Online research in philosophy

There has recently been considerable interest in accounts of fiction which treat fictional characters as abstract objects. In this paper I argue against this view. More precisely I argue that such accounts are unable to accommodate our intuitions that fictional negative existentials such as “Raskolnikov doesn’t exist” are true. I offer a general argument to this effect and then consider, but reject, some of the accounts of fictional negative existentials offered by abstract object theorists. I then note that some of the sort of data invoked by the abstract object theorist in fact cuts against her position. I concludle that we should not regard fictional characters as abstract objects but rather should adopt a make-believe theoretic account of fictional characters along the lines of those developed by Ken Walton and others.

When philosophers make claims of the form “Fs are fictions”, what they say is often ambiguous in a crucial way. On one way of understanding it, it has clear ontological implications: there are not really any such things as Fs. But there is also a different, non-ontological way of understanding the claim: as merely asserting that F-assertions are normally made in a fictional spirit. Clearly one can hold that we normally make statements about Fs in a fictional spirit while also holding that we would still express truths if we were to make literal statements about Fs. Let ontological fictionalism about F-discourse be the thesis that Fs do not really exist but only exist in fictions. Let linguistic fictionalism about F-discourse be the thesis that we normally make F- statements in a fictional spirit. (Throughout when talking about (linguistic) fictionalism I shall mean hermeneutic fictionalism: fictionalism considered as a thesis about actual discourse, to the effect that we actually do make statements belonging to the discourse in a fictional spirit. Contrast: revolutionary fictionalism, which proposes that we should make statements belonging to the discourse in a fictional spirit.1).

There have been few attempts to draw a distinction between ficta (mythical and literary characters, and fictional creations in general) and unactualized possibilia (objects of unrealized assemblages, of false but coherent scientific theories, of unfulfilled plans) qua respective alleged referents of singular terms occurring in sentences apparently talking of them. Both have indeed been indistinctly rejected as belonging to the perverse domain of the non-existent. Those singular terms purporting to refer to them have consequently been considered as empty non-denoting terms or, at least sometimes in the case of fictional reference, as being used in contexts of pretended reference. This referential peculiarity seems to have been necessary in order to save the apparent truth of sentences belonging to fictional contexts. This policy, however, has the effect of blurring the ontological distinction between ficta and possibilia. On the one hand, ficta are a particular kind of abstract objects, namely constructed abstract objects. Moreover, they are essentially incomplete abstract entities, in that they are correlates of finite sets of properties. On the other hand, possibilia are concrete objects as well as realia, which are ultimately nothing but actualized possibilia. In fact, possible objects are objects that, even though they do not actually exist, might have existed, in the particular, Platonic-Kantian, sense of the firstorder concept of existence here involved, namely that of being effective, i.e. being involved in the causal order. Thus, being a possible unactualized object is tantamount to being possibly involved in the causal order. Besides, as an object existent in this sense may legitimately be qualified as complete, the incompleteness which pertains to possible objects may be said to be contingent, that is, to regard them only with respect to the worlds in which they do not exist. With ficta and possibilia two different notions of completeness are therefore brought into play, the former referring to a predicative, the latter to a propositional, concept of negation..

I advance an objection to Graham Priest’s account of fictional entities as nonexistent objects. According to Priest, fictional characters do not have, in our world, the properties they are represented as having; for example, the property of being a bank clerk is possessed by Joseph K. not in our world but in other worlds. Priest claims that, in this way, his theory can include an unrestricted principle of characterization for objects. Now, some representational properties attributed to fictional characters, a kind of fictional entities, involve a crucial reference to the world in which they are supposed to be instantiated. I argue that these representational properties are problematic for Priest’s theory and that he cannot accept an unrestricted version of the principle of characterization. Thus, while not refuting Priest’s theory, I show that it is no better off than other Meinongian theories.

The paper attempts at yielding a language-independent argument in favour of fictional entities, that is, an argument providing genuinely ontological reasons in favour of such entities. According to this argument, ficta are indispensable insofar as they are involved in the identity conditions of semantically-based entities we ordinarily accept, i.e. fictional works. It will also be evaluated to what extent this argument is close to other arguments recently provided to the same purpose.

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?

Creationism with respect to fictional entities, i.e., the position according to which ficta are creations of human practices, has recently become the most popular realist account of fictional entities. For it allows one to hold that there are fictional entities while simultaneously giving such entities a respectable metaphysical status, that of abstract artifacts. In this paper, I will draw what are the ontological and semantical consequences of this position, or at least of all its forms that are genuinely creationist. For some people, these consequences will sound as plagues against the position; for some others, especially realists on ficta, they are welcome results. Although I hold that all forms of genuine creationism have these consequences, I will conclude by explaining why I take moderate creationism, according to which ficta are created by means of a reflexive stance on the make-believe practice grounding them, to be the best of these forms.

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.