Are Fictional Worlds Really Possible? A Short Contribution to Their Semantics

Literary theoreticians refer to fictional (possible) worlds in order to grasp products of a mental creation and re-creation, products that are based on the acts of creating and perceiving literary works. These theoreticians are notorious for using the notion of possible worlds as a kind of metaphor rather than as a way to refer to the notion of possible worlds as it is employed by modal logic. possible worlds of logic differ fundamentally from (narrative) fictional worlds. Whereas possible worlds of logic are usually consistent, necessarily infinite in number, and complete, fictional worlds of narratives can be contradictory, their number depends on the number of literary texts, and they are incomplete. This enumeration provides us with only a rough overview of the worlds' differences, and it arises only as a result of a deeper analysis and clearer typology of the two kinds of worlds. From the very beginning we accept as a matter of fact that we consider the essential difference between the possible worlds of logic and the fictional worlds of literature to be the way they are given: the way they are given not only has a crucial impact on their ontological status but also determines their qualities. What does Sau! Kripke mean when he says: possible world is not a distant country that we are coming across, or viewing through a telescope. Generally speaking, another possible world is too far away.... A possible world is given by the descriptive conditions we associate with it.... Possible worlds are stipulated, not discovered by powerful telescopes (44)? (1) Referring to Kripke's statement, Thomas Pavel, a prominent theoretician of fictional worlds, explicitly formulates the fundamental dissimilarity between possible and fictional worlds: Usually philosophers assume that possible worlds are not genuine concrete entities that could be inspected were we to possess the adequate telescope; they are abstract models, and may be thought of either as actual abstract entities or as conceptual constructions. But if so, the relation between a world and its creator matters less; to represent works of fiction as worlds involves a model that does not necessarily include a rigorous theory of the production of the fictional world.... Kripkean modal semantics offers what could be called a distant model for the theory of fiction: rather than rigorously unified semantics, fiction needs a typology of worlds to represent the variety of fictional practice. And if, on the one hand, technically impeccable possible worlds are too narrowly defined to provide for a model in the theory of fiction, on the other hand the notion of world as an ontological metaphor for fiction remains too appealing to be dismissed. (49-50) As we can see, both statements can be interpreted in several ways as regards different points of view and levels of view. development of possible worlds of logical discourse is based primarily on the fact that classical logical systems (i.e., extensional systems with a two-value truth-valuation of statements) fail to produce an exhaustive and unified system suitable for truth-valuation of modal expressions. (2) At this moment the idea of different worlds was born: The basic intuition is about the nature of modality, and it consists in the leading idea that possibility amounts to a pre-fabricated space of all the consistent and complete ways the world is or might have been (Heydrich 189). (3) As much as we consider possible worlds to be firmly connected with the development of modal logic and logical discourse, it has to be emphasized that the notion of possible worlds originates in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's metaphysical notion of the universe of possible worlds from which the best one was chosen and actualized by God. Thus even the logical notion rests on a metaphysical base. (4) Although the two types of worlds we are speaking about differ in various ways on different levels, it is obvious that the main discrepancy is caused by the different ontological status of the two types of worlds. …