Fictionalism has recently returned as a standard response to ontologically problematic domains. This article assesses moral fictionalism. It argues (i) that a correct understanding of the dialectical situation in contemporary metaethics shows that fictionalism is only an interesting new alternative if it can provide a new account of normative content: what is it that I am thinking or saying when I think or say that I ought to do something; and (ii) that fictionalism, qua fictionalism, does not provide us with (...) any new resources for providing such an account. (shrink)

On a familiar and prima facie plausible view of metaphor, speakers who speak metaphorically say one thing in order to mean another. A variety of theorists have recently challenged this view; they offer criteria for distinguishing what is said from what is merely meant, and argue that these support classifying metaphor within 'what is said'. I consider four such criteria, and argue that when properly understood, they support the traditional classification instead. I conclude by sketching how we might extract a (...) workable notion of 'what is said' from ordinary intuitions about saying. (shrink)

There is an uneasy tension between our ordinary talk about beliefs and desires and the ontological facts supported by neuroscience. Arguments for eliminative materialism can be fairly persuasive, yet error theory about folk psychological discourse may be unacceptable. One solution is to accept mental fictionalism: the view that we are (or should be) fictionalists about mentality. My aim in this paper is to explore mental fictionalism as a viable theoretical option, and to show that it has advantages over other fictionalist (...) views in the literature, as well as advantages over other theories of mind. However, mental fictionalism faces particular objections that do not plague other fictionalist accounts, nor other theories of the mind. These objections may provide some explanation as to why mental fictionalism has not (until recently) gained much traction in the literature. I end with some suggestions on how the mental fictionalist can address these objections, hopefully paving the way for further development of mental fictionalism as a live philosophical position in philosophy of mind. -/- . (shrink)

There are three distinct projects - ontological, phenomenological, and conceptual - to pursue in the philosophy of perception. They are, however, rarely distinguished. Failure to distinguish them has resulted in their being pursued as one. Their completion then requires that they admit of the same solution, while accommodating the existence of misperception and the scientific facts concerning the perceptual process. The lesson to learn from misperceptions and those facts is, however, that no such common solution is possible, and that the (...) projects must, and can, be pursued separately. Pursuit of the phenomenological and conceptual projects then requires a context in which discourse concerning objects of perception is permitted without ontological commitment to such objects. This is supplied by treating certain uses of perceptual locutions as within a context of pretense. (shrink)

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 (...) logical characteristics. Hence, the riddle of understanding nonsense arises. We seem to use nonsensical sentences in reasoning, thinking, judging, and drawing conclusions, but they convey no propositions, which are the vehicles of their semantic properties. In this article, I propose the pretence theory of understanding nonsense to explain the riddle of understanding nonsense, and discuss alternative frameworks that are insufficient to solve it. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper, I defend fictional creationism, the view that fictional objects are abstract artifacts, from the objection that the apparent truth of fictional negative existentials, such as “Sherlock Holmes does not exist,” poses a serious problem for creationism. I develop a sophisticated version of the pragmatic approach by focusing on the inconsistent referential intentions of ordinary speakers: the upshot would be that creationism is no worse —perhaps even in a better position— than anti-realism, even if we restrict our linguistic (...) data to fictional negative existentials. (shrink)

This paper deals with the semantics and meta-semantics for ordinary names in fiction. It has recently been argued by some philosophers that when ordinary names are used in fictional contexts, they change their semantic contents and work as fictional names in general. In this paper, I argue that there is no compelling reason to believe that such reference changes occur and defend the view that whether those names refer to real or fictional objects depends on which semantic intentions speakers have.

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.

