Against fictional realism

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 102, Issue 12, 2005, Pages 624-649

  Everett, Anthony ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 51749099532     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jphil2005102129     Document Type: Review

References (73)

1. This sort of argument can be found in, for example, Charles Crittenden, Unreality: The Metaphysics of Fictional Objects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1991), p. 95;
2. Robert Howell, "Fiction Objects," Poetics VIII (1979): 129-77, see p. 152;
3. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature (New York: Oxford, 1994), pp. 96-99;
4. Terence Parsons, Nonexistent Objects (New Haven: Yale, 1980), pp. 52-54;
5. Amie Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics (New York: Cambridge, 1998), pp. 5-6;
6. and Peter van Inwagen, "Quantification and Fictional Discourse," in Anthony Everett and Thomas Hofweber, eds., Empty Names, Fiction, and the Puzzles of Non-Existence (Stanford: CSLI, 2000), pp. 235-47, see pp. 243-44
7. as well as "Creatures of Fiction," in his Ontology, Identity, and Modality (New York: Cambridge, 2001), pp. 37-56, on p. 43
8. and "Existence and Ontological Commitment," in Michael Loux and Dean Zimmerman, eds., Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics (New York: Oxford, 2003), pp. 131-57, see pp. 136-38. Strict Quineans will insist that our ontological commitments are revealed, not by the natural language sentences we hold true, but rather by the way we choose to paraphrase these into First Order Logic but I will ignore this complication here.
9. See van Inwagen, "Quantification and Fictional Discourse," p. 244.
10. See van Inwagen, "Existence and Ontological Commitment," p. 137.
11. See, for example, Lamarque and Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature, pp. 97-101;
12. Karel Lambert, Meinong and the Principle of Independence (New York: Cambridge, 1983), p. 144;
13. and Parsons, Nonexistent Objects, pp. 32-38.
14. The classic statement of the view that utterances of object-fictional sentences should be understood as pretend assertions can be found in John Searle, "The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse," in his Expression and Meaning (New York: Cambridge, 1979), pp. 58-75;
15. See Stuart Brock, "Fictionalism about Fictional Characters," Noûs, XXXVI, 1 (2002): 1-21;
16. and Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge: Harvard, 1990), pp. 396-405, for discussions of the ontological implications, or lack thereof, of object-fictional sentences.
17. For examples of the former, see Mark Crimmins, "Hesperus and Phosphorus: Sense, Pretense, and Reference," Philosophical Review, CVII, 1 (1998): 2-18;
18. and Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 414.
19. For examples of the latter, see Mark Richard, "Commitment," in James Tomberlin, ed., Philosophical Perspectives 12 (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 255-81
20. and "Seeking a Centaur, Adoring Adonis: Intensional Transitives and Empty Terms," in Howard Wettstein and Peter French, eds., Figurative Language: Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Volume XV (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 103-27.
21. See Braun, "Empty Names, Fictional Names, Mythical Names," Noûs, XXXIX, 4 (2005): 596-631;
22. Salmon, "Nonexistence," Noûs, XXXII, 3 (1998): 277-319;
23. and Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics, "Fictional Characters and Literary Practices," British Journal of Aesthetics, XLIII, 2 (2003): 138-57
24. and "Speaking of Fictional Characters," Dialectica, LVII, 2 (2003): 205-23.
25. See Wolterstorff, Work and Worlds of Art (New York: Oxford, 1980);
26. and Zalta, Abstract Objects (Boston: Reidel, 1983)
27. and Intensional Logic and the Metaphysics of Intensionality (Cambridge: MIT, 1988).
28. See van Inwagen, "Quantification and Fictional Discourse," "Creatures of Fiction," and "Existence and Ontological Commitment."
29. See Meinong, "Über Gegenstandstheorie," in his Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologie (Leipzig: Barth, 1904)
30. and Über die Stellung der Gegenstandstheorie im System der Wissenschaften (Leipzig: Voigtlander, 1907);
31. Parsons, "A Prolegomenon to a Meinongian Semantics," this JOURNAL, LXXI, 16 (September 19, 1974): 561-80
32. Nonexistent Objects, and "Are There Nonexistent Objects?" American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, XIX (1982): 365-71;
33. and Routley, Exploring Meinong's Jungle and Beyond: Department Monograph 3, Philosophy Department (Canberra: Australian National University, 1980).
34. See, for example, Lamarque, "Objects of Interpretation," Metaphilosophy, XXXI, 1/2 (2000): 96-124 (see in particular p. 120);
35. and Thomasson, "Fictional Characters and Literary Practices," p. 155.
36. Evans's original argument is in his "Can There Be Vague Objects?" Analysis, XXXVIII (1978): 208. There is an enormous body of literature on Evans's argument to which I cannot hope to do justice here, but see Timothy Williamson, "Vagueness in Reality," in Loux and Zimmerman, eds., for an excellent discussion of the relevant issues and references to the relevant literature.
37. For an application of fuzzy logic to Evans's argument, see B. Jack Copeland's excellent "Fuzzy Logic and Vague Identity," this JOURNAL, XCIV, 10 (October 1997): 514-34.
38. For classic expositions of fuzzy logic, see Joseph Goguen, "The Logic of Inexact Concepts," Synthese, XIX (1969): 325-73;
39. Kenton Machina, "Vague Predicates," American Philosophical Quarterly, IX (1972): 225-33
40. and "Truth, Belief, and Vagueness," Journal of Philosophical Logic, V (1976): 47-78;
41. and Lofti Zadeh, "Fuzzy Sets," Information and Control, VIII (1965): 338-53.
42. Van Inwagen makes a similar point in his Material Beings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1990), p. 240.
