The chapter appraises David Lewis’s seminal work on truth in fiction. This will allow us to make an important distinction between three uses of fictive discourse, including the one that Lewis’s work focuses on: discourse characterizing the content of fictions. The chapter examines variations of standard criticisms of Lewis’s account, aiming to show that, if developed as Lewis suggests in his 1983 “Postscript A,” his proposals on the topic are – as Hanley puts it – as good as it gets. Thus elaborated, Lewis’s account can resist these objections, and it offers a better picture of fictional discourse than recent resurrections of other classic works of the 1970s by Kripke, van Inwagen, and Searle. The turn that Lewis suggests, and which the chapter recommends, draws on the remaining outstanding contribution from that time, that of Walton, which is to be examined in Chapter 3.

This chapter examines the question of whether we can acquire knowledge from fiction. My main claim is a nuanced positive answer, based on the account of the fiction vs. nonfiction distinction that I have so far defended. Narrative nonfiction mainly consists of an assertoric core – a speech act governed by a norm requiring truth or knowledge for its correctness. Fiction mainly consists instead of a core of fiction-making – speech acts that are not governed by a norm requiring truth for their correctness, but ultimately one requiring for their correctness that interesting imaginings are invited. I argue that this account is compatible with fictions presenting contents as true and allowing for the acquisition of knowledge, in at least two ways. First, like other speech acts (such as rhetorical questions), acts of fiction-making can indirectly convey assertions. Second, and no less importantly, fictions may assert background facts about the time, place, or characters in setting up the fiction. I present and discuss illustrative examples of the first kind, in McEwan’s Atonement and Marías’s Dark Back of Time, which, I claim, indirectly make assertions precisely about the topic of this chapter – whether fictions can impart knowledge. The chapter confronts arguments to the effect that such indirectness undermines the acquisition of knowledge.