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 (...) appears meaningful. The second constraint requires that nonsense does not express thoughts. An account which fails to meet this constraint undercuts the critical force of the concept of nonsense. I offer an account which meets both constraints. The central idea is that to be under the illusion that some nonsense makes sense is to enter a pretence that the nonsense is meaningful. (shrink)

This article looks at photography from the perspective of Charles S. Peirce’s theory of signs. The topic is a mainstay in accounts of photography, though usually it is limited to discussing iconicity and indexicality in a cursive and superficial manner: photos are both likenesses of their objects, and they are existentially determined by them. Yet the practice of photography—the way we use it—requires us to delve deeper into Peirce’s theory of signs. The central argument of this article is that calling (...) on the semiotics of Peirce to investigate photography requires more than simply describing how the medium of photography functions in terms of any sort of medium specificity. It requires that we consider—and distinguish—how producers and viewers use photos as signs as well as the purposes for using them. Such uses and purposes may vary greatly in individual cases as there are no fixed rules in the matter except the adaptedness of the medium to be used for this or that purpose. (shrink)

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 (...) thinkers have general abilities to respond to support and tension among their thoughts. And these abilities are constituted by following logical rules. So thinkers have to follow logical rules. But there isn’t just one correct logic for thinking. I show that my view is consistent with logical pluralism: there are a range of correct logics, any one of which a thinker might follow. A logic for thinking does, however, have to contain certain minimal principles: Modus Ponens and Non-Contradiction, and perhaps others. We follow logical rules by exercising logical capacities, which display a distinctive first-person/third-person asymmetry: a subject can find the instances of a rule compelling without seeing them as instances of a rule. As a result, there are two limits on illogical thinking. First, thinkers have to tend to find instances of logical rules compelling. Second, thinkers can’t think in obviously illogical ways. So thinking has to be logical – but not perfectly so. When we try to think, but fail, we produce nonsense. But our failures to think are often subjectively indistinguishable from thinking. To explain how this occurs, I offer an account of nonsense. To be under the illusion that some nonsense makes sense is to enter a pretence that the nonsense is meaningful. Our use of nonsense within the pretence relies on the role of logical form in understanding. Finally, while the normativity of logic doesn’t fall directly out of logical constitutivism, it’s possible to build an attractive account of logical normativity which has logical constitutivism as an integral part. I argue that thinking is necessary for human flourishing, and that this is the source of logical normativity. (shrink)

In recent metaphysics, the questions of whether fictional entities exist, what their nature is, and how to explain truths of statements such as “Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street” and “Holmes was created by Arthur Conan Doyle” have been subject to much debate. The main aim of my thesis is to wrestle with key proponents of the abstractionist view that fictional entities are abstract objects that exist (van Inwagen 1977, 2018, Thomasson 1999 and Salmon 1998) as well as Walton’s (...) (1990) pretense view, which denies the existence of such entities. In the process, I propose modifications to these views to deal with problems they face and show how the modifications better account for the philosophical data. -/- Key abstractionists (van Inwagen 1977, Thomasson 1999) make a strict distinction between discourse within fiction, in which statements about literary characters cannot be literally true, and discourse about fiction, as it occurs in literary criticism, where statements about fictional characters can be literally true. Fictional objects are postulated to account for the truth of the latter. This runs into trouble because statements thought to be literally true are not literal. (Yagisawa 2001, Friend 2002) I provide a uniform analysis to account for the truth of statements involving fictional characters by appealing to a presupposition involving a metaphor in both contexts. The presupposition is that there is an x such that x is fictional; x is likened to a real person; and x is and ought to be treated/counted as a real person for all relevant intents and purposes. -/- More generally, I adopt Everett and Schroeder’s (2015) realist view that fictional characters are ideas constituted by mental representations. This, to me, better accounts for how fictional characters are created within the world’s causal nexus (unlike non-spatiotemporal entities in abstractionism), among other things. One key challenge they face is to explain how ideas can possess properties such as being a detective. I present a fine-grained version of their view, according to which the mental representations constituting fictional entities encode mind-dependent properties. Moreover, I explain how reference to such representations is possible, using Bencivenga’s (1983) Neo-Kantian view of reference and Karttunen’s (1976) view on discourse referents. Finally, I suggest that the identity of fictional characters is interest-relative. The constant, and sometimes radical, change of properties that, fictional characters can undergo is taken to be a consequence of the fact that unified mental representations are bundles of simpler mental representations. As change occurs, simpler representations are replaced by others. -/- A key theme that runs through the thesis is that neither fictionality nor pretense is relevant to the semantics of fictional sentences—a claim bolstered by Matravers’ (2014) arguments. Whether or not my account works, this claim, as well as the new philosophical data I bring up, are some of the challenges I pose to the heart of established views. (shrink)

We argue that if Stephen Yablo (2005) is right that philosophers of mathematics ought to endorse a fictionalist view of number-talk, then there is a compelling reason for deflationists about truth to endorse a fictionalist view of truth-talk. More specifically, our claim will be that, for deflationists about truth, Yablo’s argument for mathematical fictionalism can be employed and mounted as an argument for truth-theoretic fictionalism.

