Reasoning between Possibility, Fictional Reality, and ActualityA Case Study in Detheologizing the Commedia’s ConditionalsLaura DiNardo

Establishing Possibility: Inferno 9

I turn first to Inferno 9, where Dante-poet provides the reader with an early key to understanding the potential of ‘se’ as a vehicle for possibility within the poem. By staging what happens when one isolates the utterance of a conditional itself, we can observe in this episode how Dante is able to dramatize the construction’s ability to encode possibility, for better or for worse, into the meaning of words.

The opening of Inferno 9 is critical to the development of the Commedia’s narrative in that it represents an early moment of uncertainty within the poem, specifically as it relates to the successful progression of the journey ahead. In earlier cantos of Inferno, such as the crossing of the Acheron in Inferno 3 and the passage by Minos in Inferno 5, any impediment to the travellers’ path was met with assurance and easy resolution on the part of Virgil, inaugurating a pattern for the reader whereby the success of the journey and its divine status were taken as a given. For the first time in Inferno 8 and the episode’s continuation into Inferno 9, the established narrative structure is resisted: Virgil and Dante-pilgrim find themselves having been denied entrance into the gates of the city of Dis and, as a result, the pilgrim begins to doubt the abilities of his guide and the sanctioned nature of his travels.

As the two await a sign of help to resolve their narrative impasse, Virgil utters a series of disconnected statements in which he puts into words the doubt that has been building since the previous canto: ‘“Pur a noi converrà vincer la punga”, | cominciò el, “se non…Tal ne s’offerse. | Oh quanto tarda a me ch’altri qui giunga!”’ (‘“We have to win this battle”, he began, | “if not… But one so great had offered help. | How slow that someone’s coming to see me!”’; Inf. 9.7–9). Importantly, at this critical narrative juncture — the first moment in the text where the Beginning of page[p. 108] certainty of the journey is placed in question — Virgil begins to express a conditional statement regarding what might happen if aid does not come swiftly, signalled by the employment of an antecedent ‘se non’ (v. 8), before cutting himself off from the consequent and switching course. More specifically, he only begins to establish the conditions of possibility related to the success of the journey in his statement; he does not flesh them out fully or arrive at a conclusion regarding that which the possibility would entail. The very nature of the conditional is never fully expressed before it is denied as impossible. As Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi notes in her commentary, this denial of the consequent is never unpacked explicitly within the dialogue, but instead must be supplied by the reader and pilgrim alike:

la reticenza non è spiegata; il lettore, proprio come il Dante personaggio, deve supplire con la sua immaginazione. Evidentemente essa esprime una esitazione in Virgilio, integrabile dalle parole che seguono […].

(the reticence is not explained; readers, just like Dante-pilgrim, must compensate with their imagination. Evidently this reticence expresses a hesitation in Virgil, which can be inserted from the words that follow […]).1616See Dante Alighieri, Commedia, ed. with commentary by Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, 3 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1991–97), i: Inferno (1991), ad loc. For a more recent reading of Virgil’s cut-off speech, see J. C. Wiles, ‘“Se non…” (Inf 9.9) and “I vostri mali…” (23.109): Interpretative Issues of Infernal Aposiopesis’, Annali d’italianistica, 39 (2021), pp. 205–27.

While Virgil foregoes the second half of his conditional formula ‘if p, then q’, those two small words alone — ‘se non’ — alongside Virgil’s own rebuttal in the verses shortly after, ‘Tal ne s’offerse. | Oh quanto tarda a me ch’altri qui giunga!’ (vv. 8–9), allow Dante-pilgrim to begin to imagine outcomes that await them if help does not arrive. These linguistic signals also allow Dante-poet to dramatize the process of making meaning in conversation in the verses that follow.

