How fictions are credible

Coleridge claimed that “poetic faith” involves a suspension of disbelief. If that is right, to be good a literary fiction must be credible. Of course, literary credibility does not mean truthfulness or something like that, since literary fictions are false by definition. So, to be good, literary fictions must be both false and credible. For being false is not a sufficient condition of aesthetic value: a set of false sentences, or a set of some true and some false sentences, does not suffice to make a good literary fiction. So, what criteria do determine the credibility of fictions? I consider the hypothesis that, at least in literary works, coherence is a criterion of credibility. 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. Such a criterion is checked against some literary and legal fictions; then I ask whether it might be a unification standard for fiction theory.