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 (...) states is a useful pretence for describing people and their behaviour. I try to clarify and motivate this approach by comparing it to well-known alternatives, including behaviourism, instrumentalism and eliminativism. I also consider some of the challenges that it faces. (shrink)

In this entry I will offer a survey of the contemporary debate on fic- tionalism, which is a distinctive anti-realist view about certain regions of discourse that are valued for their usefulness rather than their truth.

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 (...) of our PIF account of truth-talk, we demonstrate a few advantages it offers over T-deflationist accounts that do not explicitly acknowledge pretense at work in the discourse. In turning to the Liar Paradox, we explain how the quasi-anaphoric functioning that our account attributes to truth-talk provides a diagnosis of the Liar Paradox (and other instances of semantic pathology) as having no content—in the sense of not specifying any of what we call M-conditions. At the same time, however, we vindicate the intuition that we can understand liar sentences, thereby avoiding one standard objection to “meaningless strategy” responses to the Liar Paradox. With this diagnosis in place, we then, by way of treatment, introduce a new predicate, ‘semantically defective’, and show how the explanation we give for its application allows for a consistent, yet revenge-immune, (dis)solution of the Liar Paradox, and semantic pathology generally. (shrink)

Linguistic expressions frequently make reference to the situation in which they are uttered. In fact, there are expressions whose whole point of use is to relate to their context of utterance. It is such expressions that this article is primarily about. However, rather than presenting the richness of pertinent phenomena (cf. Anderson & Keenan 1985), it concentrates on the theoretical tools provided by the (standard) two-dimensional analysis of context dependence, essentially originating with Kaplan (1989)--with a little help from Stalnaker (1978) (...) and Lewis (1979a, 1980), and various predecessors including Kamp (1971) and Vlach (1973). The current article overlaps in content with the account in Zimmermann (1991), which is however much broader (and at times deeper).. (shrink)

Prop oriented make-believe is make-believe utilized for the purpose of understanding what I call “props,” actual objects or states of affairs that make propositions “fictional,” true in the make-believe world. I, David Hills, and others have claimed that prop oriented make-believe lies at the heart of the functioning of many metaphors, and one variety of fictionalism in metaphysics invokes prop oriented make-believe to explain away apparent references to entities some find questionable or problematic (fictional characters, propositions, moral properties, numbers). Elisabeth (...) Camp has argued against my and David Hills’ views of metaphor. Her arguments, many of them echoed by Catharine Wearing, demolish a very implausible account of metaphor, but leave entirely untouched the views that Hills and I actually proposed. Clarifying what we say about metaphor serves also as a defense of fictionalist theories that invoke prop oriented make-believe. (shrink)

Some philosophers have recently suggested that the reason mathematics is useful in science is that it expands our expressive capacities. Of these philosophers, only Stephen Yablo has put forward a detailed account of how mathematics brings this advantage. In this article, I set out Yablo’s view and argue that it is implausible. Then, I introduce a simpler account and show it is a serious rival to Yablo’s. 1 Introduction2 Yablo’s Expressionism3 Psychological Objections to Yablo’s Expressionism4 Introducing Belief Expressionism5 Objections and (...) Replies5.1 Yablo’s likely response5.2 Charity6 Conclusion. (shrink)

The essays collected in this volume are all concerned with the connection between fiction and truth. This question is of utmost importance to metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophical logic and epistemology, raising in each of these areas and at their intersections a large number of issues related to creation, existence, reference, identity, modality, belief, assertion, imagination, pretense, etc. All these topics and many more are addressed in this collection, which brings together original essays written from various points of view by (...) philosophers of diverse trends. These essays constitute major contributions to the current debates that the connection between truth and fiction continually enlivens, and give a sense of the directions in which research on this question is heading. Contributors: Fred Adams, Frederick Kroon, Robert Howell, Brendan Murday, Terence Parsons, Graham Priest, Erich Rast, Manuel Rebuschi, Marion Renauld, R.M. Sainsbury, Grant Tavinor, Alberto Voltolini. (shrink)

