Online research in philosophy

In this paper, I distinguish scientific models in three kinds on the basis of their ontological status—material models, mathematical models and fictional models, and develop and defend an account of fictional models as fictional objects—i.e. abstract objects that stand for possible concrete objects.

Some works of fiction are widely held by critics to have little value, yet these works are not only popular but also widely admired in ways that are not always appreciated. In this paper I make use of Kendall Walton’s account of fictional worlds to argue that fictional worlds can and often do have value, including aesthetic value, that is independent of the works that create them. In the process, I critique Walton’s notion of fictional worlds and offer a defense of the study and appreciation of fictional worlds, as distinguished from the works of fiction with which they are associated.

The challenge of handling fictional discourse is to find the best way to resolve the apparent inconsistencies in our ways of speaking about fiction. A promising approach is to take at least some such discourse to involve pretense, but does all fictional discourse involve pretense? I will argue that a better, less revisionary, solution is to take internal and fictionalizing discourse to involve pretense, while allowing that in external critical discourse, fictional names are used seriously to refer to fictional characters. I then address two objections to such realist theories of fiction: One, that they can’t adequately account for the truth of singular nonexistence claims involving fictional names, and two, that accepting that there are fictional characters to which we refer is implausible or ontologically profligate.

This essay explains why creationism about fictional characters is an abject failure. Creationism about fictional characters is the view that fictional objects are created by the authors of the novels in which they first appear. This essay shows that, when the details of creationism are filled in, the hypothesis becomes far more puzzling than the linguistic data it is used to explain. No matter how the creationist identifies where, when and how fictional objects are created, the proposal conflicts with other strong intuitions we have about fictional characters. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us Digg Reddit Technorati What's this?

Fictional realism, i.e., the view that because fictions exist, fictional characters exist as well, has recently been accused of leading to inconsistency generated by phenomena of indeterminacy and inconsistency in fiction. We examine in detail four arguments against fictional realism, and present a version of fictional realism which can withstand those arguments.

I discuss Gregory Currie’s taxonomy of explanations of the fictional. On the one hand, there is an important kind of relation between internal and external explanations of some fictional truths that Currie leaves out, where both are salient and yet in a relation of harmony with each other. On the other hand, I do not see that he has established that there is a genuine relation of tension between some pairs of internal and external explanations, and thus I question the usefulness of the category of collapse. I also consider a further kind of explanation: the exterior explanation.

The fictional monster Cthulhu was created by HP Lovecraft. Therefore there is some thing, Cthulhu, that Lovecraft created. Cthulhu is a fictional being, so there are fictional beings. You can’t kick a fictional being, so they are abstract. Thankfully, all of this is compatible with a sparse nominalistic ontology. What is important for the nominalist is that a world of concreta suffices to ground all truths, and fictional beings have their grounds in concrete acts of interpretation. Or so I will argue. Along the way we’ll deal with indeterminate identity of fictional characters, as well as making some general remarks about metaontology.

The first question to be addressed about fictional entities is: are there any? The usual grounds given for accepting or rejecting the view that there are fictional entities come from linguistic considerations. We make many different sorts of claims about fictional characters in our literary discussions. How can we account for their apparent truth? Does doing so require that we allow that there are fictional characters we can refer to, or can we offer equally good analyses while denying that there are any fictional entities?

Dienes & Perner argue that there is a hierarchy of forms of implicit knowledge. One level of their hierarchy involves factuality, where it may be merely implicit that the state of affairs is supposed to be a real one rather than something imagined or fictional. I argue that the factual or fictional status of a thought or utterance cannot be a matter of concept, implicit or explicit.