43. These examples might be multiplied. With sufficient ingenuity we might construct stories where, for example, the law of excluded middle, the reflexivity of identity, the transitivity of identity, and the laws of arithmetic, fail to apply to identity statements involving the denizens of the stories and hence fail to apply to the fictional characters occurring in those stories. Indeed, Tamar Szabo Gendler's The Tower of Goldbach (see her "The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance," this JOURNAL, XCVII, 2 (February 2000): 55-81) provides a case where, arguably, 7 fictional characters plus 5 fictional characters both does and does not equal 12 fictional characters.
44. We might, for example, take my stories to be describing conceptual impossibilities and agree with Kathleen Stock that we cannot imagine conceptual impossibilities; see her "The Tower of Goldbach and Other Impossible Tales," in Matthew Kieran and Dominic Lopes, eds., Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 107-24.
45. Of course, Stock's arguments raise the question of what counts as a conceptual impossibility. But, putting this issue to one side, I think there are serious reasons to doubt their cogency. Brian Weatherson, "Morality, Fiction, and Possibility," The Philosopher's Imprint, IV (2004): 1-27 (see especially pp. 10-11) raises some well-taken worries about some of Stock's arguments and I give some further reasons to suppose can imagine the logically incoherent below.
46. See Szabo Gendler's "The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance," and "On the Relationship between Pretense and Belief," in Kieran and Lopes, pp. 139-40, for a defense of our ability to imagine conceptual impossibilities. Weatherson, "Morality, Fiction, and Possibility," argues that we are able to imagine certain impossibilities although he is more cautious than Gendler about our ability to imagine conceptual impossibilities.
47. Szabo Gendler makes a closely related point in her "The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance," pp. 69-70.
48. This sort of view is defended by, amongst others, Greg Currie in his The Nature of Fiction (New York: Cambridge, 1990)
49. No doubt there is a lot of work still to be done in unpacking these concepts but I think that we have a solid pre-theoretic grasp upon these notions and there is an increasing body of interesting work in philosophy and psychology on pretense and the imagination. See, for example, Currie, "Imagination and Simulation," in Martin Davies and Tony Stone, eds., Mental Simulation (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 151-69
50. "The Paradox of Caring," in Mette Hjort and Sue Laver, eds., Emotion and the Arts (New York: Oxford, 1997), pp. 63-77
51. and "Pretense, Pretending, and Metarepresenting," Mind and Language, XIII, 1 (1998): 35-55;
52. Currie and Ian Ravenscroft, Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology (New York: Oxford, 2003);
53. Szabo Gendler, "On the Relationship Between Pretense and Belief";
54. Paul Harris, "Imagining and Pretending," in Davies and Stone, eds., and The Work of the Imagination (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000);
55. Alan Leslie, "Pretense and Representation," Psychological Review, XCIV (1987): 412-26;
56. Angeline Lillard, "Making Sense of Pretence," in Charlie Lewis and Peter Mitchell, eds., Children's Early Understanding of Mind: Origins and Development (Hillside, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994), pp. 211-34
57. "Pretending, Understanding Pretense, and Understanding Minds," in Stuart Reifel, ed., Theory in Context and Out (Westport, CT: Ablex, 2001), pp. 233-54
58. and "Just Through the Looking Glass: Children's Understanding of Pretense," in Robert Mitchell, ed., Pretending and Imagination in Animals and Children (New York: Cambridge, 2002), pp. 102-14;
59. Aaron Meskin and Jonathan Weinberg, "Imagine That!" in Kieran, ed., Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Malden, ,MA: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 222-35;
60. Shaun Nichols, "Imagination and the Puzzles of Iteration," Analysis, LXIII (2003): 182-87
61. "Imagining and Believing: The Promise of a Single Code," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, LXII (2004): 129-39
62. "Just the Imagination: Why Imagining Doesn't Behave Like Believing," forthcoming in Mind and Language;
63. Josef Perner, Understanding the Representational Mind (Cambridge: MIT, 1993);
64. Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stitch, Mindreading (New York: Oxford, 2003);
65. and Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, "Metaphor and Prop Oriented Make-Believe," The European Journal of Philosophy, I, 1 (1993): 39-57
66. "Spelunking, Simulation, and Slime: On Being Moved by Fiction," in Mette and Laver, eds., and "In Other Shoes: The Varieties of Empathy and Their Uses," in his In Other Shoes (New York: Oxford, forthcoming).
67. In addition to the principles noted above, our pretense will almost certainly also be governed by some restricted version of the Incorporation Principle and the Recursive Principle discussed by Evans, The Varieties of Reference (New York: Oxford, 1982), pp. 354-55. Note however that Evans's Incorporation Principle and his Recursive Principle are in general unlikely to hold without restriction for the sorts of reasons discussed by Walton and due to the sorts of cases of disparity discussed by Szabo Gendler in her "On the Relationship between Pretense and Belief."
68. See Zalta, Abstract Objects and Intensional Logic and the Metaphysics of Intensionality.
69. See Russell, "On Denoting," Mind, XIV, 56 (1905): 479-93, especially p. 438.
70. See also his critical notice of Meinong's Über die Stellung der Gegenstandstheorie im System der Wissenschaften, Mind, XVI (1907): 436-38.
71. See Russell, "On Denoting," p. 438
72. and his critical notice of Meinong's Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologie, Mind, XIV (1905): 530-38, especially p. 533.
73. See also Nicholas Griffin, "Russell's Critique of Meinong's Theory of Objects," Grazer Philosophische Studien, XXV/XXVI (1985/1986): 375-401.