It is our contention that an ontological commitment to propositions faces a number of problems; so many, in fact, that an attitude of realism towards propositions—understood the usual “platonistic” way, as a kind of mind- and language-independent abstract entity—is ultimately untenable. The particular worries about propositions that marshal parallel problems that Paul Benacerraf has raised for mathematical platonists. At the same time, the utility of “proposition-talk”—indeed, the apparent linguistic commitment evident in our use of 'that'-clauses (in offering explanations and making (...) predictions)—is also in need of explanation. We account for this with a fictionalist analysis of our use of 'that'-clauses. Our account avoids certain problems that arise for the usual error-theoretic versions of fictionalism because we apply the notion of semantic pretense to develop an alternative, pretense-involving, non-error-theoretic, fictionalist account of proposition-talk. (shrink)

Traditional theories of sarcasm treat it as a case of a speaker's meaning the opposite of what she says. Recently, 'expressivists' have argued that sarcasm is not a type of speaker meaning at all, but merely the expression of a dissociative attitude toward an evoked thought or perspective. I argue that we should analyze sarcasm in terms of meaning inversion, as the traditional theory does; but that we need to construe 'meaning' more broadly, to include illocutionary force and evaluative attitudes (...) as well as propositional content. I distinguish four subclasses of sarcasm, individuated in terms of the target of inversion. Three of these classes raise serious challenges for a standard implicature analysis. (shrink)

This thesis deals with the phenomenon of attitude reporting. More specifically, it provides a unified semantics of de re and de se belief reports. After arguing that de se belief is best thought of as a special case of de re belief, I examine whether we can extend this unification to the realm of belief reports. I show how, despite very promising first steps, previous attempts in this direction ultimately fail with respect to some relatively recent linguistic data involving quantified (...) and infinitival reports, logophoric constructions, and monstrously shifted indexicals. Formalizing my idea of a contextual resolution of acquaintance relations in a dynamic framework, I arrive at an alternative analysis that handles all these data. (shrink)

Platonism is the view that there exist such things as abstract objects — where an abstract object is an object that does not exist in space or time and which is therefore entirely non-physical and nonmental. Platonism in this sense is a contemporary view. It is obviously related to the views of Plato in important ways, but it is not entirely clear that Plato endorsed this view, as it is defined here. In order to remain neutral on this question, the (...) term ‘platonism’ is spelled with a lower-case ‘p’. (See entry on Plato.) The most important figure in the development of modern platonism is Gottlob Frege (1884, 1892, 1893-1903, 1919). The view has also been endorsed by many others, including Kurt Gödel (1964), Bertrand Russell (1912), and W.V.O. Quine (1948, 1951). (shrink)

I discuss and defend two arguments against semantic theories which wish to avoid commitment to propositions. The first holds that on the most plausible semantics of a class of natural language sentences, the truth of sentences in that class requires the existence of propositions; and some sentences in that class are true. The second holds that, on the best understanding of the form of a semantic theory, the truth of a semantic theory itself entails the existence of propositions. Much of (...) the discussion engages Davidsonian alternatives to a propositionalist semantic theory. (shrink)

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 (...) to imagine the condition under which what is pretended can be true. Thus, shallow pretense does not consist in the counterintuitive meta-representation of the fact of pretense. Second, against the objection to Crimmins’ distinction between utterance truth-condition and modal content that it is ad hoc, I argue that there is good reason to hold the distinction for the semantics of belief reports. Finally, I argue that the distinction has a merit of explaining our intuition about the epistemic possibility associated with our use of an empty singular term. (shrink)

