Practice question · True or false
On Searle's account, what separates fiction from lying is the absence of an intention to deceive.
Hints
- Both involve saying something that is not the case.
- The difference is in the intention and in the mutual knowledge of the pretence.
Show the answer
True
Why
True. The words alone cannot distinguish them, an identical sentence can be a lie in a witness box and fiction on a page. The difference lies in the act being performed, and in the pretence being shared rather than concealed.
Practise Fictionality
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More questions on Fictionality
- Match each term from the theory of fiction to what it names.
- Why does the principle of minimal departure explain why fantasy needs little exposition?
- Coleridge argues that readers engage in a 'willing suspension of disbelief for the moment'. What follows from…
- Arrange the stages of the fictional contract as the reader enters it.
- Genette divides the paratext into the peritext, which surrounds the text within the volume, and the epitext,…
- Of the background facts in a fictional world — gravity, mortality, weather, hunger — roughly what percentage…
- Most of the sentences in a realist novel are, taken individually, true statements about the world.