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Pretense and Pathology: Philosophical Fictionalism and its Applications

Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. Edited by James A. Woodbridge (2015)

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  1. Irreplaceable truth.Jamin Asay - 2024 - Synthese 203 (3):1-20.
    Conceptual engineers are always on the lookout for concepts that can be improved upon or replaced. Kevin Scharp has argued that the concept truth is inconsistent, and that this inconsistency thwarts its ability to serve in philosophical and scientific explanatory projects, such as developing linguistic theories of meaning. In this paper I present Scharp’s view about what makes a concept inconsistent, and why he believes that truth in particular is inconsistent. Then I examine the concepts that he suggests should replace (...)
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  • The Riddle of Understanding Nonsense.Krystian Bogucki - 2023 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 30 (4):372–411.
    Typically, if I understand a sentence, then it expresses a proposition that I entertain. Nonsensical sentences don’t express propositions, but there are contexts in which we talk about understanding nonsensical sentences. For example, we accept various kinds of semantically defective sentences in fiction, philosophy, and everyday life. Furthermore, it is a standard assumption that if a sentence is nonsensical, then it makes no sense to say that it implies anything or is implied by other sentences. Semantically uninterpreted sentences don’t have (...)
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  • Revenge for Alethic Nihilism.Bradley Armour-Garb & James A. Woodbridge - 2024 - Journal of Philosophy.
    Note: The paper attached here is a "pre-review" version, not the final version that has now been published online first at the link below. -/- In “Nothing is True,” Will Gamester defends a form of alethic nihilism that still grants truth-talk a kind of legitimacy: an expressive role that is implemented via a pretense. He argues that this view has all of the strengths of deflationism, while also providing an elegant resolution of the Liar Paradox and its kin. For the (...)
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  • Fictions in legal reasoning.Manish Oza - 2022 - Dialogue 61 (3):451-463.
    A legal fiction is a knowingly false assumption that is given effect in a legal proceeding and that participants are not permitted to disprove. I offer a semantic pretence theory that shows how fiction-involving legal reasoning works.
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  • Nonsense: a user's guide.Manish Oza - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Many philosophers suppose that sometimes we think we are saying or thinking something meaningful when in fact we’re not saying or thinking anything at all: we are producing nonsense. But what is nonsense? An account of nonsense must, I argue, meet two constraints. The first constraint requires that nonsense can be rationally engaged with, not just mentioned. In particular, we can reason with nonsense and use it within that-clauses. An account which fails to meet this constraint cannot explain why nonsense (...)
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  • Deflationism about Truth.Bradley Armour-Garb, Daniel Stoljar & James Woodbridge - 2021 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Deflationism about truth, what is often simply called “deflationism”, is really not so much a theory of truth in the traditional sense, as it is a different, newer sort of approach to the topic. Traditional theories of truth are part of a philosophical debate about the nature of a supposed property of truth. Philosophers offering such theories often make suggestions like the following: truth consists in correspondence to the facts; truth consists in coherence with a set of beliefs or propositions; (...)
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  • Logical Form and the Limits of Thought.Manish Oza - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Toronto
    What is the relation of logic to thinking? My dissertation offers a new argument for the claim that logic is constitutive of thinking in the following sense: representational activity counts as thinking only if it manifests sensitivity to logical rules. In short, thinking has to be minimally logical. An account of thinking has to allow for our freedom to question or revise our commitments – even seemingly obvious conceptual connections – without loss of understanding. This freedom, I argue, requires that (...)
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  • What we talk about when we talk about mental states.Zoe Drayson - 2022 - In Tamás Demeter, T. Parent & Adam Toon (eds.), Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations. New York & London: Routledge. pp. 147-159.
    Fictionalists propose that some apparently fact-stating discourses do not aim to convey factual information about the world, but rather allow us to engage in a fiction or pretense without incurring ontological commitments. Some philosophers have suggested that using mathematical, modal, or moral discourse, for example, need not commit us to the existence of mathematical objects, possible worlds, or moral facts. The mental fictionalist applies this reasoning to our mental discourse, suggesting that we can use ‘belief’ and ‘desire’ talk without committing (...)
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  • Something is true.Jamin Asay - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (3):687-705.
