The Association for Studies in Fiction and Fictionality / SociĂ©tĂ© Internationale des Recherches sur la Fiction et la FictionnalitĂ© invites submissions on the theme of Fiction and Lies, for the ASIFF/SIRFF Fourth International Congress.

10-12 June 2026
University of Edinburgh, UK

Supported by the ÌÇĐÄÊÓÆ” and the Scots Philosophical Association

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
-Professor Eileen John (Philosophy, University of Warwick)
-Professor Pierre Bayard (Literature, UniversitĂ© Paris 8 – Saint-Denis

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
From Plato’s indictment of the tragic poets as misrepresenting the truth, to Sir Philip Sidney’s famous claim in the Defence of Poesy that ‘the Poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth’, to current debates about fictionality and factuality, the relationship between fiction and lies has been a focus of scholarly attention. Both fiction-makers and liars make things up and misrepresent the truth. But it is traditionally assumed that with fiction, the invention is non-deceptive. As Margaret Macdonald (1954, 170) put the point, ‘The conviction induced by a story is the result of a mutual conspiracy, freely entered into, between author and audience. A storyteller does not lie, nor is a normal auditor deceived’. Macdonald proposed that instead, fiction-makers engage in a non-deceptive pretence of assertion (see also Searle 1975); but other approaches also distinguish between fictionality and deception, from philosophers who associate fiction with an invitation to make-believe rather than to believe to narratologists who treat fictionality as a rhetorical mode of communication that overtly signals fabrication. If lies are assertions aimed at deception, perhaps fictions are incapable of lying.

Yet a sharp distinction between fictionality and deception confronts numerous challenges. Scholars across disciplines have considered the many ways in which fictions can affect our beliefs, for good or ill. Even if fictions cannot lie in some technical sense, they can certainly mislead, insinuate, obfuscate and so on. Works of fiction may be instances of propaganda which misrepresent the facts; think of Oliver Stone’s film JFK (1991) or Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear (2004). And the distinctions between the fictional and factual are under increasing pressure in the current culture of disinformation and ‘fake news’ – a category not so easy to distinguish from ‘fictional news’.

This three-day international conference aims to explore the relationship between fiction and lies from a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, literary history and theory, narratology, film and media studies, psychology and cognitive science. Proposals may address fiction in general, or any historical period or cultural tradition. We also encourage studies of fictional works in a variety of media (including video games, comics, film, and television series).

POSSIBLE TOPICS include but are not limited to:
‱ The possibility of lying in/through fiction
‱ Other modes of deception and dissimulation in fiction (in particular works, in different media, etc.)
‱ Fiction and fictionality as (tools for) propaganda
‱ The relationship between fiction and fake news
‱ Differing historical or cultural conceptions of the relationship between fiction and lies
‱ Representations of deception within fiction (e.g., unreliable narrators, lying protagonists, forgers)
‱ Fictions that (seem to) deceive about their own status (e.g., mockumentary), and more generally, questions of ‘framing’

Please note: There may be a conference registration fee (discounted for students) depending on the outcome of grant funding applications.

SUBMISSION GUIDANCE
‱ All submissions should be sent by attachment in Word or pdf to fictionlies2026@gmail.com by 15 December 2025.
‱ Papers: Abstracts should be no longer than 350 words, in English or French. Bear in mind that sessions scheduled for paper presentations will be 30 minutes (20 minutes presentation, 10 minutes questions and answers).
‱ Symposia: Proposals, in English or French, should be no longer than 500 words and should include a description of the topic/theme, the names/affiliations of participants and brief abstracts of the papers. Sessions for symposia will be 1.5 hours or 2 hours depending on the schedule and thus should typically have no more than three speakers.
‱ We encourage submissions from, and symposia including, members of groups underrepresented in their disciplines, including women in philosophy. Symposia in philosophy should ensure that the proposal follows the Good Practice Policy of the British Philosophical Association and the Society for Women in Philosophy (see ). Please also take note of the BPA’s Environment/Travel Guideline Scheme ().
‱ Funding may be available towards the cost of arranging childcare for speakers who may require it. Please ask for details.
‱ Participants in the conference will be expected to become members of the Association if they are not already ().

EARLY CAREER PRIZE
The ASIFF/SIRFF will offer a prize for the best paper by an early-career scholar (doctoral student or scholar who has received their PhD within the last 3 years), to be presented at the conference. The winner will receive a monetary award of €1,000 (euros). If you would like to be considered for this award, please submit your completed conference paper (no more than 3,500 words/20,000 characters) by 28 February 2026 to fictionlies2026@gmail.com. The article must be unpublished.

