Is “Makoto” cute? – an Introduction to a Serious Problem

This post is the first in what I hope will become a regular series. Tentatively it seems like it would follow a Tuesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday schedule, and hopefully solidifying such a schedule would motivate me to better organize my thoughts.

The topic I want to talk about today is far too broad in scope for a single post, so the purpose of this writing is to lay down a framework for future expansion.

One way to understand truth is as a correspondence to the actual state of affairs. We can say with little argument, for example, that Key created Kanon, because there exists a company named Key, and they created a game named Kanon. However, what can we say about the work itself?

This statement is false in so many ways.

The statement “Makoto said ‘Makoto’ is cute, so it’s cute” implies several things logically. The first, that there exists “Makoto.” While there certainly exist people named Makoto, the character with which we are equating Makoto to, does not exist in this world. The most we can say about Makoto, is that there exists a character in Kanon, named “Makoto.”

The second implication is that Makoto said “Makoto” is cute. Incidentally, this statement also requires that Makoto exists, and then that Makoto said that.

The final implication is that if Makoto said that “Makoto” is cute, then “Makoto” is cute. This is ultimately a digression, but it’s slightly interesting to think about when such a statement is true. If it is the case that whenever Makoto says that “Makoto” is cute, it is also the case that “Makoto” is cute, the conditional statement is true. It is false whenever Makoto says “Makoto” is cute, and “Makoto” is not cute. Fairly reasonable, right?

What about in the case that Makoto does not say that “Makoto” is cute? Then it doesn’t matter whether or not “Makoto” is cute. With conditional statements, when the antecedent is false, the conditional is true regardless of the truth value of the consequent. This is quite a trivial consequence, since in everyday speech, we tend to entirely ignore conditionals where the antecedent is always false (Imagine a statement like “If 1+1 = 3, then I like cake.” Since 1+1 will never be 3, you can’t really say that the statement is false).

So, since Makoto does not exist, it can not be the case that Makoto says that “Makoto” is cute. So the statement is actually true. 1/3, not bad…

Incidentally, this statement is true.

But the statement in question is a conjunction of all 3 of the smaller statements derived, and can only be true if all 3 of them are true. It is very clear then, that most statements based on a work of fiction can only be true if we include the statement: “In work of fiction X, [statement],” as any statements relying on the truth of the existence of some character would otherwise be false unless it were something like the conditional in the third statement. Adding this additional statement then makes the first two false statements true, and the once true third statement a logical nightmare.

We do this quite often, as it is naturally assumed that we are specifically talking about a work of fiction when we say something like “Makoto is cute.” Surely we are not talking about some person that doesn’t exist, but rather, we are implying “The character from Kanon, Makoto, is cute.”

The work of fiction encapsulates a lot of ideas which create a small universe that is disjoint from ours, so a statement like “Makoto is cute” has several layers of meaning. It can refer to our own interpretation of Makoto from the viewpoint of the “actual world” but it can also refer to a viewpoint from within the fictional world. It may very well be a fact of the fictional world that Makoto is cute, yet our own observation of that world would lead us to a different conclusion.

Now that I have made explicit the kind of thoughts and implications that are made when discussing fiction, we can focus on what these thoughts really mean. Was it really necessary to write all this to communicate a pretty obvious fact? Not really. But I feel that solidifying these obvious points is quite important in order to understand any sort of phenomenon. Over the next few posts, I’ll discuss more about the fictional world; what is true in the fictional world, and the relationship between the real world and the fictional world.