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Ontological Fictionalism
Edited by Pablo Rychter
About this topic
| Summary | A fictionalist view about an area of discourse D says or implies that claims within D, like those of fiction, need not be literally true in order to make valuable contributions. Fictionalist views are often intended to show that their target discourse D does not really have (or need not have) the ontological commitments that it seems to have. So to the extent that an ontological debate revolves around what ontological commitments D has, a fictionalist view of D may contribute to its solution. The areas of discourse about which fictionalist views have been developed are many and varied: ordinary moral judgments, mathematics, talk about possible worlds, scientific models, mental states, God, fictional characters, composite material objects, and more. For the first four of these cases PhilPapers has dedicated categories, listed below at ‘see-also’. The present category, under the parent category ‘metaontology’, focuses on the general significance of fictionalism for ontological questions and debates, and on its metaontological implications. Special attention is also given to fictionalist views on notions that are central to ontological theorizing across different topics: existence, identity, grounding, truthmaking, etc. |
| Key works | An early discussion of the metaontological implications of fictionalism is Yablo 1998, where he suggests that ontology in the Quinean tradition may rest on the mistake of relying on an elusive distinction between the literal and the non-literal. Others have emphasized the positive implications that fictionalism seems to have for the Quinean tradition in ontology. For instance, Eklund 2010 points out that fictionalism offers a way to resist the ‘easy inferences’ for realism on which some critics of ontology (e.g. Thomasson 2014) rely. And Dorr 2005 shows how, within an ontological debate about the existence of Fs, fictionalism could provide the antirealist about Fs with a way to make sense of their opponent's views. Fictionalism about existence talk itself has been defended by Kroon 2004 and Armour-Garb & Woodbridge 2015, developing suggestions of Evans 1982, Walton 1990 and Crimmins 1998. |
| Introductions | Eklund 2010 offers a relatively short but very complete presentation of the different varieties of fictionalism, discussing some of its metaontological implications in the final section 5. Kroon et al 2018 is a very accessible, book-length introduction to fictionalism. The first chapter of Armour-Garb & Woodbridge 2015 contains a very helpful discussion of several forms of fictionalist views. |
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Related
Siblings
- Metaontology, Misc (372)
- Ontological Commitment (318)
- Ontological Conventionalism and Relativism (109)
- Ontological Disagreement (115)
- Ontological Pluralism (140)
- Ontological Realism (273)
- Quantification and Ontology (325)
- Methodology in Metaphysics (574)
- Debunking Arguments about Metaphysics (129)
See also
Contents
214 found
Order:
| 1 — 50 / 214 |
- A Critique of Metaphysical Thinking.T. Parent - manuscriptDraft of March 2022. This is a draft of the front matter and ch. 1, for a new book manuscript on metametaphysics.
- Critical notice of ficitionalism in metaphysics.Zoltan Szabo - manuscriptI present two challenges to fictionalism. According to the first, the reasons fictionalists offer for acceptance without belief often warrant a somewhat different attitude. According to the second, the possibility of fictionalist acceptnace rests on the poorly supported hypothesis that there is a clear distinction between philsophical and ordinary contexts. This is forthcoming in Noûs.Remove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - Fictionalism about modality.Author unknown - manuscriptRemove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Emotion and Ethics in Virtual Reality.Alex Fisher - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.It is controversial whether virtual reality should be considered fictional or real. Virtual fictionalists claim that objects and events within virtual reality are merely fictional: they are imagined and do not exist. Virtual realists argue that virtual objects and events really exist. This metaphysical debate might appear important for some of the practical questions that arise regarding how to morally evaluate and legally regulate virtual reality. For instance, one advantage claimed of virtual realism is that only by taking virtual objects (...)