In the context of the present analysis, we can note how these three early verses foreground the work that the conditional is doing to set up the dialogic interaction that follows in the canto, for the mechanism by which meaning is made in this episode is presented as a complex interaction between the unfinished conditional and the rebuttal to these Beginning of page[p. 109] words all carried out on the part of Virgil as guide. As Chiavacci Leonardi’s commentary highlights, it is only by proceeding in the narrative that Dante-pilgrim, and the reader alongside him, is able to supply the remainder of the conditional statement: the consequent is concluded based on how quickly Virgil denies its potential implications. Moreover, the isolation of the antecedent, ‘se non’ (v. 8), allows Dante-poet to underscore the power of possibility itself in the context of a narrative structure that inherently tends toward a singular resolution. If aid does not arrive, the journey might not go as planned. These cut-off words, then, whose effects on the pilgrim are staged throughout the rest of the exchange, do double duty within the construction of the narrative in the poem. From a world-building perspective, they resist the singular path that is the pilgrim’s journey, seeding doubt in its foregone conclusion. Importantly, though, they do so by staging possibility itself to allow the pilgrim and reader to imagine the various ways that the narrative could be diverted.1717See Nicolò Crisafi, Dante’s Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the ‘Commedia’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), in particular chapter 2, ‘Alternative Endings and Parallel Lives’ for an important recent contribution that engages with similar questions of possibility in the context of the teleology of the poem, positioning narrative alternativity as manifested in hypothetical constructions as one mechanism by which ‘Dante exposes the conditions of possibility of his autobiographical masterplot as such’ (p. 85).

We can therefore see firsthand how this notion of possibility works to reinforce the poet’s fictional reality in this moment in Inferno 9. By staging doubt regarding what could happen if aid does not arrive via a cut-off conditional (explicitly labelling it a ‘parola tronca’ (‘broken phrase’; v. 14), the poet asks the reader to buy into the truth of the path on which Dante-pilgrim is travelling. He does so by creating avenues to consider the journey as one in which success is not a given, thus calling its status as a foregone conclusion into question. The introduction of this possibility then allows the reader to buy more deeply into the fiction that is the Commedia, therefore upping the poem’s truth value. The result of this buy-in becomes even more important in the context of Dante’s enactment of a theory of meaning or semantics within the poem because it then serves as consent to the power that inscribing possibility into language holds in bolstering reality, and therefore its assertion of truth. The poet seems highly aware of the ability of ‘se’ to Beginning of page[p. 110] access this relation in the context of the narrative in that he isolates and dramatizes its use by cutting the conditional off from its consequent. Thus, he is able to effectively stage how the conjunction alone works to construct possibility, establishing its use in his language theory as a constituent component of the truth value of the poem itself. We will never actually know what the second half of Virgil’s cut-off statement would look like, however the mere signalling of the possible through a particular conjunction — ‘se non’ — is enough to activate fear within the pilgrim and to create narrative suspense for the reader such that the journey’s inevitable success becomes all the more believable.

The Study of Conditionals Past and a Contemporary Framework

Having established this distinct connection between conditionality and possibility that Dante constructs in Inferno 9, as well as the importance of its impact on the narrative and its truth value, we can now turn to contextualizing the poet’s employment of conditionals to then better evaluate them throughout the Commedia. I begin by noting that the study of conditional constructions is not foreign to the field of Dante studies, or its points of contact in the discipline of historical linguistics. Gianluca Colella’s monograph Costrutti condizionali in italiano antico, for example, has undertaken the important historical-linguistic project of tracing the development of and categorizing the use of conditional constructions in early Italian literature, which includes a discussion of Dante in light of his employment of conditionals in the argumentative structure of the Convivio.1818See Gianluca Colella, Costrutti condizionali in italiano antico (Rome: Aracne, 2010), Section 9.3.2, ‘L’argomentare del Convivio’. Colella demonstrates how the use of this particular linguistic structure in the poet’s philosophical treatise, much like in Monarchia, is largely modelled off earlier Latin forms that serve to establish and verify premises in a scholastic vein.1919In particular, he notes how within the Convivio, ‘la costruzione condizionale permette di connettere la domanda alla risposta’ (‘the conditional construction allows the connection of the question to the answer’). Colella, Costrutti condizionali, p. 231, translation mine. As his study relates to how conditionals can figure in narrative formulations, and specifically in dialogue, he turns instead to Boccaccio’s Decameron.Beginning of page[p. 111]

