Abstract
In her book Fiction and Metaphysics (1999) Amie Thomasson, influenced by the work of Roman Ingarden, develops a phenomenological approach to fictional entities in order to explain how non-fictional entities can be referred to intrafictionally and transfictionally, for example in the context of literary interpretation. As our starting point we take Thomasson’s realist theory of literary fictional objects, according to which such objects actually exist, albeit as abstract and artifactual entities. Thomasson’s approach relies heavily on the notion of ontological dependence, but its precise semantics has not yet been developed. Moreover, the modal approach to the notion of ontological dependence underlying the Artifactual Theory has recently been contested by several scholars. The main aims of this paper are (i) to develop a semantic approach to the notion of ontological dependence in the context of the Artifactual Theory of fiction, and in so doing bridge a number of philosophical and logical gaps; (ii) to generalize Thomasson’s categorial theory of ontological dependence by reconstructing ontological categories of entities purely in terms of different structures of ontological dependence, rather than in terms of the basic kinds of entities the categorical entities depend on.
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Notes
As we will discuss further on in the paper, instead of creation we speak of codification.
In fact, Thomasson speaks of existential dependence. Saying that Y existentially depends on X could suggest that the existence of Y entails the simultaneous existence of X; this precisely need not be the case in connection with historical dependence. The idea that Y depends for its existence on X is, we think, somewhat more conveniently expressed when speaking of ontological dependence.
Actually, the relevant author’s surname is ‘Conan Doyle’.
What we refer here to as modal requirement is actually the same as Simons’s weak foundation (1987, p. 295). For the sake of generality, we have opted for a more neutral terminology.
For the sake of simplicity, we assume that the relation R is invariant with respect to times, and that the relation \(<\) is invariant with respect to worlds. Conceptually there would be no difficulty in allowing the time structure to vary with the world being considered, and allowing the set of worlds accessible from a given world to be contingent on the time being considered.
This is the way the domains of worlds are usually looked upon when, in the semantics of first-order modal logic, so-called varying domain models are used.
The notion of local requirement seems to cover some of the reflexive cases of metaphysical dependence discussed by Jenkins (2001).
In her informal discussion on the notion of constant dependence, Thomasson points out some cases of constant rigid requirement: ‘Not only may the objects be identical (everything is constantly dependent on itself ... an object may also be rigidly constantly dependent on one of its own parts or moments: for example ... on my brain’ (Thomasson 1999, p. 30).
Tero Tulenheimo formulated this objection in a talk at the workshop Modalities: Semantics and Epistemology. MESHS-Lorraine, 3-12-2010, Nancy.
‘Then the present proposal is that the dependence of x upon y should be defined by \(\square x(Ex \rightarrow Ey)\)’ (Fine 1995, p. 273); this reads: it is true in virtue of the essence of X that if X exists Y exists.
‘When we say that X depends on Y, we mean not only that X requires Y, but also that X exists in virtue of Y, i.e. Y grounds to the existence of X.’ (Correia 2005, p. 57) We will make use of an alternative definition of grounding.
Thomasson (1999, pp. 25–26) calls it a ‘bi-dimensional’ system of ontological categories.
For further details on Thomasson’s ontology, see (Thomasson 1999, Part Two—Ontological Decisions).
However, Thomasson’s ontology precludes the idea that objects could be ontologically dependent on numbers.
See Kroon and Voltolini (2011, Paragraph 1.3).
Voltolini’s (2006, pp. 65–1000) own syncretistic theory combines the theory of the Neo-Meinongians with the Artifactual Theory.
The term ’codification’ was suggested to us by Prof. Göran Sundholm in a personal communication during his visiting professorship at the University of Lille 3-Charles-de-Gaulle from February to April 2012. In fact, Thomasson (1999, pp. 12–13) comes very close to this notion when she speaks of creations as linguistic acts.
In her more recent work Thomasson (2003) tackles such issues with help of the distinction between de re and de dicto pretense. In our view Hintikka’s world-lines provide a more general solution.
Another way to see this is that the codification act provides a canonical element of a given type (as in constructive type theory) and that the definition of that canonical element associates the author with a fixed time-point.
By institutionalized make-believe process we mean that the codification act establishes within a cultural community a set of norms involving a specific process of make-believe.
For the notion of make-believe see Walton (1990).
