To Alexius Meinong and Bertrand Russell
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To Alexius Meinong and Bertrand Russell Contents Acknowledgments 5 FRANCK LIHOREAU Introduction 7 TERENCE PARSONS Fictional Characters and Indeterminate Identity 27 BRENDAN MURDAY Two-Dimensionalism and Fictional Names 43 ERICH RAST Classical Possibilism and Fictional Objects 77 ALBERTO VOLTOLINI How Creationism Supports Kripke’s Vichianism on Fiction 93 GRAHAM PRIEST Creating Non-Existents 107 FRED ADAMS Sweet Nothings: The Semantics, Pragmatics, and Ontology of Fiction 119 R. M. SAINSBURY Fiction and Acceptance-Relative Truth, Belief and Assertion 137 ROBERT HOWELL Fictional Realism and Its Discontents 153 FREDERICK KROON The Fiction of Creationism 203 GRANT TAVINOR Virtual Worlds and Interactive Fictions 223 MANUEL REBUSCHI &MARION RENAULD Fiction, Indispensability and Truths 245 References 287 Notes on Contributors 301 Index 305 Acknowledgments My work on the book project was carried out at the Philosophy of Language Institute (IFL), New University of Lisbon. It was supported by a research fellowship from the Portuguese Science and Technology Fun- dation (FCT), and developped within the FCT-funded IFL project “Con- text & Communication” (PTDC/FIL/68643/2006). In these respects, I am particularly indebted to António Marques and João Sàágua. I have received valuable advice on essay selection, comments, sugges- tions and encouragement from a number of friends and colleagues, includ- ing Luiz Carlos Baptista, Thomas Behrens, Éric Clémençon, Gabriele De Angelis, Rijn Dutoit, Manuel García-Carpintero, Erich Rast, Manuel Re- buschi, and the authors of the essays. In addition, I truly appreciate the careful reading and extremely valuable suggestions by Mick Sweeney on certain parts of the book. I am grateful to Ontos Verlag for publishing this volume. Rafael Hün- telmann has been an understanding and astute editor, and the Ontos Verlag staff has shown professionalism and efficiency from the outset. I thank them all for making my work on the project a worthwhile and enjoyable experience. And finally, above all, and again, I want all the authors of the essays to know how grateful I am that they so generously and enthusiastically accepted to be part of this project. Introduction FRANCK LIHOREAU A literatura, como toda a arte, é uma confissão de que a vida não basta. Fernando Pessoa The eleven essays collected in the present volume are all partially, if not entirely, concerned with the connection between fiction and truth. This question is of utmost importance to metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and epistemology, as it raises in each of these areas and at their intersections a large number of issues related to creation, ex- istence, reference, identity, modality, belief, assertion, imagination, pre- tense, etc. All these topics, and many more, are addressed in this col- lection, which brings together original essays written from various points of view by philosophers of diverse trends. These essays constitute ma- jor contributions to the current debates that the question of the connection between fiction and truth continually enlivens, and give a sense of the di- rections in which research on the question is heading. In this Introduction I give a synoptic description of the essays, highlighting how the ideas they discuss find their natural place in those debates. (In doing so, I shall rely on definitions of, and distinctions between various “labels” whose quasi- stipulative character is meant for the sake of clarity and relevance rather than exhaustivity. For surveys of recent relevant work, one may want to consult Thomasson, 1999; Woods & Alward, 2002; Everett, 2005; Friend, 2007; and Fontaine & Rahman, 2010.) We sometimes praise people for telling stories that we commonly know to be true. We often blame people for telling stories that we commonly know 8 Franck Lihoreau to be false. But we hardly ever praise or blame people for telling stories that we commonly know to be fictive. This observation makes particular sense when we consider excerpts from literary works of fiction, like: (1) Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table. (The Hound of the Baskervilles) (2) When they left Tostes at the month of March, Madame Bovary was pregnant. (Madame Bovary) (3) On meeting Anna Karenina, as he was Alexey Alexandrovitch’s enemy in the government, he tried, like a shrewd man and a man of the world, to be particularly cordial with her, the wife of his enemy. (Anna Karenina) Unless we are ignorant of the fact that the stories told in the works are “made up” and intended by their author to be thus read, this sort of discour- se—which Currie (1990) simply calls “fictive” and which Bonomi (2008) associates with what he calls “textual” uses of fictional discourse—will not naturally be assessed in terms of its truth or falsity. The link between truth and fiction becomes