Dal finto al vero. La letteratura come ipotesi critica su come stanno le cose

This essay explores how literary fiction, as a form of pseudos, can nonetheless convey truths about the human world. Drawing on Aristotle and Meinong, it argues that literature operates through incomplete, non-existent objects and “assumptive” propositions that approximate truth without asserting it. Fiction constructs possible states of affairs that illuminate aspects of reality, offering critical hypotheses about how things are or could be. Through narrative synthesis, literature reveals patterns, motives, and meanings often obscured in factual discourse, thereby contributing to human self-understanding. Examples from Williams’s Stoner and Seneca’s Medea illustrate how particular stories attain universal significance. Ultimately, the essay defends literary fiction as a reflective and cognitively valuable mode of interpreting the world.