- Ontology after Folk Psychology; or, Why Eliminativists should be Mental Fictionalists.Ted Parent - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.Mental fictionalism holds that folk psychology should be regarded as a kind of fiction. The present version gives a Lewisian prefix semantics for mentalistic discourse, where roughly, a mentalistic sentence “p” is true iff “p” is deducible from the folk psychological fiction. An eliminativist version of the view can seem self-refuting, but this charge is neutralized. Yet a different kind of “self-effacing” emerges: Mental fictionalism appears to be a mere “parasite” on a future science of cognition, without contributing anything substantial. (...)
- Review of Brock and Everett (eds.) Fictional Objects. [REVIEW]Lee Walters - forthcoming - British Journal of Aesthetics.
- A Fictionalist Social Ontology.Erim Bakkal - 2024 - Dissertation, Bilkent UniversityIn this thesis, I explore how a fictionalist approach can be applied to social ontology, especially for conferred kinds, in the context of action explanation and prediction by comparing this view with various realist views. Chapter 1 is concerned with clarifying constitution accounts and the criteria for comparison. Chapter 2 gives three different kinds of problems against this realist view, which makes this view less credible. Chapter 3 introduces conferralist accounts. Chapter 4 will deal with the question of whether conferralist (...)
- A fictionalist theory of universals.Tim Button & Robert Trueman - 2024 - In Peter Fritz & Nicholas K. Jones (eds.), Higher-Order Metaphysics. Oxford University Press.Universals are putative objects like wisdom, morality, redness, etc. Although we believe in properties (which, we argue, are not a kind of object), we do not believe in universals. However, a number of ordinary, natural language constructions seem to commit us to their existence. In this paper, we provide a fictionalist theory of universals, which allows us to speak as if universals existed, whilst denying that any really do.
- What's in a Name? Legal Fictions and Philosophical Fictionalism.Luft Constantin - 2024 - Law and Literature 2:1-22.This paper uses analytic philosophy to prevent merely verbal disputes about the concept of fiction within discussions on fictiones iuris. It provides a survey of potentially fruitful connections between legal fictions and fictionalism. More specifically, I will argue that by enriching current accounts of legal fictions in legal theory with insights from (1) the philosophy of language on fictional speech and from (2) contemporary metaphysics on philosophical fictionalism, it seems natural to explore the position that talk involving fictiones iuris is (...)
- The Pedagogy of "As If".Johan Dahlbeck - 2024 - Educational Theory 74 (2):145-164.In this paper Johan Dahlbeck sets out to propose a pedagogy of “as if,” seeking to address the educational paradox of how students can be influenced to approximate a life guided by reason without assuming that they are already sufficiently rational to adhere to dictates of practical reason. He does so by outlining a fictionalist account, drawing primarily on Hans Vaihinger's systematic treatment of heuristic fictions and on Spinoza's ideas about how passive affects can be made to strengthen reason. Dahlbeck (...)
- Causal Fictionalism.Antony Eagle - 2024 - In Yafeng Shan (ed.), Alternative Philosophical Approaches to Causation: Beyond Difference-making and Mechanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Causation appears to present us with an interpretative difficulty. While arguably a redundant relation given fundamental physics, it is nevertheless apparently pragmatically indispensable. This chapter revisits certain arguments made previously by the author for these claims with the benefit of hindsight, starting with the role of causal models in the human sciences, and attempting to explain why it is not possible to straightforwardly ground such models in fundamental physics. This suggests that further constraints, going beyond physics, are needed to legitimate (...)
- Fictionalism, Indifferentism, and Easy Ontology.Daniel Z. Korman - 2024 - Festschrift for Matti Eklund.Fictionalism is supposed to be motivated, at least in part, by its ability to undermine our ordinary grounds for believing in numbers and other contested entities. Eklund argues that a weaker and less controversial view, which he calls indifferentism, can do the job just as effectively. I will show that whether he’s right about this depends upon how we think about “our ordinary grounds”. If we think about our ordinary grounds as consisting in what people are pre-theoretically inclined to say (...)
