Reporting theory of fictionalizing.

This is a dissertation in the philosophy of language. My main objective is to give the correct account of the speech act of fictionalizing, aka fiction-making or creating a fiction or storytelling, stipulating that this last excludes nonfiction stories and lies. The Introduction and Chapter Five work together to establish the exhaustiveness of the following trilemma of viable accounts of fictionalizing: David Lewis’s and John Searle’s pretend-assertion theory, Manuel Garcia-Carpintero’s and Greg Currie’s neo-Gricean audience-make-belief theory, and my reporting-on-fictional-situations theory. Chapter Four details an account of paradigmatic cases of reporting needed to understand my fictionalizing account, which is itself argued for in Chapter Five. Chapters Two and Three (with a smattering of Chapter Five) are meant to take pretense and make-belief theories out of the running altogether. Along the way readers will find contributions to discussions on assertion and other speech acts, pretense and other facsimile actions, the nature of propositions, fake news and misinformation, and even a potential resolution to a paradox related to tragic works of fiction, to name a few.