Transcendental fictionalism

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

Fictionalist theories in philosophy are, very roughly (very very very roughly) theories that discourse about this or that subject, is true or false depending on some kind of presuppositional background fiction/narrative in which the discourse takes place/to which (or through which?) it refers. So numbers-talk is true or false in "the story of numbers," so to speak.

Morality, if the result of, you might say, "infictition," not intuition or intellection as such, might yet be shown, via a sort of constructivist route, to have a universal/objective/w/e relation or standing. The ideal of morality in this sense would be that of a universal narrative. But this arises from narrators, and if transcendental, then from the mere possibility of narration in narrators. So the possibility of a universal narrative becomes the archetype of the principle of universal justice. That is to say, the general rule of all possible culture and society is one of supporting and protecting the possibility of a narrative in which all people in all cultures and societies participate, through an implicit or explicit universal construction (in the act, especially, of public reason).

However, particular obligations will be more substantially fictitious, in a sense. We are, as it were, imagining a book in which some sentences are written from the nature of the book itself--or, so to say, there are choices made in the composition of the text (fonts, letter size, etc.) that have a semiotic function over and above the text's semantics, or even plain syntax (though you might style these qualities "transyntactic"). But this is also a book in which most of the sentences are written essentially by fiat, so that "according to the fiction of morality, X is right" will tend to be true because an agent or integrated system of agents will have "written" the book, by fiat (as by promising under certain conditions), to say that X is right. So we will be looking at a diverse narrative, in the reflection of the universal one per se, including one in which both individuality and community should be enabled to play constructive roles, so far as the authors of the story of morality all have the equal ability to play this role (to write in the book (by fiat)).