- Difference Between the Existential Quantifier and the Existence Predicate According to Mario Bunge.Martín Orensanz - 2024 - Mεtascience: Scientific General Discourse 3:52-66.Most analytic philosophers believe that the existential quantifier, ∃, has ontological import. Mario Bunge was one of the first thinkers to challenge this view. He traces a distinction between the quantifier ∃ and a first-order existence predicate. Furthermore, he acknowledges two kinds of existence: real and conceptual. One of the reasons for accepting Bunge’s proposal is that it can do justice to statements about fictional entities, which is something that rival proposals do not seem to be capable of doing. Additionally, (...)
- Object-Oriented Ontology and Materialism.Martín Orensanz - 2024 - Mεtascience: Scientific General Discourse 3:268-287.According to Object-Oriented Ontology, matter does not exist. Here I will challenge that idea, by advancing some arguments that aim to establish that mat-ter can be conceptualized both as a sensual object as well as a real object. I will also argue that matter is not fictional, and that the word “matter” can be under-stood as a term that is grammatically singular but referentially plural. This being so, matter itself is a plurality of things, each of which has some kind (...)
- Fictionalism: The Art of Teaching Truth Disguised as Lies.Johan Dahlbeck - 2023 - BRILL.Fictionalism confronts the dual epistemological nature of education. In this book, Johan Dahlbeck argues that all education, at bottom, concerns a striving for truth initiated through fictions. This foundational aporia is then interrogated and made sense of via Hans Vaihinger’s philosophy of ‘as if’ and Spinoza’s peculiar form of exemplarism. Using a variety of fictional examples, Dahlbeck investigates the different dimensions of educational fictionalism, from teacher exemplarism to the basic educational fictions necessary for getting started in education in the first (...)
- A Counterexample to Deflationary Nominalism.Nicholas Danne - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (4):1721-1740.According to Jody Azzouni’s “deflationary nominalism,” the singular terms of mathematical language applied or unapplied to science refer to nothing at all. What does exist, Azzouni claims, must satisfy the quaternary condition he calls “thick epistemic access” (TEA). In this paper I argue that TEA surreptitiously reifies some mathematical entities. The mathematical entity that I take TEA to reify is the Fourier harmonic, an infinite-duration monochromatic sinusoid applied throughout engineering and physics. I defend the reality of the harmonic, in Azzouni’s (...)
- Fiction and Scientific Knowledge.Adam Toon - 2023 - In Alison James, Akihiro Kubo & Françoise Lavocat (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief. Routledge. pp. 115-125.What has fiction to do with science? At first glance, the two activities seem to have entirely different aims and products. Science aims at truth, while fiction can deviate wildly from it. Science produces theories, which we are asked to believe. Fiction produces stories, which we are asked to imagine. Given these differences, associating science and fiction might seem like a serious mistake, or even a threat to science. And yet many authors have tried to understand science by looking to (...)
- What we talk about when we talk about mental states.Zoe Drayson - 2022 - In Tamás Demeter, T. Parent & Adam Toon (eds.), Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations. New York & London: Routledge. pp. 147-159.Fictionalists propose that some apparently fact-stating discourses do not aim to convey factual information about the world, but rather allow us to engage in a fiction or pretense without incurring ontological commitments. Some philosophers have suggested that using mathematical, modal, or moral discourse, for example, need not commit us to the existence of mathematical objects, possible worlds, or moral facts. The mental fictionalist applies this reasoning to our mental discourse, suggesting that we can use ‘belief’ and ‘desire’ talk without committing (...)
- The Sellarsian Fate of Mental Fictionalism.László Kocsis & Krisztián Pete - 2022 - In Tamás Demeter, T. Parent & Adam Toon (eds.), Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations. New York & London: Routledge. pp. 127-146.This chapter argues that mental fictionalism can only be a successful account of our ordinary folk-psychological practices if it can in some way preserve its original function, namely its explanatory aspect. A too strong commitment to the explanatory role moves fictionalism unacceptably close to the realist or eliminativist interpretation of folk psychology. To avoid this, fictionalists must degrade or dispense with this explanatory role. This motivation behind the fictionalist movement seems to be rather similar to that of Sellars when he (...)
