How Fictions Are Credible

ISBN: 978-3-88405-518-2

Abstract

Coleridge claimed that “poetic faith” involves a suspension of disbelief. If that is right, to be good a literary fiction must be credible. Of course, literary credibility does not mean truthfulness or something like that, since literary fictions are false by definition. So, to be good, literary fictions must be both false and credible. For being false is not a sufficient condition of aesthetic value: a set of false sentences, or a set of some true and some false sentences, does not suffice to make a good literary fiction.

About the Author

Giovanni Tuzet studied law and philosophy in Turin and Paris XII; he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Peirce’s theory of inference. Formerly post-doc researcher at the universities of Lausanne, Switzerland, and Ferrara, Italy, he presently teaches, as assistant professor, Philosophy of Law and Legal Argumentation at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. His areas of interest include epistemology, philosophy of logic, normative sciences and, in particular, philosophy of law.

His writings include La prima inferenza. L’abduzione di C.S. Peirce fra scienza e diritto (Giappichelli, 2006), “Projectual Abduction” (Logic Journal of the IGPL, 2006), and several papers on legal reasoning and argumentation. With D. Canale he edited the volume The Rules of Inference. Inferentialism in Law and Philosophy (Egea, 2009).Bocconi University

giovanni.tuzet@unibocconi.it