manifest, however, in other sorts of fiction- involving talk. One is the sort of talk that Currie calls “metafictive” and Bonomi “paratextual”, exemplified by such sentences as: (4) Sherlock Holmes was a detective. (5) Sherlock Holmes was clever. (6) Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street in London. (7) Watson lived at the same place as Holmes. (8) Anna Karenina was a woman. These claims, which are somehow “internal” to the relevant fictions, are intuitively assessable as true or false. They are intuitively true in the fic- tion and given the content of the fiction. Another sort of fiction-involving discourse corresponds to Bonomi’s notion of a “metatextual” sentence, a notion that overlaps Currie’s notion of “transfictive” discourse and exem- plified by: Introduction 9 (9) Holmes is more clever than Poirot. (10) Anna Karenina and Raskolnikov were both Russian. (11) Sherlock Holmes is more clever than any real-life detective. (12) Anna Karenina and Tolstoy were both Russian. (13) Professor James Moriarty made his first appearance in The Final Problem. (14) When authors create fictional characters, they describe them with more or less physical details, but some characters in 19th-century novels are described with a greater wealth of physical details than is any character in any 18th-century novel. This time, the claims are somehow “external” to the relevant fictions, in that they do not bear so much on the contents of the works of fiction as on the works of fiction themselves, and do not so much say something true of the worlds of the fictions as of the real world. So, at least as far as paratextual and metatextual claims are concerned, it makes intuitive sense to think of them as being true or false. But how could such claims ever be true (or false) if, as everyone will agree, it is also true that: (15) Sherlock Holmes does not really exist. (16) James Moriarty does not really exist. (17) Emma Bovary does not really exist. (18) Anna Karenina does not really exist. and so on, and if, more generally, being fictional seems to be incompatible with being real? The literature on the matter can be divided into two main camps: the “realists” and the “irrealists”. Realists hold that there are such things as fictional entities, and maintain that one can refer to, quantify over, attribute and deny properties to them. For some realists, those entities precede human activity; for others not. In any case, since fictional entities do not really exist, realists must explain how we can apparently make true claims about things that do not exist. Irrealists deny that there are such things as 10 Franck Lihoreau fictional entities, hence deny that one can ever refer to, quantify over, or attribute and deny properties to such entities. Since on their view there are no fictional entities, irrealists must explain how we can apparently make true claims about nothing at all. The first five essays—by Parsons, Murday, Rast, Voltolini, and Priest—all assume the truth of some form of realism. Realism can be understood as saying that objecthood exceeds actual existence, that is to say, the things that actually exist form only a proper subset of the things that are. This idea can be developed in various ways. In this respect, neo-Meinongians like Parsons (1980), Routley (1980) and Priest (2005) inter alia, offer what is perhaps the most straightforward and spectacular form of realism. Ac- cording to them, some objects are existent, some are nonexistent, and a fictional character like Sherlock Holmes is a nonexistent object. A neg- ative existential claim like that in (15) is thus understood as being about an object, that referred to by “Sherlock Holmes”, and as simply denying, truly, the existence of that object. To introduce nonexistent objects, realists of this kind sometimes rely on a distinction between “nuclear” properties (like being golden, being a mountain, etc.) and “extranuclear” properties (like being existent, being impossible, being admired by Christie, etc.), to formulate a “Generating Principle” like this one: For any class C of nuclear properties, there is an object o such that for any property P, o has P iff P is in C, thus following a strategy that Terence Parsons endorsed in his book Nonex- istent Objects. A principle like this one guarantees that what objects there are will include such nonexisting objects as the golden mountain, viz. that object that has exactly the nuclear properties making up the class fgoldenness;mountainhoodg. The result carries over naturally to the case of nonexisting fictional objects like Sherlock Holmes, modulo the restric- tion of the relevant class of properties to those that can be assigned to that character based on what is said in the relevant stories. We can en- compass this restriction by saying that a fictional character is that object that has all and only those properties attributed to the character in the story in which it originates.