- Mental Fictionalism: the costly combination of magic and the mind.Amber Ross - 2022 - In Tamás Demeter, T. Parent & Adam Toon (eds.), Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations. New York & London: Routledge.Mental fictionalism is not the benign view that we may better understand the mind if we think of mental states as something like useful fictions, but the more radical view that mental states just are useful fictions. This paper argues that, if one were to treat mental states as a kind of fiction, the genre of fiction best suited to this purpose would be fantasy make-believe, in which magic is a central feature. After defending a promising fictionalist account of mental (...)
- (2 other versions)Mental fictionalism.Meg Wallace - 2022 - In Tamás Demeter, T. Parent & Adam Toon (eds.), Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations. New York & London: Routledge. pp. 27-51.There is an uneasy tension between our ordinary talk about beliefs and desires and the ontological facts supported by neuroscience. Arguments for eliminative materialism can be fairly persuasive, yet error theory about folk psychological discourse may be unacceptable. One solution is to accept mental fictionalism: the view that we are (or should be) fictionalists about mentality. My aim in this paper is to explore mental fictionalism as a viable theoretical option, and to show that it has advantages over other fictionalist (...)
- (1 other version)Mental fictionalism: a foothold amid deflationary collapse.Meg Wallace - 2022 - In Tamás Demeter, T. Parent & Adam Toon (eds.), Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations. New York & London: Routledge. pp. 275-300.This paper examines three meta-ontological deflationary approaches – frameworks, verbal disputes, and metalinguistic negotiation – and applies them to ontological debates in philosophy of mind. An intriguing consequence of this application is that it reveals a deep, systematic problem for mental deflationism – specifically, a problem of cognitive collapse. This is surprising; cognitive collapse problems are usually reserved for serious ontological views such as eliminative materialism and mental fictionalism, not deflationism. This paper investigates why deflationism about the mental is particularly (...)
- Deflationism as Alethic Fictionalism via a SPIF Account of Truth-Talk.Bradley Armour-Garb & James Woodbridge - 2021 - In Michael Lynch, Jeremy Wyatt, Junyeol Kim & Nathan Kellen (eds.), The Nature of Truth (Second edition). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 429-453.The aim of this chapter is to explain, motivate, and provide the central details of a specific version of what has come to be called alethic fictionalism—namely, a fictionalist account of truth (or, more accurately, of truth-talk, that fragment of discourse that involves the truth-predicate and other alethic-locutions). Our particular brand of alethic fictionalism is sometimes described as a “pretense theory of truth,” and a catchphrase for our view is “truth is a pretense.” But a more precise label for the (...)Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- (1 other version)Pretence Fictionalism about the Non-Present.Kristie Miller - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1.Presentists hold that only present things exist. But we all, presentists included, utter sentences that appear to involve quantification over non-present objects, and so we all, presentists included, seem to commit ourselves to such objects. Equally, we all, presentists included, take utterances of many past-tensed (and some future-tensed) sentences to be true. But if no past or future things exist, it’s hard to see how there can be anything that those utterances are about, which makes them true. This paper presents (...)
- How Can Buddhists Prove That Non-Existent Things Do Not Exist?Koji Tanaka - 2021 - In Sara Bernstein & Tyron Goldschmidt (eds.), Non-Being: New Essays on the Metaphysics of Nonexistence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 82-96.How can Buddhists prove that non-existent things do not exist? With great difficulty. For the Buddhist, this is not a laughing matter as they are largely global error theorists and, thus, many things are non-existent. The difficulty gets compounded as the Buddhist and their opponent, the non-Buddhist of various kinds, both agree that one cannot prove a thesis whose subject is non-existent. In this paper, I will first present a difficulty that Buddhist philosophers have faced in proving that what they (...)
