A Critique of John Searle’s View of the Logic of Fictional Discourse

Abstract

John Searle analyzes the nature of fictional discourse within the theory of speech acts. He thinks that fictional discourse is made up of assertive illocutionary acts, which have no referential force. In this sense, they do not fulfill truth conditions, but require “horizontal conventions.” Therefore, an author of fictional discourse pretends to perform assertive illocutionary acts.