Programme:

9.30: Manuel GarcĂ­a-Carpintero, “On the Mood for Fiction”

10.45: Samuel Lebens, “Stories, Worlds, Centers, and Contradictions”

12.00: Merel Semeijn, “Ho Ho Hoaxing! What Santa Can Teach Us ÌÇĐÄÊÓÆ” Fiction”

14.45: Eileen John, “Fiction, Humour and Understanding the Atypical”

16.00: Neri Marsili, “The Cooperative Principle in Fiction: Quality and Beyond”

All are welcome. For abstracts, accessibility information and to participate, please see/register .

Organisers:

Filippo Contesi & Elisa Paganini

The Workshop is hosted by the Dipartimento di Filosofia “Piero Martinetti”, UniversitĂ  degli Studi di Milano, and generously supported by the Ministero dell’UniversitĂ  e della Ricerca (PRIN2022 – 2022NTCHYF_003).

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The project has received funding from the British Society for Aesthetics.

Confirmed keynotes:
Professor Brian Winston, Lincoln Chair, Lincoln School of Film and Media, University of Lincoln.
Dr Stacie Friend, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London.

The fiction/nonfiction divide is a much discussed topic in contemporary analytic aesthetics. According to classic works like Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990) and Currie’s The Nature of Fiction (1990), fiction essentially involves imagining whereas nonfiction essentially involves believing. However, more recent works like Friend’s “Fiction as a Genre” (2012) and Matravers’ Fiction and Narrative (2014) have put under pressure this conception of the fiction/nonfiction divide. Surprisingly, documentaries are seldom mentioned in this debate, which has so far mainly focused on literary narratives. Yet, documentaries are paradigmatic cases of nonfiction and arguably an investigation of them might shed some light on the fiction/nonfiction divide, which in turn might improve our understanding of the documentary film. In fact, the main philosophical conceptions of the documentary remain those developed some twenty years ago by Currie (1999), Carroll (1997), Ponech (1997), and Plantinga (2005). Despite their differences, all these accounts rely on the standard conception of the fiction/nonfiction divide in terms of an imagination/belief distinction. Yet, if Friend and Matravers are right in questioning this standard conception, then the philosophy of documentary is to be reconsidered as well.

Film studies have a longer tradition of doubting the neat division of fiction/nonfiction when it comes to documentary. Classic theories and histories of documentary film starting with Barnouw’s Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (1974) and Nichol’s Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (1992) and extending to more recent contributions such as Winston’s The Documentary Film Book (2013) and Nichol’s Introduction to Documentary: 3rd Edition (2017) have also treated documentary film as essentially assertions about reality. But they were far more willing to concede that documentary oftentimes slips into fiction than their philosopher peers.

That being the case, the conference “Documentaries and the Fiction/Nonfiction Divide” aims to revive the philosophical research on documentaries by encouraging a dialogue on this issue with film critics and theorists, as well as with historians and practitioners. The goal is to explore how film scholars can contribute to philosophical issues such as the fiction/nonfiction divide as much as philosophy can contribute to our appreciation of documentaries.

Topics for papers and pre-constituted panels may include but are not limited to:
Definitions of documentary.
Is documentary pure nonfiction or can it be a hybrid form between fiction and nonfiction?
Does the practice of reenactment in documentaries challenge the fiction/nonfiction divide?
Analyses of documentaries that question the fiction/nonfiction divide.
What can the history of film teach us about the nature of the documentary?
The relationship between early cinema forms such as actualities and documentary.
The specificity of documentaries with respect to other nonfiction images (CCTV images, TV shows…).
The relationship between the documentary and the indexicality or transparency of the photographic images.
Have digital technologies changed the documentary? If yes, in what way?
The periphery of the documentary (e.g. docudramas, docufiction, mockumentaries).
Is the documentary specific to the medium of film or can we find it also in other media?
Is the documentary specific to the film as a form of art, or can we find it also in other forms of art, for instance in theatre or in video art?
Are there essential differences between the experience of a documentary and that of a fiction film?
Taxonomies of the documentary: the expository/observational dichotomy and other subcategories.
Animated documentaries.
Is the documentary a kind of storytelling? What are the analogies and the difference between storytelling in documentaries and storytelling in fiction films?
How can a documentary be beautiful? Is there an aesthetic specificity of the documentary?
The evaluation of documentaries: should we use the same criteria we use for fiction films or are there specific criteria?
Can documentary be objective?
The relationship between ethics and documentary.
The intertwining of aesthetics and ethics in the documentary
The cognitive value of documentaries: what can we learn from documentaries? Can documentaries actually contribute to history, philosophy, science or do they just illustrate them?

