ABSTRACT
Fictional truth' has an oxymoronic air for anyone who is tempted to equate the fictional with the false. Yet two much-discussed philosophical questions pertaining to fiction seek to elucidate senses in which 'fictional truth', far from being paradoxical, is central to people's engagement with fictions. In a biography of George Orwell, for example, many facts about Orwell are omitted because they are deemed to be trivial or uninteresting, or because they are not known by the author. A serious difficulty for 'possible worlds' approaches to truth in fiction, however sophisticated, is to account for fictional narratives in which inconsistent truths obtain – for example, 'time-travel' stories in which a character travels back in time and kills her own parents – since only logically consistent worlds can be possible. Fictions might be thought to be cognitively valuable in a number of different ways.