The Enciclopedia Dantesca, cited earlier in this essay, also includes two important entries related to conditionals. Both the entry on ‘Se’, as well as one specifically dedicated to the ‘Periodo ipotetico’ serve predominantly to catalogue the poet’s various uses of the conjunction itself and the conditional construction.2020See Vignuzzi, ‘Se (sed)’; and Franca Brambilla Ageno, ‘Periodo ipotetico’, Appendix to Biografia, Lingua e stile, Opere, in Enciclopedia Dantesca, ed. by Bosco, vi (1978), pp. 408–24. In the latter in particular, Franca Brambilla Ageno categorizes the different types of conditionals in the poet’s works and gestures toward their narrative impact. She begins by noting that a highly common conditional in Dante is that of the type discussed from Inferno 1, in which the antecedent and the consequent are both in the indicative mood such that the statement serves as ‘una concatenazione di fatti che “suole” verificarsi, che ha luogo tutte le volte che si verifica l’ipotesi’ (‘a concatenation of facts that “customarily” occurs, that happens every time that the hypothesis is verified’).2121Brambilla Ageno, ‘Periodo ipotetico’, p. 409, translation mine. Interestingly, her succinct description of these indicative conditionals provides additional credence to the relation between reality and possibility gestured toward in the Inferno 1 example and asserted in this essay: Virgil introduces the possible world of the poem, the ‘altro viaggio’ (‘other path’; Inf. 1.91), in a structure that establishes a factual relation. If Dante wishes to exit the dark wood, he must travel through the three realms of the afterlife. The fact that the afterlife is presented as a ‘verifiable’ consequent, encoded via the use of an indicative conditional, underscores its existence as a true object.

Brambilla Ageno also notes a high density of what she terms ‘true’ hypotheticals (‘il periodo ipotetico vero e proprio’),2222Ibid., p. 417. or those in which one can observe the subjunctive in the antecedent and the conditional in the consequent. Dante’s use of this formula, she asserts, does not always indicate impossibility, but rather seems to get at different forms of possibility:

Presso Dante, l’alto numero di p[eriodi] ipotetici con protasi al cong[iuntivo] e apodosi al cond[izionale] può suggerire molte considerazioni sia sulla capacità costruttiva che regge periodi vasti e complessi e nello stesso tempo saldi e simmetrici come Beginning of page[p. 112] architetture classiche; sia sulla ricchezza fantastica, che non solo conferisce concretezza ed evidenza a un mondo immaginario, ma varia tale rappresentazione col riferimento (anche nella protasi di p[eriodi] ipotetici) a immagini di altra sfera […].

(In Dante, the high number of conditional constructions with a protasis [antecedent] in the subjunctive and an apodosis [consequent] in the conditional can suggest many considerations both with respect to Dante’s capacity to construct, a capacity that supports vast and complex sentences that are at the same time firm and symmetrical as in classical architecture; as well as with respect to the richness of his fantasy, which not only confers concreteness and evidence on an imaginary world but varies such representation with referral (even in the protasis of the conditional) to images from another realm […]).2323Ibid., translation mine.

Brambilla Ageno gestures toward something important in her observation that these forms of the conditional — what in English are termed counterfactuals or subjunctive conditionals — ground the poet’s statements regarding his imaginary world in concreteness and evidence. How exactly the construction does so is the point of departure for the present analysis. As I have shown thus far, scholars of Dante have observed both the importance of possibility in the construction of the Commedia as a whole, as well as certain linguistic features such as the conditional that may contribute to its centrality within the text. However, a next important step in this discussion is to analyse how these linguistic features do indeed contribute in a technical manner to this established relation between possibility and reality, thereby underscoring the truth of the poet’s work. It is here that I believe the employment of approaches from philosophy of language, and particularly those frameworks proposed in the most recent century, can be useful.

