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John Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life.

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John Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life. Oxford U. Press, 2007. Pp. 201. $75.

How to assess the truth value of statements of apparent fact that occur in fictions ("Sherlock Holmes lived on Baker Street" is a favorite example) may sound like a merely academic, indeed philosophical question. And indeed it is, having been debated by philosophers since the turn of the twentieth century, when pioneers of analytic philosophy such as Alexis Meinong, Gottlob Frege, and Bertrand Russell took sides on a question that, if truth be told, is still batted around by philosophers more as a way of testing competing theories of meaning and truth than from any burning interest in literary writing as such. Roughly, Meinong thought that such statements could be true in a fictional world; Russell that, there being no world to refer to except the world, they are all false; and Frege that fictions are all sense or meaning (Sinn) and no reference (Bedeutung), and so don't have truth values. These days analytic philosophers tend to approach this question in terms of "possible world semantics." Gibson is a philosopher. But he does not go down the road of possible world semantics because he wants to make a contribution to analytic philosophy of literature, not, except per accidens, philosophical semantics. He wants to know whether we can learn about life from novels and plays, and, if so, how.

Gibson raises doubts about a way of answering this question that he calls "humanism," that is, the notion that it is possible...

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