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Full Idea
The fictionalist offers the option that your simulated beliefs and assertions may be tracking a realm of genuine facts, or a realm of what you take to be facts.
Gist of Idea
Fictionalism allows that simulated beliefs may be tracking real facts
Source
Stephen Yablo (Go Figure: a Path through Fictionalism [2001], 13)
Book Ref
Yablo,Stephen: 'Things: Philosophical Papers vol. 2' [OUP 2010], p.197
A Reaction
This means that fictionalism does not have to be an error theory. That is, we aren't mistakenly believing something that we actually made up. Instead we are sensibly believing something we know to be not literally true. Love it.
| 14429 | Classes are logical fictions, made from defining characteristics [Russell] |
| 9497 | Without modality, Armstrong falls back on fictionalism to support counterfactual laws [Bird on Armstrong] |
| 8909 | Abstractions may well be verbal fictions, in which we ignore some features of an object [Lewis] |
| 10023 | Talk of mirror images is 'encoded fictions' about real facts [Hodes] |
| 8864 | We quantify over events, worlds, etc. in order to make logical possibilities clearer [Yablo] |
| 19494 | Fictionalism allows that simulated beliefs may be tracking real facts [Yablo] |
| 19489 | For me, fictions are internally true, without a significant internal or external truth-value [Yablo] |
| 19490 | Make-believe can help us to reason about facts and scientific procedures [Yablo] |
| 19491 | 'The clouds are angry' can only mean '...if one were attributing emotions to clouds' [Yablo] |
| 10262 | Fictionalism eschews the abstract, but it still needs the possible (without model theory) [Shapiro] |
| 10277 | Structuralism blurs the distinction between mathematical and ordinary objects [Shapiro] |
| 12445 | If fictional objects really don't exist, then they aren't abstract objects [Azzouni] |