Universal Fictions II
Comments on Michel-Antoine Xhignesse, "Exploding stories and the limits of fiction"
Michel-Antoine Xhignesse, “Exploding stories and the limits of fiction,” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, Vol. 178, No. 3 (March 2021), pp. 675-692.
A universal fiction is a fictional story in which everything is true in the fiction. Xhignesse wants to question whether these are possible, and helpfully identifies three strategies by which people have tried to argue that they can exist:
Assertoric: “According to the assertoric strategy, an author simply needs to tell a story S which explicitly asserts that everything is true in S” (p. 676). Xhignesse gives the following story as an example:
True Story
Once upon a time, everything was true. The end. (p. 676)
Complemental: “...[T]he author must first select a (the?) zero-length literary work (a work with no explicit content) Z, and preface Z with a statement of a complement function to the effect that whatever is not explicitly fictionally true in Z is fictionally true in this second story Z2” (p. 676). Such a story takes advantage of the idea that universal fictions are complements of empty fictions, which are fictional stories in which there are no propositions. We thus select an empty fiction and add a sort of preface saying that whatever is not explicitly true in the empty fiction is true.
Explosive: Explosive strategies take advantage of the principle of contradiction explosion, or something logically equivalent to it. Since, in classical logic, every proposition follows from a contradiction (ex falso quodlibet), if you have a story with a contradiction, and classical logic is the relevant logic, every proposition is entailed by the contradiction.
The resulting universal fictions, Xhignesse calls phictions, i.e., philosophers’ fictions. In the case of the phictions that result from these strategies, the key question is how fictional stories relate to the principle of noncontradiction, and, in particular, whether the latter acts as a hard limit on what can belong to a fiction. On the basis of this Xhignesse is going to argue that, contrary to the proponents of universal fictions, the principle of noncontradiction creates a set of limitations on how we interpret stories that make universal fictions impossible.
The first obstacle with which any attempt to recognize universal ‘phictions’ is what Xhignesse calls the Says-Is Gap: “not everything explicitly said in or by a story is true in that story” (p. 678).1 This complicates any attempt to make the assertoric or explosive approaches work. (It also complicates the complemental strategy, we think, but Xhignesse does not focus on this.) Practically speaking, to make sense of actual fiction we need to recognize both that it may have implicit content inferrable from the text and that these inferences may be far from straightforward. Othello does not make explicit all the ways in which Iago is dishonest; some stories give us apparently inconsistent accounts of what is purportedly the same event. Thus merely because a story tells us something does not mean that we can treat this as the content of the story. If we take True Story, above, for instance, nothing about the story tells us that we should take the story straight. It could, for instance, be sarcastic. That is to say, it says everything is true, but it hasn’t shown us that it is true in the story that everything is true.2 As Xhignesse puts it:
The only way for TS to be properly universal is for it to range over absolutely everything; but the only way to ensure the appropriate domain is to beg the question by assuming that every possible proposition is included in the story. Mere assertion, then, is insufficient—a fact which even some universal phictionalists acknowledge. (pp. 679-680)
The second major obstacle to universal phictions is that we already use the most obvious cues for universal phictions for other things. When we interpret a story, we don’t generally take contradictions as a sign that a contradiction is true in the story, but as a sign that we need to interpret the story differently (e.g., as having an unreliable narrator, or as creating a merely apparent contradiction that needs to be resolved). One common view of fiction is that it involves an invitation to believe, but the existence of a contradiction in the story invites disbelief or at least further scrutiny:
What this shows is that we typically treat extra-, inter-, and intra-textual inconsistencies as interpretive cues signalling that something in the story requires our critical and reflective attention. We thus embrace the law of non-contradiction as a background principle governing our engagement with texts, and do not draw explosive inferences from apparent contradictions. (p. 680)
Even if we take a story like Graham Priest’s “Sylvan’s Box”, which deliberately makes use of a contradiction, the contradiction works as a cue to pause and consider how it works; we do not have any ready-made way to treat it as part of the story. The cue is not itself an indication of what is true in the story.
