Cause and Effect, Counterfactuals, and the Role of Fiction in our Psychic Lives

In this chapter, I consider the idea of stories as hypotheticals, that is, as complicated counterfactuals. I discuss David Lewis’ account of truth in fiction which argues that we treat fictional narratives as counterfactuals. I consider an extension or variation of Lewis’ view that can explain some of our experience of reading and writing fiction. At the end, I note the intimate relation between counterfactuals and causation. If fiction is tightly connected to counterfactuals and counterfactuals are closely connected to causation, then fiction and causation are linked. In the last section of the chapter, I consider evolutionary explanations for why we engage with fiction and whether this can partly explain the importance of causation within fiction.