fictions, or variations thereof, are enjoying popularity at present, several serious objections have been leveled at them. Problems have also been raised with respect to some alleged difficulties that the Gricean account confronts with handling the relation of truth to fiction.