We are very skeptical of this particular line of thought. Xhignesse (p. 683n22) points to Daniel Nolan’s article, “A consistent reading of ‘Sylvan’s Box’,” The Philosophical Quarterly 57 (229) 667-673. In that article, Nolan provides an interpretation of “Sylvan’s Box” in which there is not contradiction; rather, in the story Graham and Nick just mistakenly believe that there is a real contradiction. We don’t think this can be used to argue that there are no stories in which contradictions are true, because such an argument involves a sort of equivocation. Our overall interpretation of “Sylvan’s Box” could indeed take Graham and Nick to be in fact mistaken. But the only reason we can take them to be mistaken is that Graham, the narrator, is explicitly narrating a story in which a contradiction can be true. If there were no actual contradiction in Graham’s story as Graham narrates it, there couldn’t be anything to be mistaken about. It is only because Graham’s story itself involves taking a contradiction to be true that one can conclude the story as a whole involves a higher-order mistake. Nolan’s interpretation (and this is true in general of the way we handle contradictions in story) adds a layer to the story, so to speak; but it does not change, and in fact depends on the fact that, the base layer actually involves a contradiction. Thus we can tell a story in which a contradiction is true in the story. It is true that it is at least commonly the case that we take this as a further sign that the story involves some mistake, deception, or confusion of perspective, and as a reason to take the story interpretively within a framework in which it can be recognized as involving such mistake, deception, or confusion. But this does not change the fact that the story within that framework treats a contradiction as true. It simply underlines it.
The third line of thought Xhignesse deploys against the universal phictionists is that in truth in fiction we are not concerned with how we happen to take what is said but with how we ought to take what is said. In order to consider this, in reading fiction we often leave open everything we can leave open, and therefore only focus on local inconsistencies. Universal phictions seem by nature to be things we cannot handle in this only-local way: “The case for universal phictions would have us conflate what seems plausible given an occurrent reading with what seems plausible upon reflection” (p. 684). This seems to us to be his strongest argument, in part because we are already sympathetic to arguments in favor of paraconsistent logics based on the oddness of taking all propositions whatsoever to be potentially on the table in every argument.
Xhignesse goes further, however, and argues that proposed universal phictions aren’t any kind of story or fiction at all. Storytelling, Xhignesse argues, is not purely psychological, but is a cultural practice, and telling and understanding stories requires more than just that something be said; it requires placing them in a conventional and social context. Xhignesse doesn’t quite want to commit to saying that there are no possible contexts in which one could have stories in which a contradiction could be true, but he wants to deny that such a context in fact exists. Rather, our practices concerned with story are all organized by artistic and interrogative interests; we want stories with “humanly interesting content” (to use a phrase quoted from Lamarque and Olsen, p. 686). A story like True Story is inherently nonstandard; while the construction is clever, we do not have what we need to take a “literary stance” (p. 687) toward it. Universal phictions “say everything and nothing: they are utterly trivial” (p. 687). As such, they can satisfy no literary interest. It’s not that they are bad stories; it is that they are not stories at all.
We are also unconvinced by this argument. While it’s true that storytelling is embedded in a cultural context, we don’t think that stories are constituted by the literary stances we take to them, in part because there is no single thing that is the literary stance. Rather, given stories, we cultivated literary stances to them. And there are many things that make a story interesting. One of them is novelty and another is clever construction, both of which we have in phictions.
We’re inclined to think that the relation between more common kinds of fictions and what Xhignesse calls phictions is like the difference between common works of fine art and some works of postmodern art, like conceptual art or found art. The latter are limit cases, nonstandard, and deliberately so. Something like True Story is playing with the lack of limitation to what we can include in any story; something like “Sylvan’s Box” is playing with the durability of any fictional story in the face of contradiction. It is doing it by making an extreme example, just to make this aspect more clear. What is more, it is simply not true that phictions “say everything and nothing”; they say something very specific. It happens to be the case that they imply everything, or so it is alleged, but this is not at all the same thing. The distinction between the explicit and implicit is quite important for storytelling, and all of these phictions by their very nature make use of a robust sense of such a distinction.
