This month we wrap up TST Metaphysics and the Understanding Philosophy series with On Truth in Fiction. Last time, we explored Truth in History as a disciplined attempt to tell true stories about the past. This month, we turn to fiction: invented stories that can still reveal truth. This area of thinking covers both truth in fiction and untruth in nonfiction. This column explores how fictional worlds borrow reality as their background, how imagination bends fact without escaping it, and why invented stories can sometimes tell truths that ordinary factual summaries miss.
The bonus article this month is my TST Philosophy of Fiction: Imaginative Realism paper. This academic working paper explores the idea that pure fiction is impossible. The TST position is called Imaginative Realism, and it is the idea that humans cannot create fiction from the void. We live in a self-reconfiguring universe. Our fictional stories arise from the recombination of real impressions, not from nothing.