I assert that Dante is utilizing the poem itself as a testing ground for the ways the linguistic construction of the conditional taps into various frameworks of possibility within the narrative to say something about its ability to bolster the truth value of his fictional reality under construction and open pathways to access the real. This performance of the power of conditionals to inscribe possibility within the poem presents an interesting counterpoint to ancient and medieval concerns Beginning of page[p. 113] about the construction, which largely focused on their appearance in logical argumentation. As noted also by Colella, Boethius and Abelard can be taken as prime examples of these earlier studies of the linguistic structure of conditionals. Boethius investigated their form in his De hypoteticis syllogismis; as the title of this work implies, his predominant interest was their relation to the syllogism and to Aristotelian logic.2424See Boethius, De hypotheticis syllogismis, ed. and trans. into Italian by Luca Obertello (Brescia: Paideia, 1969). For a succinct overview of these historical touchpoints, see Colella, Costrutti condizionali, p. 15. Abelard, too, speaks of conditionals always in relation to the truth or falsity of statements.2525See, for example, the fourth tractatus of Abelard’s Dialectica, ed. by Lambertus M. De Rijk, rev. 2nd edn (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum & Comp., 1970).

It is predominantly in modern philosophical investigation that we see a turn toward formalizing the connection between conditional constructions and various forms of possibility through a semantics of possible worlds. Therefore, I will turn to the contemporary discipline of philosophy of language to demonstrate further the robust and highly technical nature of Dante’s thoughts on possibility and its ability to be encoded within the linguistic structures of poetry. Much work has been done in the previous century in the philosophy of language to conceptualize this semantic theory of possible worlds, which has then been applied to conditional constructions to demonstrate their effectiveness at tapping into that notion of possibility. One of the earliest and most important philosophers who utilized possible worlds to provide a working theory of conditional constructions was Robert Stalnaker. I propose that his ‘A Theory of Conditionals’ can be used with great effectiveness to unpack the implicit and explicit work that these structures are doing within the Commedia.

In his essay, Robert Stalnaker looks specifically to counterfactual conditionals to discuss the semantic and pragmatic issues that arise in analysing conditional statements and puts forth a theory for their evaluation. He writes that to establish the belief conditions of these sorts of statements, the process of evaluation is as follows: ‘First, add the antecedent (hypothetically) to your stock of beliefs; second, make whatever adjustments are required to maintain consistency (without modifying the hypothetical belief in the antecedent); finally, consider Beginning of page[p. 114] whether or not the consequent is then true’.2626Robert Stalnaker, ‘A Theory of Conditionals’, in Studies in Logical Theory, ed. by Nicholas Rescher (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1968), pp. 98–112 (p. 102). However, he notes that while we may be able to assert a set of conditions under which we can determine the belief conditions of any statement of the structure ‘if p, then q’, we must also identify a mechanism by which we are able to assert the truth conditions of these constructions to provide credence to our beliefs. Specifically, we must appeal to the idea of possible worlds to move from belief to an evaluation of the truth conditions of a conditional statement. Stalnaker proposes the following framework to do so: ‘Consider a possible world in which A is true, and which otherwise differs minimally from the actual world. “If A, then B” is true (false) just in case B is true (false) in that possible world.’2727Ibid., p. 102, author’s emphasis. That is, to evaluate conditionals we must begin by establishing some sort of relation between a possible world in which the hypothetical under consideration were true and the actual world. We do so by employing a selection function to find the closest possible world in which the antecedent or if-statement is true, with otherwise minimal difference from the actual world, and evaluate if the consequent is also true at that world.