This feature of the act of codification has the consequence that the artifactual conception of a fictional character requires some form of characterizing properties. See Definition 10.
This assumes an appropriate theory of identity
It might be objected that if institutionalization is what makes a fictional character come into reality, and institutionalization is something that happens in degrees, then also the coming into reality of fictional characters happens in degrees. Was Holmes not completely real when ten people had read the story, but completely real when ten thousand people had? This objection was raised by an anonymous reviewer.
According to our viewpoint, the case is similar to the case of vague predicates such as being bald: despite the fact that there are border cases there is a frontier beyond which a person is definitely bald. In the case of fictional characters, there is a moment, or at least this is our assumption, beyond which the fictional character comes into reality as an ontologically dependent object. For fictional characters of literature we might, for example, say that it is the date of the first publication of the work. The point is that we assume that there is such a moment—it is even possible to speak of a closed interval instead and reformulate our definitions accordingly—the precise description of which depends on the fictional character under consideration. Furthermore, we do not think that we need to accept that there are degrees of coming into reality of the fictional character—and in our framework there are no degrees of ontological dependence.
Correia (2005) stresses the fact that the notion of existential or ontological dependence is not symmetric and therefore cannot be defined as the relation ‘X requires Y’ (in the sense specified at the beginning of the present section). He defines an asymmetric relation of simple dependence making use of the primitive notion of grounding. The asymmetric notion with which we operate, that of uniform historical rigid dependence, is again defined using exclusively the notion of uniform historical requirement, itself admitting of symmetric cases. Our notions are intrinsically modal (in that they receive their sense in the context of a plurality of worlds), while Correia’s notion of grounding is not. Simons (1987, p. 295) adds explicit restrictions to the notion of dependence, such as reflexivity and necessary entities, but his definition does not preclude dependence between compresent entities.
For the sake of simplicity we have restricted the definition to one entity X, but in fact we could generalize to some series of entities X\(_{1}\)...X\(_{n}\)—consider the case of joint authors.
A similar restriction has been deployed by Simons (1987, p. 295).
This condition should be expressed perhaps in epistemic terms. Once brought into existence, a fictional character exists as long as at least one copy of the relevant text is known to exist by the relevant cultural community\(. \)It is, then, one of the characteristics of a fictional object that its existence is partly conditioned by our knowledge of it. This would involve a considerably more complex framework than the one developed in the present paper.
Thomasson (1999, p. 26) herself is less sharply cut on the issue. On the one hand, she concedes that it is trivial that everything depends on itself for its own existence, but on the other hand she writes that this is not at all useful:
Apart from its triviality, one motivation for excluding cases of self-dependence seems to be in the interest of distinguishing the so-called dependent from independent entities
The point is that reflexivity is not helpful in defining a notion of ontological dependence which is suitable for differentiating fictional from non-fictional characters.
To keep matters simple, in the present definition, we considered that the set \(\Gamma \) contains objects of only one sort, namely, copies of the same relevant text (in Thomasson’s terminology, copies of the same composition). However, the set might contain copies and readers, or we can think of \(\Gamma \) as being a class of sets, readers and copies.
Definition [D6] involves a stronger link between the supported and the supporting entities than the link established in Thomasson’s approach. In fact, our notions of ontological dependence do not possess the same mathematical properties as Thomasson’s relations of existential dependence. The point is that Thomasson (1999, pp. 34–35) needs these properties in order to structure her underlying ontology. However, since we do not assume this ontology, our notions will not share the same properties.
The point is that although Thomasson might reject the second condition of [D10], the formal modal semantics of ontological dependence of the Artifactual Theory seems to require it—at least in our framework and in the context of our notion of codification (see Sect. 5.1 above). In fact, Voltolini, too (2006, Part I, Chap. 3), suggests that an artifactual approach requires such a condition, although his argument is based on identity issues.
Priest (2011, Sect. 2.9) uses a similar approach, though he assumes rigid designation.
Ranta (1994), Chaps. 6.9 and 7.3.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are indebted to Tero Tulenheimo for his valuable input during the initial stages of writing, to two anonymous referees for crucial remarks and to Gareth Wilson and Cheryl Lobb de Rahman for linguistic and stylistic corrections.
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Fontaine, M., Rahman, S. Towards a semantics for the artifactual theory of fiction and beyond. Synthese 191, 499–516 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0287-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0287-z