Conference organizers and speakers: Dr Mario Slugan (Ghent University) and Dr Enrico Terrone (Universitat de Barcelona).
Please send proposals to: aesthetics.film.studies@gmail.com. The deadline for receipt is Monday July 29, 2019. Speakers will be notified of decisions by Monday August 19. There will be no conference fees.
The conference is open to both individual papers and pre-constituted panels (with 3 speakers each and a chair).
In the case of individual papers, please submit abstracts between 500 and 1000 words (references included) together with a title and 5 keywords. The abstracts should be prepared for blind review (with name, institutional affiliation, contact details, and the title of the proposal in a separate file).

In the case of pre-constituted panels, the conveners are asked to submit a panel proposal including the title, a 300- to 500-word justification for the panel and 300- to 500-word abstracts (references included) for each of the three presentations making up the panel accompanied by a title and 5 keywords. Also included should be names and institutional affiliation for the three presenters and the name, institutional affiliation, contact details, and institutional affiliation for the chair. Panel conveners will be also requested to conform to the Good Practice Policy making sure that at least two of the panellists (including the convener/chair) are female.
In line with the Good Practice Policy of the British Philosophical Association and the Society for Women in Philosophy, the conference organizers have already ensured gender parity among keynotes and will do their best to do so for the other conference delegates. To offset unconscious biases against accepting female work demonstrated in different fields in recent studies, the papers will be blind-reviewed.
We hope for an edited volume to result from the conference. In case of publication the organizers as editors will also ensure that women are well represented.

BLASCO DISPUTATIO is a yearly workshop designed to promote the discussion on topics in epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. Each edition of this workshop focuses on a particular issue to be disputed by two invited speakers that will defend divergent, if not opposing, views. A call for papers will be made for contributions that will explore further aspects of the topic.

Views about the role of Singular Terms in Fictional Discourse have mostly focussed on prima facie empty terms, made up by authors of fiction, such as ‘Bezukhov’ in War and Peace. Singular terms in fictions that are already in use outside them, such as ‘Napoleon’ in the same work, have not received as much attention. An issue they raise is whether or not theorists –whether or not they are realists about fictional characters– should give them the same treatment that their made-up counterparts receive. In the 2017 Blasco Disputatio, Stacie Friend and Manuel García-Carpintero will argue for contrasting views on this matter. The workshop will also be open to discussing any related issues on the semantics of singular terms in fiction and on other aspects concerning fictional discourse. The invited papers, together with a selection of the submitted papers will appear on a special issue in the journal Disputatio.

Invited Speakers:
Stacie Friend (Birkbeck, University of London), Manuel GarcĂ­a-Carpintero (University of Barcelona)

Call for Papers:
The organisers invite submissions on any aspect of the debate on the semantics of singular terms in fiction and on other philosophical issues concerning fictional discourse. Authors should submit full papers (5000 words) or extended abstracts (2000 words) by June 16th, 2017 [EXTENDED DEADLINE]. Submissions should be sent to blascodisputatio@gmail.com. Notification of acceptance should be expected by July 16, 2017

Scientific Committee:
Stacie Friend (Birkbeck), Manuel GarcĂ­a-Carpintero (UB), Tobies Grimaltos (UV), Petr Kot’átko (AS CR), Teresa Marques (UPF), Pablo Rychter (UV), JesĂșs Vega (UAM).

Organisers:
Jordi Valor (University of Valencia) and Josep E. CorbĂ­ (University of Valencia)

Sponsors:
Spanish Research Council, via Network on Epistemology and Society (FFI2014-55256-REDT) and the research projects: “ÌÇĐÄÊÓÆ” Ourselves” (FFI2013-47948-P) and “Self-Knowledge, Moral Responsibility and Authenticity” (FI2016-75323-P); Internationalization and Cooperation University Office (UV), Faculty of Philosophy and Educational Sciences (UV), Department of Philosophy (UV), and Philosophical Society in the Valencian Country.

Contact: blascodisputatio@gmail.com

For more information check our WEBSITE:

teorema encourages submissions on these and related questions. Articles must be written in English and should not exceed 6,000 words. For the presentation of their articles, authors are requested to take into account the instructions available at: http://www.unioviedo.es/Teorema/English/Authors.html. Submissions must be suitable for blind review. Both a DOC and a PDF document must be sent to the Editor by November 15, 2015. Notification of intent to submit, including both a title and a brief summary of the content, will be greatly appreciated, as it will assist with the coordination and planning of the special issue.

Guest Editor for this issue will be Prof. Manuel GarcĂ­a-Carpintero (University of Barcelona).

Contact details for queries and submissions:

Prof. Luis M. Valdés Villanueva

Editor of teorema
E-mail: teorema@uniovi.es

Deadline for submissions: November 15, 2015.