What Is Said

This chapter begins with the notions of piggybacking and pivoting, suggeting that metaphorical contents—contents obtainable by piggybacking on a game—cannot always be reconstrued as incremental contents—contents obtained by pivoting on a suitably related presupposition. Pivoting is a limited operation, compared to piggybacking. However, the argument for this applies just when A is closed to its metaphorical content. It could be that piggybacking on a game G can always be simulated by pivoting on a corresponding presupposition, provided that every A is open to its G-induced metaphorical content. It is uncertain whether this is really so, but we can adopt it as a working hypothesis. The chapter then makes the following conjecture: most, if not all, of the philosophically controversial games—the games invoked by fictionalists about numbers, sets, properties, mereological sums, other times and worlds, and so on—are hyperbolic. The facts that make A pretendable are included in the facts that would make it true. This is illustrated with number fictionalism.