As indicated in this description, Stalnaker’s theory of conditionals is important for its introduction of the concept of minimal difference between the actual world and possible worlds as a means to assert the truth value of a conditional statement, thus also introducing a hierarchy or ordering of possible worlds such that some might be closer to the actual world while others remain farther away, depending on the similarity of their characteristics. It is additionally useful to note that he positions this framework as largely a semantic one. The theory as it is presented explains an underlying linguistic concept, rather than the particularities of use of conditionals in everyday human speech. This semantic concept does have distinct pragmatic repercussions, in that he notes how the changes that each possible world undergoes are ‘largely dependent on pragmatic considerations for their application’.2828Ibid., p. 104. We will see in the discussion that follows how Dante too seems to be negotiating the bounds between semantic theory and pragmatic contexts of use in his own working understanding of conditionals in Beginning of page[p. 115] the poem, for he takes the interaction between the two as part and parcel of his establishment of his fictional reality in the narrative, as well as its relation to accessing the real.

Toward the end of his discussion, Stalnaker highlights the importance — and at first glance the contradictory nature — that evidence plays in the assessment of the truth value of this linguistic structure. We might ask: Since conditional statements rely on an assessment of a possible world, which does not indeed exist, how can they be verified in the actual world? He relies once again on minimal difference to answer this question: ‘It is because counterfactuals are generally about possible worlds which are very much like the actual one, and defined in terms of it, that evidence is so often relevant to their truth’.2929Ibid., p. 112. This theory of conditionals leads Stalnaker to assert that the function of a conditional is that it ‘[…] provides a set of conventions for selecting possible situations which have a specified relation to what actually happens. This makes it possible for statements about unrealized possibilities to tell us, not just about the speaker’s imagination, but about the world’.3030Ibid. As can be seen from this high-level overview, the notion of possible worlds is central to Stalnaker’s theory of conditionals. Moreover, as he briefly suggests in his own conclusion, the theory of conditionals he develops also has real repercussions in the assertion of a relation to the actual world.3131As will be shown in the analysis that follows, this framework for conditional statements not only serves as a basis to establish relations between the possible and the real, but also how fiction figures into this discussion. See, for example, David Lewis’s ‘Truth in Fiction’, cited earlier, which relies on similar correspondences between different possible worlds and the actual world as a means to establish the truth value of statements in the context of a fiction.

Stalnaker’s theory discussed here is one of the earliest that proposes a possible worlds framework for conditional statements and, as such, the tools and vocabulary employed therein are particularly productive for the clarity they provide in recognizing the fundamental components of the linguistic construction and its connection to possibility.3232For an overview of how theories of possible worlds and of conditionals have evolved in recent decades, see Christopher Menzel, ‘Possible Worlds’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2024 edn <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/possible-worlds/> [accessed 9 June 2025]; and Willow Starr, ‘Counterfactuals’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2022 edn <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/counterfactuals/> [accessed 9 June 2025]. I believe that the methodologies provided by Stalnaker,Beginning of page[p. 116] and later by philosopher David Lewis who continued to nuance this framework of possible worlds as they relate to counterfactuals,3333See David Lewis, Counterfactuals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). are particularly helpful in reconstructing how Dante might be theorizing a use of conditionals within the context of the Commedia. As the examples that I have discussed have shown, he similarly perceives this ability of conditionals to access the question of possibility and possible worlds and, across the poem, he is capitalizing on the connection between these linguistic structures and the idea of possibility for narrative buy-in. Thus, the poet’s own use of the construction seems well positioned to benefit from this more contemporary approach. Moreover, his sustained employment of this linguistic structure at critical narrative moments contributes to the establishment of larger theories of meaning and use within the text.

Detheologizing Narrative Possibility and Fictional Reality: Inferno 27

I now turn to one canto in particular — the pilgrim’s encounter with Guido da Montefeltro in Inferno 27 — to highlight the conditional construction’s ability to establish the fictional world of the Commedia specifically in relation to the possible and the real. In particular, we can observe that a counterfactual conditional introduces Guido’s biographical discussion, which then leads to the recounting of the course of action that landed him in the eighth circle of hell. As will be shown, Guido’s use of this conditional does double duty in the context of this narrative episode. It is not only our first indication of a seriously faulty logic on the part of the sinner, which gives credence to the erroneous reasoning that led to his actions recounted in the text, but, moreover, it embeds the complex notion of possibility in counterfactual form to assert a relation between possible worlds, including that of the poem’s fictional reality. This relation that Guido’s conditional establishes then allows Dante-poet to nuance how the rules of his construction of the Beginning of page[p. 117] underworld itself hinge on careful assessment of the distance between the actual world (the real) and the world of his fiction.