    The thesis that nothing is true has long been thought to be a self-refuting position not worthy of serious philosophical consideration. Recently, however, the thesis of alethic nihilism—that nothing is true—has been explicitly defended (notably by David Liggins). Nihilism is also, I argue, a consequence of other views about truth that have recently been advocated, such as fictionalism about truth and the inconsistency account. After offering an account of alethic nihilism, and how it purports to avoid the self-refutation problem, I (...)
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  • (1 other version)Deflationary theories of properties and their ontology.Thomas Schindler - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy:1-16.
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  • Fictionalist Strategies in Metaphysics.Lukas Skiba & Richard Woodward - 2020 - In Ricki Bliss & James Miller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics. New York, NY: Routledge.
    This paper discusses the nature of, problems for, and benefits delivered by fictionalist strategies in metaphysics.
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  • From one to many: recent work on truth.Jeremy Wyatt & Michael Lynch - 2016 - American Philosophical Quarterly 53 (4):323-340.
    In this paper, we offer a brief, critical survey of contemporary work on truth. We begin by reflecting on the distinction between substantivist and deflationary truth theories. We then turn to three new kinds of truth theory—Kevin Scharp's replacement theory, John MacFarlane's relativism, and the alethic pluralism pioneered by Michael Lynch and Crispin Wright. We argue that despite their considerable differences, these theories exhibit a common "pluralizing tendency" with respect to truth. In the final section, we look at the underinvestigated (...)
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  • Fictionalism and the folk.Adam Toon - 2016 - The Monist 99 (3):280-295.
    Mental fictionalism is the view that, even if mental states do not exist, it is useful to talk as if they do. Mental states are useful fictions. Recent philosophy of mind has seen a growing interest in mental fictionalism. To date, much of the discussion has concerned the general features of the approach. In this paper, I develop a specific form of mental fictionalism by drawing on Kendall Walton’s work on make-believe. According to the approach I propose, talk of mental (...)
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  • Fictionalism.Matti Eklund - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Rethinking Role Realism.Daniela Glavaničová - 2021 - British Journal of Aesthetics 61 (1):59-74.
    Role realism is a promising realist theory of fictional names. Different versions of this theory have been suggested by Gregory Currie, Peter Lamarque, Stein Haugom Olsen, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. The general idea behind the approach is that fictional characters are to be analysed in terms of roles, which in turn can be understood as sets of properties. I will discuss several advantages and disadvantages of this approach. I will then propose a novel hyperintensional version of role realism, according to which (...)
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  • Inheriting the World.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2020 - Journal of Applied Logics 7 (2):163-70.
    A critical reflection on John Woods's new monograph, Truth in Fiction – Rethinking its Logic. I focus in particular on Woods’s world-inheritance thesis (what others have variously called ‘background,’ ‘the principle of minimal departure,’ and ‘the reality assumption,’ and which replaces Woods’s earlier ‘fill-conditions’) and its interplay with auctorial say-so, arguing that world-inheritance actually constrains auctorial say-so in ways Woods has not anticipated.
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  • On the Systematic Inadequacy of Fictionalism about Fictional Characters.Marián Zouhar - 2019 - Philosophia 47 (3):925-942.
    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 (...)
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  • Alethic fictionalism, alethic nihilism, and the Liar Paradox.Bradley Armour-Garb & James A. Woodbridge - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (12):3083-3096.
    Recently, several philosophers have proposed fictionalist accounts of truth-talk, as a means for resolving the semantic pathology that the Liar Paradox appears to present. These alethic fictionalists aim to vindicate truth-talk as a kind of as if discourse, while rejecting that the talk attributes any real property of truth. Liggins has recently critically assessed one such proposal, Beall’s constructive methodological deflationist, offering objections to Beall’s proposed alethic fictionalism that potentially generalize to other alethic fictionalist accounts. Liggins further argues that CMD (...)
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  • On Our Understanding of Singular Negative Existential Statements: A Defense of Shallow Pretense Theory.Poong Shil Lee - 2021 - Philosophia 49 (5):2133-2155.
    In uttering negative existential sentences, we do not mention but use an empty singular term. A pretense account explains the use in terms of pretense. I argue that our understanding of negative existential statements can be successfully explained by Crimmins’ theory of shallow pretense if it is supplemented and reconstructed properly. First, I explain the notion of shallow pretense and supplement Crimmin’s theory with an Evansian account that we immediately grasp the phenomenology of what is pretended without a conscious effort (...)
