fictionality

Fictionality is the property or status of being fictional, assigned to entities, events, statements, or artifacts within a narrative or discourse. It is contrasted with actuality and is a central concern in literary studies, philosophy of fiction, media theory, and information science. The term is used to analyze how texts encode fictionality and how audiences interpret it, including the boundaries between fictional and real worlds.

Cues of fictionality include explicit disclaimers, framing devices, genre conventions (fantasy, science fiction), metafictional commentary, and the creation of a storyworld with its own internal logic. Some entities may be fictional within one discourse while being treated as real in another (for example, a character in a novel vs. a historical figure named identically). Fictionality also affects the semantics of statements: a claim can be true within a story world even if it is false in the actual world, or be considered non-factual rather than false.

Philosophical approaches to fictionality address how fiction relates to truth and belief. Some theories treat utterances about fictional entities as truth-apt within their own world; others propose fictionalism, which allows talking about non-existent objects by treating ordinary talk as a stand-in for a different kind of discourse. In practice, fictionality shapes literary analysis, adaptation, copyright, and media ethics, as well as how scholars evaluate the credibility of sources and the construction of world-building.