The exchange in Inferno 27 between the pilgrim, his guide, and Guido da Montefeltro opens with the yet-to-be-named sinner who greets the two travellers, noting that he heard Virgil speaking Lombard. The Roman poet then urges Dante-pilgrim to speak in this instance, given their interlocutor is Italian. After exchanging information regarding the current political state of Romagna, the narrative shifts from the urban to the personal and Dante-pilgrim requests to know the sinner’s name. By way of response, he answers with an overture that couches his fear of revealing himself in two conditional statements:

The sinner, we come to learn, is Guido da Montefeltro; however, as he declares in these verses, he is only willing to identify himself as such if he can be assured that the individual speaking to him cannot return to the world of the living (and likely spread news of his story). His preamble is predicated entirely on conditional reasoning to arrive at this point.

Guido’s first assertion in verses 61–63 — ‘S’i’ credesse che mia risposta fosse | a persona che mai tornasse al mondo, | questa fiamma staria sanza più scosse’ — is a textbook case of a counterfactual conditional, with a subjunctive in the antecedent and a conditional in the consequent. Moreover, it is followed by an indicative conditional that rebuts the doubt seeded in the counterfactual, asserting as fact the belief that no one has ever returned from hell to the world above. Relying on precise linguistic structures and verb forms that reveal the Beginning of page[p. 118] sinner’s apparent reasoning, the importance of this narrative moment is heightened by the fact that it is immediately clear to the reader that Guido’s belief conditions and the truth he derives from them are utterly incorrect.

In his recent commentary to the Commedia, Nicola Fosca succinctly unpacks the incorrect logic that Guido da Montefeltro utilizes in this moment such that he arrives at false conclusions:

in effetti il suo ragionamento è formalmente esatto, ma la premessa su cui si basa (‘nessuno entra in questo fondo, nell’Inferno, e poi torna a vivere sulla terra’) è materialmente erronea, e quindi porta ad una conclusione altrettanto erronea (‘il mio interlocutore resterà qui e posso tranquillamente parlargli’).

(in effect, his reasoning is formally precise, but the premise on which it is based (‘no one enters into this pit, in inferno, and then returns to live on earth’) is materially incorrect, and therefore it leads to a further incorrect conclusion (‘my interlocutor will remain here and I can calmly speak to him’).3434See Nicola Fosca, Commentary to the Inferno, in The Dartmouth Dante Project, 2025 <https://dante.dartmouth.edu/> [accessed 9 June 2025], author’s emphasis. For an alternate reading whereby Guido da Montefeltro employs the conditional precisely because he knows Dante is living and wishes to have his story told in the world above, see Joseph Markulin, ‘Dante’s Guido da Montefeltro: A Reconsideration’, Dante Studies, 100 (1982), pp. 25–40.

I assert that, in addition to staging the use of faulty logic to arrive at incorrect premises and conclusions, Dante-poet is also tapping into the framework of possible worlds he observes within counterfactual conditionals to heighten the absurdity of Guido’s statement in the context of the poem. The problem for Guido, the poet implies, is that he reasons using an incorrect relation between worlds.

Guido da Montefeltro’s counterfactual seeks to establish a relation between a possible world and the base world from which he reasons, which has its foundation in beliefs derived from the actual world. However, as Dante-poet masterfully shows, what the sinner does not consider is how the world in which the pilgrim is travelling (that of the fictional reality in which Guido also happens to exist) is already different from the actual world he claims as his starting point — for Beginning of page[p. 119] indeed, the world of the fiction does allow for a sanctioned individual to journey to the underworld in the flesh only to return to that of the living. Therefore, rather than simply asserting a belief about a possible world in which a distinct hell that can be journeyed to exists, calculated based on its distance to the actual world, the sinner must judge the relation taking into account the ways in which the Commedia has established a different rulebook for the afterlife.

