Abstract

Why do we sometimes say that a fiction is a good fiction, or an acceptable one, or even a credible one? Are there any criteria that determine our judgment in such senses? The paper takes into consideration the hypothesis that, at least in literary works, coherence is a criterion of fiction assessment. Coherence is not to be identified with logical consistency and is not easily definable. It is something more than mere logical consistency; it is a sort of «making sense» that concerns not only the logical relations between sentences but also their content and their relations to the world (there are forms of internal and external coherence). Such a criterion is checked against some literary and legal fictions, and, although the differences between them must not be minimized, the paper concludes that coherence provides in general an explanation and justification of fictions and of our judgments on them.