pseudo-statement

pseudo‐statement, a term invented by the British critic I. A. Richards in Science and Poetry (1926) in an attempt to distinguish the special kind of ‘truth’ provided by poetry and fiction: whereas scientific or ordinary ‘referential’ language makes statements that are either true or false, poetry's ‘emotive’ language gives us pseudo‐statements, i.e. utterances that are not subject to factual verification but which are valuable in ‘organizing our attitudes’. The term proved to be controversial, partly because it was misunderstood to mean ‘falsehood’, and partly because it implied that poetry can have no cognitive status; but the idea itself is traditional: Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry (1595) argued that the poet ‘nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth’. A somewhat similar distinction is involved in the later concept of the performative.