Against creationism in fiction

Nous

Volumn 35, Issue SUPPL. 15, 2001, Pages 153-172

  Yagisawa, Takashi ^a  

^a CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950495564     PISSN: 00294624     EISSN: 14680068     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0029-4624.35.s15.8     Document Type: Article

References (13)

1. P. 73 of John Searle, "The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse", first published in New Literary History vol. VI, 1974-75, pp. 319-332, and included in Expression and Meaning (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 58-75. Page references are to the latter.
2. P. 157 of Stephen Schiffer, "Language-Created Language-Independent Entities", Philosophical Topics vol. 24, no. 1, Spring, 1996, pp. 149-167, emphasis his.
3. On page 130 of "The Problem of Non-Existents, I. Internalism", Topoi 1(1982), pp. 97-140
4. Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 367.
5. Nathan Salmon would say that Coyle did create an individual. Such a view severs the tie between creation and pretense, and therefore is not a version of pretensetheoretical creationism. See his "Nonexistence", Noûs 32:3(1998), pp. 277-319.
6. Mark Richard expresses reservations about Salmon's view, in "Commitment", Philosophical Perspectives 12, language, Mind, and Ontology, 1998 (ed.) James E. Tomberlin (Boston & Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 255-281.
7. P. 305 of his "Creatures of Fiction", American Philosophical Quarterly, 14:4, 1977, pp. 299-308, emphasis his.
8. Gregory Curry makes a similar point while defending the notion of truth in fiction. See his The Nature of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 4-9.
9. See his "Fiction and metaphysics", Philosophy and Literature 7:1, 1983, pp. 67-77.
10. Amie L. Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) pp. 144-145.
11. This allows the possibility for someone to write the story independently of Doyle. Some people think that such a story would not be the same story as A Study in Scarlet. Cf. Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", Ficciones (New York: New Directions, 1964). I find their reasoning highly unpersuasive.
12. Even when instantiations of sentences are produced by someone intentionally, his/her mental states need not determine the interpretation. As George A. Miller observes, "People who know only the rules of pronunciation can read a Spanish text aloud well enough that Spaniards can understand it, even though the readers have no idea what they are saying." See his The Science of Words (New York: Scientific American Library, A Division of HPHLP, 1991), p. 56.
13. Also see Herman Cappelen, "Intentions in Words", Noûs 33:1, March 1999, pp. 92-102.