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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7344965" data-attributes="member: 42582">I made a long post about this and mentioned you at the top of it.Short version: the physical words of a book are interesting (and different from, say, creases in or scribbles on the paper) because they encode ideas. A person who knows the language can read the book and have ideas caused in him/her in virtue of that knowledge and that encoding.Sherlock Holmes does not cause the idea of Sherlock Holmes. Arthur Conan Doyle's act of authorship (which itself has a long causal history that includes his knowledge of English) together with a publishers act of printing, together with a reader's act of reading (which itself depends upon both prior causal processes like learning the language, and also immediate causal processes in the eyes and the brain), cause the idea of Sherlock Holmes.Sherlock Holmes can't cause anything: he doesn't exist. Ideas can be caused and can cause things, however; they are real things (psychological states/processes). And language - the encoding of ideas - is also a real thing.I don't understand what this means. Fictional things have no effects, recursive or otherwise. But works of fiction have all sorts of effects on future acts of authorship - eg it's absolutely inconceivable that the very first work of fiction ever produced by a human being should be something like Waiting for Godot - that play has a complex causal history in which prior acts of authorship figure (among other things).But I still don't know what your point is.The Hound of the Baskervilles is a work of fiction. It's components are words - ie encodings of ideas. Sherlock Holmes is not a constituent of The Hound of the Baskervilles.Strictly parallel: a news report that astronauts just landed on Mars would be mistaken. The report's components are word - ie encoding of ideas. The landing of astrounauts on Mars would not be a component of such a report - obviously, given that no such thing has happened. (There are some philosophical views to the contrary eg Meinong at least on some readings. I don't think those views are plausible. My point about mistaken news reports is taken straight from Bertrand Russel c 1912. My extension of it to deliberate fictions is my own, but hardly a novel move in this field.)Moral of the story: ideas are not identical with the things they are about. This is why people can believe false things and imagine impossible things.Of course contradictory and logically impossible things get authored all the time. For instance, I can tell you a story right now about the great but forgotten mathematician Hilda who discovered a technique for squaring the circle; and while she was at it, she also proved every true statement in a system that nevertheless was strong enough to yield arithmetic.It's not always pointless, either: most mathematicians accept the permissibility of proof by reductio, and what is the starting point for reductio, after all, but positing a contradiction!How we manage contradictions in our fictions and our posits (and even our beliefs) is a complex question. But in any event, it is not really relevant to anything I said, as I will go on to explain:I've never claimed these things. You imputed these views to me in a post upthread, and I made the same point then.What I have actually said that two particular acts of authorship, which I described in some detail, have the same structure:(1) Adding to a fiction about a study, with a person in it looking for a map, that said person finds a map;(2) Adding to a fiction about an orc, confronted by a sword-wielding person, that said person kills the orc.The identify of structure is this: both take existing elements of the fiction and append a new description to those elements: the person who was in the study looking for a map now is a map-finder; the person who was confronting the orc while wielding a sword now is an orc-killer. And the new description does not introduce any contradiction into the fiction.The salience of that structure to RPGing I take to be self-evident. But in case explanation is needed: the appending of a new description pertaining to a salient character, to existing elements of the fiction which involve (i) that character, and (ii) his/her immediate environs (the study, the orc), is the central act of mainstream RPGing, in which players declare actions for their PCs that trade on the established fictional positioning of those PCs.Of course, if you assume that the fiction in (1) includes a GM-authored but unrevealed element like "The map is in the kitchen" then of course the finding of the map in the study would contradict that. But all that shows is what is obvious and what I have pointed out from the beginning of the thread, namely, that GM secret backstory can operate as an unrevealed bar on the success of players' action declarations. It doesn't show that there is any inherent difference between (1) and (2) as candidate action declarations. The same would be equally true if the GM had notes saying "Whatever happens, the orc can't be killed." It's just that fewer GMs use notes of that sort. (Some do, of course, and some modules suggest such approaches to adjudication.)</blockquote>

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