Truth and Trust in Fiction

This chapter examines two pathways through which fictions may affect beliefs: by invading readers’ cognitive system via heuristics and other sub-rational devices, and by expressing authorial beliefs that readers take to be reliable. Focusing mostly on the latter pathway, the chapter distinguishes fiction as a mechanism for the transmission of uncontroversial factual information from fiction as a means of expressing distinctive perspectives on evaluative propositions. In both cases, the inferences on which readers rely are precarious, and especially so with evaluative cases where there is little hope of independent verification. Moreover, trust, which in other contexts can increase the reliability of beliefs transmitted from person to person, cannot be much depended on when it comes to belief transmission from author to reader.