In a series of articles, Kit Fine presents some highly compelling objections to monism, the doctrine that spatially coincident objects are identical. His objections rely on Leibniz’s Law and linguistic environments that appear to be immune to the standard charge of non-transparency and substitution failure. In this paper, I respond to Fine’s objections on behalf of the monist. Following Benjamin Schnieder, I observe that arguments from Leibniz’s Law are valid only if they involve descriptive, rather than metalinguistic, negation. Then I (...) show that the monist is justified in treating the negation in Fine’s objections as metalinguistic in nature. Along the way I make a few methodological remarks about the interaction between the study of natural language and metaphysics. I also present evidence that some of the linguistic environments which Fine relies on are, contrary to appearances, non-transparent. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom has it that there is a class of attitude ascriptions such that in making an ascription of that sort, the ascriber undertakes a commitment to specify the contents of the ascribee’s head in what might be called a notionally sensitive, ascribee-centered way. In making such an ascription, the ascriber is supposed to undertake a commitment to specify the modes of presentation, concepts or notions under which the ascribee cognizes the objects (and properties) that her beliefs are about. Consequently, (...) it is widely supposed that an ascription of the relevant sort will be true just in case it specifies either directly or indirectly both what the ascribee believes and how she believes it. The class of “notionally sensitive” ascriptions has been variously characterized. Quine (1956) calls the class I have in mind the class of notional ascriptions and distinguishes it from the class of relational ascriptions. Others call the relevant class the class of de dicto ascriptions and distinguish it from the class of de re ascriptions. More recently, it has been called the class of notionally loaded ascriptions (Crimmins 1992, 1995). So understood, the class can be contrasted with the class of notionally neutral ascriptions. Just as the class of notional/de dicto/notionally loaded ascriptions is supposed to put at semantic issue the ascribee’s notions/conceptions/modes of presentation, so ascriptions in the relational/de re/notionally neutral class are supposed not to.. (shrink)

ABSTRACTI propose a different account of fictional objects from the ones already present in the literature. According to my account, fictional objects are culturally created abstract objects dependent for their existence on the pretence attitude adopted by a group of people towards a single fictional content. My work is divided into three parts: in the first one, I present how fictional objects come into existence according to my proposal; in the second part, I illustrate how the existence of fictional objects (...) so conceived may be ontically indeterminate; in the last part, I consider what happens when vague existence and indeterminate identity are claimed within fictional texts. (shrink)

In this paper, I want to hold, first, that a treatment of Frege cases in terms of a difference in cognitive phenomenology of the involved experiential mental states is not viable. Second, I will put forward another treatment of such cases that appeals to a difference in intentional objects metaphysically conceived not as exotica, but as schematic objects, that is, as objects that have no metaphysical nature qua objects of thought. This allows their nature to be settled independently of their (...) being thought of, in particular as concrete entities in the sense of entities that may be spatiotemporal occupiers. Yet third, as to Frege cases, cognitive phenomenology may return from the back door. For the realization that, if correct, solves any such case cannot but have a proprietary, though neither distinctive nor individuative, phenomenology. In my account, this is the realization that the different schematic intentional objects involved are none other than the same entity. (shrink)

Over the past fifty years the philosophy of language and mind has been dominated by a nondescriptivist approach to content and reference. This book attempts to recast and systematize that approach by offering an indexical model in terms of mental files. According to Recanati, we refer through mental files, the function of which is to store information derived through certain types of contextual relation the subject bears to objects in his or her environment. The reference of a file is determined (...) relationally, not satisfactionally, so a file is not to be equated to the body of (mis-)information it contains. Mental files are the mental equivalent of singular terms, and the reference of linguistic expressions is inherited from that of the files we associate with them. On this approach, mental files, the vehicles of singular thought, do all the work of so-called 'modes of presentation' in Fregean and neo-Russellian theories. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have recently become increasingly interested in the potential usefulness of fictitious and illusory beliefs.As a result, a wide variety of fictionalisms and illusionisms have sprung up in areas ranging anywhere from mathematics and modality to morality.1 In this paper, we focus on the view that Saul Smilansky has dubbed “free will illusionism”—for example, the purportedly descriptive claim that the majority of people have illusory beliefs concerning the existence of libertarian free will, coupled with the normative claim (...) that because dispelling these illusions would produce negative personal and societal consequences, those of us who are unfortunate enough to know the dangerous and gloomy truth about the nonexistence of libertarian free will should simply keep quiet in the name of the common good. (shrink)

