Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

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 (...) mix in and out predicates, which amounts to a species of copredication, where a single nominal receives simultaneous distinct interpretations relative to distinct predicates without creating ambiguity. Copredication is a perfectly general phenomenon that arises for any nominal. The simple problem now is that copredication appears to render all extant accounts of fiction either essentially partial, in dealing with one kind of simple form of fiction but not another, or merely wrong in imagining that fiction comes in categorically distinct forms, for the coherence of copredication is enough to show that this is not so. The aim of the paper is to show to resolve this accommodation problem by the radical expedient of suggesting that the fiction/non-fiction distinction is not really a semantic one, but more one between different ways in which sentences are made true or false. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Fictionalists about a kind of disputed entity aim to give a face-value interpretation of our discourse about those entities without affirming their existence. The fictionalist’s commitment to non-realism leaves open three options regarding their ontological position: they may deny the existence of the disputed entities (anti-realism), remain agnostic regarding their existence (agnosticism), or deny that there are ontological facts of the matter (ontological anti-realism). This paper outlines a method of adjudicating between these options and argues that fictionalists may be expected (...) to hold preferences between them. The typical arguments and motivations for fictionalism lead naturally to a practice-based metaontological framework under which our practices regarding a kind of disputed entity might inform our ontological beliefs about those entities. When that framework is applied to fictionalism, it is found that the usual motivations for fictionalism lead naturally, though not decisively, to ontological anti-realism. And, where there are reasons against ontological anti-realism, fictionalism leans more toward anti-realism than agnosticism. (shrink)

The topic of fictional objects is a familiar one, the topic of fictional properties less so. But it deserves its own place in the philosophy of fiction, if only because fictional properties have such a prominent role to play in science fiction and fantasy. What, then, are fictional properties and how does their apparent unreality relate to the unreality of fictional objects? The present paper explores these questions in the light of familiar debates about the nature of fictional objects.

The paper surveys recent appraisals of David Lewis’s seminal paper on truth in fiction. It examines variations on standard criticisms of Lewis’s account, aiming to show that, if developed as Lewis suggests in his 1983 Postscript A, his proposals on the topic are—as Hanley puts it—‘as good as it gets’. Thus elaborated, Lewis’s account can resist the objections, and it offers a better picture of fictional discourse than recent resurrections of other classic works of the 1970s by Kripke, van Inwagen (...) and Searle. The turn that Lewis suggests and the paper recommends draws on the remaining outstanding contribution from that time: Walton’s. (shrink)