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  • Semantics of fictional terms.Manuel García-Carpintero - 2019 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 38 (2):73-100.
    The paper provides an opinionated survey of recent contributions – roughly, in the last decade – to our understanding of how names and other referring expressions work in fictional discourse and addresses well-known philosophical worries that they raise. Views about the semantics of referring expressions in fictional discourse are usually accompanied by metaphysical views on the ontology of fictional characters, so this will also come under our focus.
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  • The Diversity of Fiction and Copredication: An Accommodation Problem.John Collins - 2019 - Erkenntnis 86 (5):1197-1223.
    The paper presents an accommodation problem for extant semantic accounts of fiction. Some accounts of fiction are designed to accommodate one or another form of fictive statement exclusively, what I shall call in-fiction and out-fiction. Thus, typically, the accounts fail to do justice to their respective excluded form. A natural response, entertained by Kripke and in a different fashion by latter-day Meinongians, is to let the two different kinds of fiction have their respective accounts. It is very easy, however, to (...)
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  • Answering the conceptual challenge: three strategies for deflationists.Bradley Armour-Garb & James A. Woodbridge - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-25.
    We defend deflationism about truth against a pressing challenge, which is to explain how deflationists can understand the role that the _concept_ of truth appears to play in accounts of several other philosophically important concepts. We provide three strategies that deflationists can employ in response to the specific challenge regarding assertion that has been raised in several recent articles, viz., that the truth concept plays an ineliminable explanatory role in an account of assertion. We then show how to extend our (...)
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  • Wilfrid Sellars and the Foundations of Normativity.Peter Olen - 2016 - London, England: Palgrave-Macmillan.
    While Wilfrid Sellars’ philosophy is often depicted in an ahistorical fashion, this book explores the consequences of placing his work in its historical context. In order to show how Sellars’ early publications depend on contextual factors, Peter Olen reconstructs the conceptions of language, psychological, and social explanation that dominated American philosophy in the early 20th century. Because of Sellars’ differing explanations of language and behaviour, Olen argues that many of Sellars’ early commitments are incompatible with his later works. In the (...)
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  • Truth, Pretense and the Liar Paradox.Bradley Armour-Garb & James A. Woodbridge - 2015 - In T. Achourioti, H. Galinon, J. Martínez Fernández & K. Fujimoto (eds.), Unifying the Philosophy of Truth. Dordrecht: Imprint: Springer. pp. 339-354.
    In this paper we explain our pretense account of truth-talk and apply it in a diagnosis and treatment of the Liar Paradox. We begin by assuming that some form of deflationism is the correct approach to the topic of truth. We then briefly motivate the idea that all T-deflationists should endorse a fictionalist view of truth-talk, and, after distinguishing pretense-involving fictionalism (PIF) from error- theoretic fictionalism (ETF), explain the merits of the former over the latter. After presenting the basic framework (...)
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  • (1 other version)Fiction.Fred Kroon - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • The Problem of (Fully) Empty Predicates.Bradley Armour-Garb & Frederick Kroon - 2017 - Australasian Philosophical Review 1 (2):163-167.
    ABSTRACTIn our paper, we mount a novel argument, which trades on recent work by Roy Sorensen [2016], following work by Saul Kripke, against Yablo's preferred reading of if-thenism, which is an attempt to read problematically ontologically committing sentences in a way that does not carry such ontological commitments. Although our argument is directed at Yablo's proposed reading of if-thenism, if the argument is successful, other versions of if-thenism may be affected. After reviewing Sorensen's recent work and presenting our argument, we (...)
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  • Four grades of ignorance-involvement and how they nourish the cognitive economy.John Woods - 2019 - Synthese 198 (4):3339-3368.
    In the human cognitive economy there are four grades of epistemic involvement. Knowledge partitions into distinct sorts, each in turn subject to gradations. This gives a fourwise partition on ignorance, which exhibits somewhat different coinstantiation possibilities. The elements of these partitions interact with one another in complex and sometimes cognitively fruitful ways. The first grade of knowledge I call “anselmian” to echo the famous declaration credo ut intelligam, that is, “I believe in order that I may come to know”. As (...)
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