Abstract
Critical statements, if true, bear ontological commitments to fictional entities. A well-known version of fictionalism about fictional characters tries to eliminate these ontological commitments by proposing that we understand critical statements as prefixed by a special sentential operator, such as ‘according to a fictional realist theory’. The aim of the present paper is to show that fictionalism about fictional characters is underdeveloped as it stands because it can be shown to be systematically inadequate. Because the fictionalist’s paraphrases of critical statements suggest that fictional realists affirm the propositions expressed by critical statements, the fictionalist mistakenly attributes to fictional realists an expertise in matters that pertain to literary criticism. Importantly, this problem of misattributed expertise paves the way to other issues that might be much more devastating to the fictionalist project. It can be shown that, because she wrongly attributes expertise to fictional realists, the fictionalist unintentionally portrays fictional realist theories in a way that renders them inconsistent and self-defeating. This undermines fictionalism about fictional characters because it leaves no workable fictional realist account in which to ground a fictionalist explanation. This is why the fictionalist about fictional characters should try to eliminate the problem of misattributed expertise and its related issues. At the end of the paper, I sketch some of the available options in this regard.
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Notes
Another way to eliminate existential commitments is to assume that (1) is uttered in a pretend or make-believe mode. I leave this option to the side; an interesting elaboration of this idea can be found in Everett (2013, 46–53).
The above rendering of fictional statements as claim about the content of literary fictions also is Brock’s; see Brock (2002, 4). Without going into details, it bears mention that Brock’s specification of critical statements is not quite satisfactory. One problem is that there are statements that obviously satisfy the above definition but are not intended to be amenable to the kind of analysis Brock applies to the paradigm examples of critical statements, such as (3) below. For example, notice that (2) turns out to be a critical statement according to the definition; although it is not about the content of Martin Chuzzlewit (only the embedded part corresponding to (1) is), (2) is true in virtue of this novel. Nevertheless, (2) is not supposed to be analyzed along the lines of (3) because such an analysis would not give us the required reading. We need (2) to be committed to the existence of Martin Chuzzlewit; when it is prefixed by the fictionalist operator it does not meet this requirement. Another problem is that there are statements that intuitively qualify as critical statements but do not satisfy Brock’s definition. One example is ‘According to Sylvia Manning, Mrs. Gamp is an alcoholic’. This sentence is not true in virtue of Martin Chuzzlewit. Yet if (2) is a critical statement according to the definition, this one should also be a critical statement because it is structurally on a par with (2). Similarly, take ‘If Dickens had been in a different mood when writing Martin Chuzzlewit, Mrs. Gamp would not have been an alcoholic’. Intuitively, this should be an instance of a critical statement too. Yet it does not satisfy Brock’s definition because, if true, it is clearly not so in virtue of the novel’s content.
I am concerned here with what is sometimes called prefix fictionalism, and I shall thus leave to the side other forms that fictionalist theories may assume. I return to this point in Section 6.
There are, of course, situations in which utterances of ‘According to X, C’ (where X is a person or a group) are used to say that X endorses a position that entails (implies, implicates, predicts, etc.) C.
It can be claimed that an adherent of a theory need not agree with all the propositions that are contained in, or entailed by, the theory. I agree; nevertheless, this point has no bearing on the line of argumentation I am going to develop in this paper. That is why I assume that the adherents of theories affirm all the propositions contained in, or entailed by, their theories.
I admit that the proponents of FR can be well-versed in literary criticism. I do not wish to reject this contention; what I find problematic, however, is that FF (perhaps unintentionally) implies that their views regarding literature follow from their fictional realist leanings.
I am here disregarding the problems addressed in footnote 3, which concern the specification of critical statements.
The same kinds of problems that are going to be discussed here with respect to FF may arise for some other versions of fictionalism. I leave this point to the side.
Since its first appearance in Rosen (1990), MF has been extensively discussed in the literature. It underwent some changes in light of challenges raised by Brock (1993), Hale (1995), Nolan (1997), and Rosen (1993) himself, to give just a few examples. The discussions about certain features of MF are still relevant. The various pros and cons of MF are beyond the scope of the present paper as they are inessential to the line of reasoning developed here.
Strictly speaking, Rosen labels the modal realist theory he considers “PW”.
In fact, there are some serious limitations. Due to certain features of Lewis’s modal realism, not all truths about non-actual worlds are derivable. I have argued for this idea in Zouhar (2017b). Armour-Garb recently invoked the same observation to motivate his criticism of MF; see Armour-Garb (2015). Interestingly, Vacek (2018) argues that modal realism is unable to give a feasible explanation of fictional discourse.
Brock admits that this version of FR is “an outrageously implausible metaphysical story” (Brock 2002, 14) because fictional characters are portrayed as both concrete and actual. Clearly, no fictional realist would be willing to adopt such a strange view. This implausibility is innocuous, though. If the fictionalist assumes that there is such a theory, she is not making any “outrageously implausible” claims about the world. On the contrary, her assumption is in fact true because such a theory does exist; it’s just that nobody—as far as I know—has seriously adopted it.
The initial version of FF developed in Brock (2002) has it that “for every critical statement C, the realist will have a paraphrase P of C that she claims adequately captures the ordinary meaning of C” (Brock 2002, 8) and that the fictionalist operator is prefixed to such realist paraphrases. Brock (2016, 382, fn. 2) suggests “an improvement on [this] view”, however, according to which the fictionalist should treat every critical statement C “as a straightforward ellipsis” for ‘According to FR, C’. My claim in the main text is based on the updated version of FF.