- Minds, materials and metaphors.Adam Toon - 2021 - Philosophy 96 (2):181-203.What is the relationship between mental states and items of material culture, like notebooks, maps or lists? The extended mind thesis offers an influential and controversial answer to this question. According to ExM, items of material culture can form part of the material basis for our mental states. Although ExM offers a radical view of the location of mental states, it fits comfortably with a traditional, representationalist account of the nature of those states. I argue that proponents of ExM would (...)
- Methodology in the ontology of artworks: exploring hermeneutic fictionalism.Elisa Caldarola - 2020 - In Concha Martinez Vidal & José Luis Falguera Lopez (ed.), Abstract Objects: For and Against.There is growing debate about what is the correct methodology for research in the ontology of artworks. In the first part of this essay, I introduce my view: I argue that semantic descriptivism is a semantic approach that has an impact on meta-ontological views and can be linked with a hermeneutic fictionalist proposal on the meta-ontology of artworks such as works of music. In the second part, I offer a synthetic presentation of the four main positive meta-ontological views that have (...)
- Agnosticism and Fictionalism: A Reply to Le Poidevin.Natalja Deng - 2020 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 12 (3):183-188.I have always found Robin’s writings on religion delightfully insightful and stimulating, and this piece was no exception. What follows are some of the thoughts that occurred to me, in order of occurrence.
- Reactionary Fictionalism.Jason Dockstader - 2020 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 58 (2):238-263.Fictionalism is the view that the claims of a target discourse are best seen as being fictional in some way, as being expressed in some pretense manner, or as not being about the traditional posits of the discourse. The contemporary taxonomy of fictionalist views is quite elaborate. Yet, there is a version of fictionalism that has failed to develop and which corresponds to the earliest form of the view found in the history of philosophy, East and West. I call this (...)
- Fictional Expectations and the Ontology of Power.Torsten Menge - 2020 - Philosophers' Imprint 20 (29):1-22.What kind of thing, as it were, is power and how does it fit into our understanding of the social world? I approach this question by exploring the pragmatic character of power ascriptions, arguing that they involve fictional expectations directed at an open future. When we take an agent to be powerful, we act as if that agent had a robust capacity to make a difference to the actions of others. While this pretense can never fully live up to a (...)
- Can Deflationism Save Interpretivism?Krzysztof Poslajko - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (2):709-725.The aim of this paper is to show that the interpretivist account of propositional attitudes fails even at the most plausible reading that treats this theory as a version of the deflationary approach to existence coupled with a metaphysical claim about the judgement-dependence of propositional attitudes. It will be argued that adopting a deflationary reading of interpretivism allows this theory to avoid the common charge of fictionalism, according to which interpretivists cannot maintain realism about attitudes as their theory becomes a (...)
- Fictionalist Strategies in Metaphysics.Lukas Skiba & Richard Woodward - 2020 - In Ricki Bliss & James Miller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics. New York, NY: Routledge.This paper discusses the nature of, problems for, and benefits delivered by fictionalist strategies in metaphysics.
- As If: Idealization and Ideals, by Kwame Anthony Appiah. [REVIEW]Adam Toon - 2020 - Mind 129 (513):275-283.As If: Idealization and Ideals, by Appiah Kwame Anthony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. xvi + 218.
- “An Argument against a Meta-Ontology of Art Inspired by Peter Lamarque’s Reading of Jean Paul Sartre”.Elisa Caldarola - 2019 - Aesthetica Preprint 111:85-96.As Peter Lamarque explains in "Work and Object", the claim that artworks are not identical with their vehicles lies at the core of a variety of art-ontological accounts, including Jean-Paul Sartre’s one. In chapter 10, Lamarque gives us an insightful read-ing of Sartre’s art-ontological proposal: works of art in themselves do not exist, while what exists is their ‘material analogue’ which, when perceived, arouses in us certain imaginings. What we call ‘artwork’ is the object of such imaginings – an object (...)