We thus don’t think Xhignesse has entirely made his case that purported examples of universal phictions merely raise “ the possibility of their truth as an interesting (but ill-fated) literary thought-experiment” (p. 691) rather than actually making everything true. We do think his argument from reading, to wit, that our actual reading of fiction involves leaving things, including interpretations, open, has some merit. When in reading fiction we come across a contradiction or a claim that everything is true, it seems plausible that we largely leave in abeyance what exactly this means. Instead, we largely stick to the explicit narrative and what is required to understand it. We might even allow, if navigating the story requires it, that there is explosion or that every proposition is true in some sense, in some way, insofar as the story genuinely requires it, but as far as actually interacting with purported examples of universal fictions, we could take this to be some kind of figure of speech without any detriment to our reading of the story, and it seems that nothing you could say in the story could absolutely rule out such a reading.
Nonetheless, there is another issue that becomes clear if we think about Xhingnesse’s accusation that ‘phictions’ are not really fictions or stories but literary thought experiments of dubious result. We don’t think this is true (they clearly fit into the genre of fiction and they are clearly narrativized, for instance), but Xhignesse’s argument would not really be confined in scope to phictions. True Story, for instance, is merely a very lightly narrativized example of a trivial logical system. Stories built on the explosive strategy are just narrativized examples of how the logical principle of contradiction explosion works. The story is a vestment for part of a logical system, which the story exemplifies. If they aren’t able to be universal fictions, this is not just a problem for these particular phictions, but for the logical systems which they are exemplifying. If you can’t have an example of how contradiction explosion would work, how can you have a principle of contradiction explosion? The principle says that if a contradiction is true, every proposition is true. You can even show this in an example argument:
[1] Assumed true: (p & ~p)
[2] By Simplification: p
[3] By Addition: p v q
[4] By Simplification: ~p
[5] By Disjunctive Syllogism: q
Notice that you can only get the explosion by taking the contradiction to be true and (represented in this particular argument by Addition) by taking every proposition to be available to the argument. These are precisely the points that explosive-strategy universal fictions use, and precisely the points on which they are claimed to be universal fictions. All such proposed universal fictions are just narrativized examples of arguments like this. If you wanted to explain contradiction explosion to undergraduates, using a purported universal fiction would be one way you could do it. Xhignesse’s truth-in-fiction arguments against universal fictions requires us to say that no one can give an actual example of arguments like this. Xhignesse’s Say-Is Gap applies to any actually communicated reasoning, just as to any story; everything he says about cues is in fact analogous to how we interpret claims even outside of stories; while his literary practice argument is framed in specifically literary terms, but it’s not difficult to build an analogous argument for argumentative practice (in real-life, when we are not doing logic exercises, we do in fact evaluate arguments in terms of their interesting and real-life applications). Thus, it seems that if we accept Xhignesse’s arguments against universal fictions, we should reject contradiction explosion and any argument, like the above, that has a line in which a contradiction is taken as true. Since the principle of contradiction explosion is provable in classical logic, Xhignesse’s argument seems really to be an argument against taking classical logic to be coherent. If so, that would be a higher price than might be expected for rejecting universal fictions.
While Xhignesse does not raise this point, we think it is important to recognize that the Says-Is Gap is found with any kind of thing said in any kind of context, not just stories, and not just fiction. This is relevant to interpreting it. For instance, Xhignesse notes in passing in a footnote (p. 680n13) a view he does not hold, which is that the Says-Is Gap could be interpreted as a reason not to make any true in the fiction. But the Says-Is Gap does not arise only in fiction, but is a feature of saying things in general, so if we took the Says-Is Gap this way in the fictional case, it would raise the question of whether anything is true at all. But there are, of course, good reason to say that the Says-Is Gap is only recognizable because there is an ‘Is’ side of the gap. We can recognize that there is a gap between ‘said to be true’ and ‘being true’ in a context only because we can recognize such a thing as ‘being true’ in that context.
This incidentally raises an interesting question that we merely note here without considering. We generally assume that ‘true’ can be reduced or expanded ad libitum. That is, It is true that it is true that p is taken to be equivalent to It is true that p and both are taken to be equivalent to p. But is this true for fiction? Another way to put it: if we take ‘true’ as working like a modality, we usually assume something like the characteristic axiom of S4; that is, that Box operators, like ‘It is necessary that’, can be reduced or expanded, because a series of Box operators works the same as a single Box operator, and vice versa. But there are kinds of Box operator for which this axiom is not true, so are there kinds of True operators that also do not assume it?