Recall that Brock described the fictional realist theory he used as a basis for his fictionalist account as “outrageously implausible”. Despite this, however, he surely would not say that the theory is inconsistent or self-defeating. Undoubtedly, fictionalists do assume that fictional realism can be formulated consistently. While assuming outrageously implausible realist theories would do no harm to the fictionalist project, assuming inconsistent and self-defeating realist theories would. Notice that a realist theory of this sort would permit the inference that FF is false, for example. At the same time, it would permit the inference that FF is true, thus rendering fictionalism about fictional characters a consequence of fictional realism.
The indices that accompany certain phrases in (13) are familiar devices that are sometimes used to mark anaphoric chains.
The anaphoric pronouns in (13) are instances of unbound anaphors. Without going into detail, I add that the problem they present for the fictionalist approach persists even when we apply well-known theories of unbound anaphora to them, such as Evans’s theory of E-type anaphors or Neale’s theory of D-type anaphors; see Evans (1977) and Neale (1990). In both cases, we would still end up referring to, or quantifying over, fictional characters outside the scope of the fictionalist operator.
It may be that the mere addition of an encyclopedia would be insufficient, because the pieces of information from an encyclopedia together with the theoretical postulates already involved in FR would not provide us with all of the critical statements that are supposed to be prefixed by ‘according to FR’. In fact, given the postulates summarized in Section 4, it is difficult to imagine how they might be helpful in deriving critical statements from an encyclopedia at all. It may be that the fictional realist theory should be enriched with some other theoretical postulates as well, which would call for more thoroughgoing amendments to FR. I ignore this complication in what follows. Nevertheless, anyone who finds this way of defending FF appealing should reconsider whether the theoretical postulates of FR need to be revised.
If required, the encyclopedia could involve both fictional statements and statements of the form ‘According to fiction F, C’.
The distinction between prefix fictionalism and pretense fictionalism is drawn, for example, in Armour-Garb & Woodbridge (2015, 32). They claim that pretense fictionalism is “a more fruitful version of the approach”. It should be noted that they consider pretense fictionalism in general: as applied to various kinds of discourse rather than the particular area of fictional discourse. Stuart Brock and Edwin Mares make a similar distinction between prefix fictionalism and non-cognitive fictionalism; see Brock & Mares (2007, 214–218). I have shown elsewhere that pretend fictionalism is superior to prefix fictionalism because if the latter is developed as independent of the former, some other worries would beset it; see Zouhar (2017a).
Pretense fictionalism is thought to be vulnerable to the phenomenological objection. Brock’s discussion of pretense fictionalism in Brock (2014) is actually motivated by this objection; in other papers, he defends prefix fictionalism. Brock (2014, 3, n. 2) claims that versions of prefix fictionalism—like the theory from Brock (2002)—are not vulnerable to this objection. Nevertheless, Brock (2016, 385–391) contains a discussion on a variant of the objection that applies to prefix fictionalism as well. For the phenomenological objection as applied to various kinds of discourse, such as mathematical or modal discourse, see Eklund (2015, Sc. 4.1), Liggins (2010) and Stanley (2001). Amie Thomasson points to a disanalogy between overtly fictional discourse and serious discourse in mathematics (along with other areas) that is closely connected to the phenomenological objection; see Thomasson (2015a, 269–272; 2015b, 186–194).
A number of authors have developed various criticisms of prefix fictionalism. Here are some examples. Building on Gerald Vision’s reasoning in Vision (1993), Richard Joyce argues that prefix fictionalism leads to unwelcome results concerning certain inferences; see in particular Joyce (2005, 292). At the same time, however, Joyce develops a version of pretense fictionalism for moral discourse. Brock responds to this criticism in Brock (2015), where he also addresses a version of the objection developed in van Inwagen (2000). Similarly, Armour-Garb and Woodbridge argue that prefix fictionalism is vulnerable to what they call the Aboutness Problem (see Armour-Garb and Woodbridge 2015, 32–34). It consists in the observation that if a statement is prefixed by a fictionalist operator, it ceases to be about its proper subject matter. This problem does not arise for pretense fictionalism. Following various authors, most notably Kendall Walton (see Walton 1990, 391ff.), Brock and Mares also raise a problem for prefix fictionalism. Given Millianism about proper names, critical statements that feature proper names of fictional characters end up expressing no propositions at all (see Brock and Mares 2007, 214–215). They argue that non-cognitive (i.e. pretense) fictionalism does not face this kind of problem. Overall, it seems that pretense fictionalism is better off than prefix fictionalism. Note that these arguments concern prefix fictionalism in general rather than one particular instance of it.
Without going into detail, I will simply remark that Everett’s notion of extended pretense (see Everett 2013, Ch. 3) is very promising in this regard.
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to anonymous reviewers for Philosophia for their critical comments and suggestions. I thank also to Lukáš Bielik, Daniela Glavaničová, Fredrik Haraldsen, Martin Vacek and Zsófia Zvolenszky for their comments on a previous version of the paper. This paper was supported by VEGA grant No. 2/0049/16 Fictionalism in Philosophy and Science.
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Zouhar, M. On the Systematic Inadequacy of Fictionalism about Fictional Characters. Philosophia 47, 925–942 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-9997-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-9997-2