- Virtual Reality: Digital or Fictional?Neil McDonnell & Nathan Wildman - 2019 - Disputatio 11 (55):371-397.Are the objects and events that take place in Virtual Reality genuinely real? Those who answer this question in the affirmative are realists, and those who answer in the negative are irrealists. In this paper we argue against the realist position, as given by Chalmers (2017), and present our own preferred irrealist account of the virtual. We start by disambiguating two potential versions of the realist position—weak and strong— and then go on to argue that neither is plausible. We then (...)
- (1 other version)Spatial Fictionalism. A Solution of the Grounding Problem.Nicola Piras - 2019 - In Richard Davies (ed.), Natural and Artifactual Objects in Contemporary Metaphysics: Exercises in Analytic Ontology. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 58-79.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- (1 other version)Spatial fictionalism. A solution of the grounding problem.Nicola Piras - 2019 - In Richard Davies (ed.), Natural and Artifactual Objects in Contemporary Metaphysics: Exercises in Analytic Ontology. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Werk und Autorschaft. Eine Ontologie der Kunst.Maria Elisabeth Reicher - 2019 - Paderborn: Mentis.In this book, a general type ontology of works is defended and developed in detail. A wide concept of “work” is used here, such that “work” roughly corresponds to “artefact”. Though the focus is on works of art, the theory is meant to be applicable, in principle, to works of science and technology and to everyday items of all sorts as well. Among others, the following questions are discussed: To what ontological category or categories do works belong? Is there a (...)
- Fictionalism, the Safety Result and counterpossibles.Lukas Skiba - 2019 - Analysis 79 (4):647-658.Fictionalists maintain that possible worlds, numbers or composite objects exist only according to theories which are useful but false. Hale, Divers and Woodward have provided arguments which threaten to show that fictionalists must be prepared to regard the theories in question as contingently, rather than necessarily, false. If warranted, this conclusion would significantly limit the appeal of the fictionalist strategy rendering it unavailable to anyone antecedently convinced that mathematics and metaphysics concern non-contingent matters. I try to show that their arguments (...)
- Truth in Fictionalism.Alexis Burgess - 2018 - In Michael Glanzberg (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Truth. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 503-516.$143.25 from Amazon (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this listExport citation Bookmark 2 citations
- You Cannot Steal Something that Doesn't Exist: Against Fictionalism about Fiction.Fredrik Haraldsen - 2018 - Dialectica 72 (4):603-616.
- Can Fictionalists Have Faith?Finlay Malcolm - 2018 - Religious Studies 54 (2):215-232.According to non-doxastic theories of propositional faith, belief that p is not necessary for faith that p. Rather, propositional faith merely requires a ‘positive cognitive attitude’. This broad condition, however, can be satisfied by several pragmatic approaches to a domain, including fictionalism. This paper shows precisely how fictionalists can have faith given non-doxastic theory, and explains why this is problematic. It then explores one means of separating the two theories, in virtue of the fact that the truth of the propositions (...)
- Релігійні виміри сучасної літератури фентезі.Sviatoslav Piven - 2018 - NaUKMA Researh Papers. Literary Studies 1:114-120.У статті розглянуто, як у сучасній літературі фентезі (на прикладі циклів «Відьмацька сага» Анджея Сапковського, «Пісня Льоду й Полум’я» Джорджа Мартіна та «Зворотний бік» Дари Корній) висвітлюється проблема релігії. Увага автора статті головно зосереджується на таких питаннях: як на висвітлення проблеми релігії у згаданих творах вплинула секуляризація суспільства, які саме релігійні образи та мотиви, образи релігійних інституцій наявні в творах, яке значення автори творів надають релігії у житті людини.
