In the past fifty years, and, in particular, in the work of David Lewis, Kwame
Anthony Appiah, and Mark Alfano, there has been considerable attention paid to
the epistemic and practical significance of fictions. This is not a coincidence, as
our world has seen an explosion of fictional entities, from string theory to credit
default swaps to fake news. While most of the recent work on fictions and
fictionalism has attempted to address its potential truth or epistemic status, today
I would like to focus on a slightly different question: how a practical fiction, selfconsciously created, eventually becomes a “fact.” This is a question left
unanswered by various thinkers, and yet, if fictions are to be of practical
significance, I would offer that it is the question. Not whether a fiction is true,
but, rather, the process whereby a fiction becomes true. Today I will argue that,
for fictionsto become true, they must be plausible, repeated, shared communally,
and have physical correlates.
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