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Selected papers relating to time or fiction:

2023

2022

2019

2018

2017

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2016

2014

2013

  • ‘Fictional Branching Time?’, in A.Iacona & F.Correia (eds.) Around the Tree: Semantic and Metaphysical Issues Concerning Branching and the Open Future (Springer: Synthese library no.361) (2013), 81-94. (Bourne and Caddick Bourne) (see Chapter 5 of Time in Fiction)

2011

  • ‘Fatalism and the Future’, in C. Callender (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) (Bourne)

2007

2006

  • 'A Theory of Presentism', Canadian Journal of Philosophy (2006) 36: 1-23 (Bourne) (See Chapter 2 of A Future for Presentism)

2004

  • 'Future Contingents, Non-Contradiction and the Law of Excluded Middle Muddle', Analysis (2004) 64: 122-128 (Bourne) (See Chapter 3 of A Future for Presentism)

  • 'Becoming Inflated', British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (2004)  55: 107-119 (Bourne) (See Chapter 7 of A Future for Presentism)

2002

  • 'When am I?  A Tense Time for Some Tense Theorists?', Australasian Journal of Philosophy, (2002) 80: 359-371 (Bourne) (See Chapter 1 of A Future for Presentism)

Elusive Fictional Truth

By Bourne & Caddick Bourne

We argue that some fictional truths are fictionally true by default. We also argue that these fictional truths are subject to being undermined. We propose that the context within which we are to evaluate what is fictionally true changes when a possibility which was previously ignorable is brought to attention. We argue that these cases support a model of fictional truth which makes the conversational dynamics of determining truth in fiction structurally akin to the conversational dynamics of knowledge-ascription, as this is understood by David Lewis’s contextualist approach to knowledge. We show how a number of the rules which Lewis proposes for the case of knowledge-ascription can be employed to develop a novel and powerful framework for the case of truth in fiction.

Latest paper:

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