We can begin to understand the full impact of Guido da Montefeltro’s counterfactual and its subsequent rebuttal by turning to Stalnaker’s theory of conditionals. We remember that to evaluate a counterfactual statement, we can utilize the following formula: ‘Consider a possible world in which A is true, and which otherwise differs minimally from the actual world. “If A, then B” is true (false) just in case B is true (false) in that possible world.’3535Stalnaker, ‘A Theory of Conditionals’, p. 102, author’s emphasis. We can see that Guido da Montefeltro is staging an appeal to a similar framework in his own conditional as a means to assess the truth value of his belief. When he reasons, ‘“S’i’ credesse che mia risposta fosse | a persona che mai tornasse al mondo, | questa fiamma staria sanza più scosse”’ (Inf. 27.61–63), what he implies in his antecedent is: If there exists a world in which my interlocutor could return to the living. In that case, he would say no more.

Importantly, though, he continues in the indicative to highlight how this process of reasoning using another possible world (i.e., one in which someone could return above) leads him to conclude that this possible world couldn’t exist: If what he knows about the actual world is true, this simply isn’t possible. The inherent impossibility he expresses in his denial highlights his miscalculation: he did not consider all possible worlds accurately in his evaluation of the first conditional. His incorrect evaluation of possible worlds and his ultimate denial of their existence results in Guido’s choice to speak.

What he fails to recognize is that the possible world in which an individual can return to the world above does indeed exist; it is the world he is living in himself. This is the fictional world of the poem, which has its own set of minimal differences from the actual world that must inform Guido’s reasoning. Therefore, Guido’s logic breaks down Beginning of page[p. 120] because he creates a relational framework between the wrong set of worlds. What he needs to do is judge the distance of his conditional from the fictional world of the poem, which holds different rules about travelling to and returning from the underworld, not the actual world. To do so correctly, he would need to utilize a slightly modified set of facts or evidence. In his own theory of conditionals, Stalnaker gestures toward issues of this nature in discussing the contingency of possible worlds and their need for evidence.3636Ibid., pp. 111–12. However, we can further specify this notion by turning to highly related frameworks in philosophy of language regarding truth in fiction to better understand how counterfactual reasoning can be employed specifically to determine the truth value of assertions about a fictional world. This additional nuance will allow us to then better understand how Guido’s logic fails in such a particular way, as well as how Dante-poet can be seen as staking claim to the world of his fiction in relation to the real and the possible in this moment.

Earlier in this essay, I indicated how a possible worlds theory of conditionals allows one to assess the truth claims encoded within this linguistic structure. Interestingly, this framework of possible worlds developed for assessing the truth conditions of a counterfactual has been similarly applied to conceptualize the reasoning individuals must engage in to determine the truth conditions of fictional worlds. Philosopher David Lewis, whose own theory of conditionals very much builds on that of Stalnaker, puts forth this framework in his ‘Truth in Fiction’.3737See David Lewis, ‘Truth in Fiction’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 15.1 (1978), pp. 37–46. The possible worlds theory of truth in fiction asserts that to establish the truth conditions of statements regarding a fictional world, we need to view them keeping in mind both the authorial assertions made about its existence (derived from the facts of the narrative), as well as the general background of ‘belief worlds’ on which the fiction operates. These ‘belief worlds’ can be defined as ‘the beliefs that are overt in the community of origin of the fiction’.3838Ibid., p. 44. Putting these components together, Lewis states that the truth value of a statement regarding fictional worlds can be determined by taking as fact authorial Beginning of page[p. 121] assertions about its existence against the backdrop of the overt belief worlds of the author’s community of origin and then judging new information based on the relation of similarity between the fictional world and the possible world in which the new premises exist.3939Lewis states that ‘a sentence of the form “In the fiction f, φ” is non-vacuously true iff, whenever w is one of the collective belief worlds of the community of origin of f, then some world where f is told as known fact and φ is true differs less from the world w, on balance, than does any world where f is told as known fact and φ is not true. It is vacuously true iff there are no possible worlds where f is told as known fact’. See Lewis, ‘Truth in Fiction’, p. 45. That is, rather than reasoning between the actual world and the possible, we must first accommodate the reality of the fictional world before establishing its new relation to possibility.

