“Is There a Problem about Fictional Discourse”? J. Searle vs. R. Rorty

Abstract

John Searle’s and R. Rorty’s deliberations represent two different view on a problem of fictional discourse. Searle still locates the meaning of fiction primarily in the objective text, not in an extra-fictional order as his initial pragmatic perspective of research could suggest. Therefore, his conception is still representative of the text-centred , essentialist thinking in a reflection on fiction. R. Rorty formulates the thesis that Searle did not solve the problem of relating words to the world and did not present a coherent theory of fictional discourse. According to Rorty’s deliberations, the discourse about fiction should transform itself into criticism and this way, it may become the literary practice. Removing the notion of fiction as an essentialist feature of a text from ontologically and linguistically orientated research is characteristic of contemporary thinking about fiction. This cultural, pragmatic and ethical turn is aimed at the new type of discourse in which researching on semantics of the text is replaced by the research on the model of the world and its descriptions functioning in each interpretative community. In the present paper I try to answer some important questions founded on the comparison of these two different conceptions, for example: is the discourse about fictionality (philosophically or literary orientated) useful and sensible and what kind of functions does it fulfill. I claim, following Josef Mitterer’s non-dualiznig philosophy and Rorty’s considerations, that as long as there will be the institutions interested in such a discourse, there will be reasons to construct them and there is no need to be afraid of losing the sensibility of our work.