- Fictionalism versus deflationism: a new look.Matteo Plebani - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (2):301-316.In the recent literature there has been some debate between advocates of deflationist and fictionalist positions in metaontology. The purpose of this paper is to advance the debate by reconsidering one objection presented by Amie Thomasson against fictionalist strategies in metaontology. The objection can be reconstructed in the following way. Fictionalists need to distinguish between the literal and the real content of sentences belonging to certain areas of discourse. In order to make that distinction, they need to assign different truth-conditions (...)
- The Will to Make‐Believe: Religious Fictionalism, Religious Beliefs, and the Value of Art.Andrea Sauchelli - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 96 (3):620-635.I explore some of the reasons why, under specific circumstances, it may be rational to make-believe or imagine certain religious beliefs. Adopting a jargon familiar to certain contemporary philosophers, my main concern here is to assess what reasons can be given for adopting a fictionalist stance towards some religious beliefs. My understanding of fictionalism does not involve solely a propositional attitude but a broader stance, which may include certain acts of pretence. I also argue that a plausible reason to be (...)
- The Real Foundation of Fictional Worlds.Stacie Friend - 2017 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (1):29-42.I argue that judgments of what is ‘true in a fiction’ presuppose the Reality Assumption: the assumption that everything that is true is fictionally the case, unless excluded by the work. By contrast with the more familiar Reality Principle, the Reality Assumption is not a rule for inferring implied content from what is explicit. Instead, it provides an array of real-world truths that can be used in such inferences. I claim that the Reality Assumption is essential to our ability to (...)
- Fictionalism and the incompleteness problem.Lukas Skiba - 2017 - Synthese 194 (4):1349-1362.Modal fictionalists face a problem that arises due to their possible-world story being incomplete in the sense that certain relevant claims are neither true nor false according to it. It has recently been suggested that this incompleteness problem generalises to other brands of fictionalism, such as fictionalism about composite or mathematical objects. In this paper, I argue that these fictionalist positions are particularly threatened by a generalised incompleteness problem since they cannot emulate the modal fictionalists’ most attractive response. I then (...)
- Only imagine: fiction, interpretation and imagination.Kathleen Stock - 2017 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.In the first half of this book, I offer a theory of fictional content or, as it is sometimes known, ‘fictional truth’.The theory of fictional content I argue for is ‘extreme intentionalism’. The basic idea – very roughly, in ways which are made precise in the book - is that the fictional content of a particular text is equivalent to exactly what the author of the text intended the reader to imagine. The second half of the book is concerned with (...)
- It Ain’t Easy: Fictionalism, Deflationism, and Easy Arguments in Ontology.Gabriele Contessa - 2016 - Mind 125 (499):763-773.Fictionalism and deflationism are two moderate meta-ontological positions that try to occupy a middle ground between the extremes of heavy-duty realism and hard-line eliminativism. Deflationists believe that the existence of certain entities (e.g.: numbers) can be established by means of ‘easy’ arguments—arguments that, supposedly, rely solely on uncontroversial premises and trivial inferences. Fictionalists, however, find easy arguments unconvincing. Amie Thomasson has recently argued that, in their criticism of easy arguments, fictionalists beg the question against deflationism and that the fictionalist alternative (...)
- Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen '(Nicht-)Metaphysik' der Religion: (Anti-)Realismus, (Non-)Kognitivismus und die religiöse Imagination.Amber Griffioen - 2016 - In Rico Gutschmidt & Thomas Rentsch (eds.), Gott ohne Theismus? Neue Positionen zu einer zeitlosen Frage. Münster, Deutschland: Mentis. pp. 127-147.In this chapter, I first explore the possible meanings of the expression 'non-metaphysical religion' and its relation to the realism and cognitivism debates (as well as these debates' relation to each other). I then sketch out and defend the germs of an alternative semantics for religious language that I call 'religious imaginativism'. This semantics attempts to move us away from the realism-antirealism debates in Philosophy of Religion and in this sense might count as 'non-metaphysical'. At the same time, it allows (...)
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