Utilizing the conceptual framework afforded by this notion of truth in fiction, we can more clearly understand how Dante-poet is theorizing the interaction between the actual world, the fictional world, and both of their relations to other possible worlds in his staging of this utterance on the part of Guido da Montefeltro. While Guido asserts a counterfactual conditional to assess the truth value between the actual world and a minimally different possible world, he fails to consider the relevant interactions between the facts and belief systems of that world in which one who lives could be standing in front of him, or rather the fictional world that is the Commedia. These factors that Guido disregards are however highly apparent to both the reader and Dante-pilgrim, for their truth is constantly reaffirmed across the poem, such that we are able to immediately spot the faulty logic of the sinner.4040They are reaffirmed, for example, each time the status of the pilgrim’s body is discussed in hell. See Inferno 3 where the apparent (i.e., perceivable) nature of Dante’s body, and therefore his status as living and distinct from the souls that populate Inferno, is acknowledged by Charon on the shores of the Acheron: ‘E tu che se’ costì, anima viva, | pàrtiti da cotesti che son morti’ (‘And you approaching there, you living soul, | keep well away from these — they are the dead’; Inf. 3.88–89).

Dante utilizes these conditionals in Inferno 27 as a mechanism to then set up a dense dialogic interaction that follows to highlight the breakdown of language and logic on the part of both Boniface VIII and Guido. However, the precise linguistic constructions discussed here that initiate Guido’s tale specifically engage with possibility to establish the fictional world in relation to the actual and the possible, highlighting the importance of taking the rules of the world of the Beginning of page[p. 122] fiction into consideration to accurately assess the truth value of claims asserted therein. In so clearly staging an incorrect application of a possible worlds framework by having a sinner miscalculate the role that the fiction plays in this sort of reasoning, Dante-poet gives credence to his own world and establishes it as a verifiable reality. By highlighting the inaccuracy of facts and belief systems that differ from those that comprise the world of the Commedia — he indicates they ultimately lead to erroneous conclusions — he elevates the truth of the fictional reality itself.4141This move to elevate the truth of the fictional reality by highlighting as erroneous the belief systems that differ from it demonstrates interesting similarity to the poet’s move in the intertextual domain to elevate the credibility of his own text by calling into question the texts of authors with whom he is in direct conversation, such as Virgil (for example in Inferno 13). On the use of intertextuality to establish truth claims, Barolini has noted: ‘To study Dante’s handling of his precursors is necessarily to study his truth claims, since he consistently formulates the difference between his poetry and that of his predecessors in terms of truth versus falsehood: he secures the credibility of his text by constructing situations designed to reveal the incredibility of his precursors’ texts’. See UDC, p. 5 note 5. Her discussion of intertextuality and truth claims in The Undivine Comedy derives from Teodolinda Barolini, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the ‘Comedy’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

Beginning with Dante’s staging of the power of ‘se’ in Inferno 9, we have seen how conditionals contribute to the construction of the Commedia as a true object that represents the world as it indeed is. Inferno 27 then serves to highlight how the linguistic structure is employed as a key for the reader to situate the fictional reality of the text in dynamic relation to both possibility and actuality. Using these cantos as case studies, I contend that by parsing conditional constructions as an interplay between the abovementioned layers of possibility and reality embedded in the poem, we can observe a technical claim to its asserted truth value. Moreover, in foregrounding the poet’s keen attention to a semantic claim to truth therewithin, we can more clearly see how linguistically encoded possibility contributes to Barolini’s convincing affirmation of the Commedia as ‘a fiction that IS true’ (UDC, p. 13).