Imaginative and creative capacities seem to be at the heart of both games of make-believe and figurative uses of language. But how exactly might cases of metaphor or idiom involve make-believe? In this paper, I argue against the pretense-based accounts of Walton (1990, 1993), Hills (1997), and Egan (this journal, 2008) that pretense plays no role in the interpretation of metaphor or idiom; instead, more general capacities for manipulating concepts (which are also called on within the use of pretense) do (...) the real explanatory work. This result has consequences for both our understanding of metaphor and idiom as well as for the use of figurative language by fictionalists in ontology. (shrink)

The nonexistence of fictional entities does not seem incompatible with their possible existence. The aim of this paper is to give an account of the intuitive truth of statements of possible existence involving fictional proper names in an actualist framework. After having clarified the opposition between a possibilist and an actualist approach of possible wolds, I distinguish fictional individuals from fictional characters and the fictional use of fictional proper names from their metafictional use. On that basis, statements of possible existence (...) involving fictional proper names literally say of fictional characters conceived as abstract objects that they might have been exemplified. (shrink)

According to standard Creationism about fictional characters, each fictional character is created by its single author independently, or created by its co-authors cooperatively, or created by its independent authors independently. I argue that standard Creationism faces the Creator-Determining Problem. I propose a non-standard form of Creationism, i.e., Conjunctive Creationism, according to which each fictional character is conjunctively created. I argue that Conjunctive Creationism does not face the Creator-Determining Problem. By responding to four potential worries, I provide a further defense. My (...) conclusion is that Conjunctive Creationism is a more promising form of Creationism.Selon la norme du créationnisme concernant les personnages fictifs, chaque personnage est soit créé indépendamment par son seul auteur, soit créé par ses co-auteurs en collaboration, soit encore créé indépendamment par ses auteurs indépendants. Cette norme doit cependant faire face au problème de l’identification du créateur. Pour éviter ce problème, je propose d’adopter le créationnisme conjonctif, selon lequel chaque personnage est créé conjointement. Je défends cette proposition en répondant à quatre inquiétudes potentielles. Je conclus que le créationnisme conjonctif est une forme plus prometteuse du créationnisme. (shrink)

In the old days of descriptivism, fictional reference and non-fictional reference with proper names were treated on a par. Descriptivism was not an intuitive theory, but it meritoriously provided a unitary semantic account of names, whether referentially full or empty. Then the revolution of the new theory of reference occurred. This new theory is definitely more intuitive than descriptivism, yet it comes with a drawback: the referentially full use and the referentially empty use, notably the fictional use, of names are (...) semantically no longer on the same footing. How the use of names from fiction is referentially empty has even been seen as a symptom of its not being a use at all. In this paper, I ask the following question: can one keep the merits of the new theory of reference and still provide a unitary account of both fictional and non-fictional reference with names? My answer is positive, provided that one conceives proper names as a special kind of indexicals. (shrink)

Recent discussions about the cognitive value of fiction either rely on a background theory of reference or a theory of imaginative pretense. I argue that this reliance produces a tension between the two central or defining claims of literary cognitivism that: (1) fiction can have cognitive value by revealing or supporting insights into the world that properly count as true, and (2) that the cognitive value of a work of fiction contributes directly to that work’s literary value. I address that (...) tension by looking at the formal devices present in a work of fiction that enable it to realize the fictional world described by a text. When we focus on those formal elements, we can identify a connection between a work of literary fiction and the insights we gain through an encounter with the fictional world that work realizes. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Imagining being someone else from the inside is something relatively easy to do. In Williams (Imagination and the self, problems of the self: philosophical papers, p 26–45, 1973), for instance, one finds Williams’s famous imaginative scenario consisting in imagining being Napoleon from the inside at the battle of Austerlitz. However, providing an adequate analysis for imagination reports like “(1) Williams imagines being Napoleon (from the inside)” is no easy task, because the logical form of such imagination report is controversial. Following (...) Vendler (Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 84(2):161–173, 1979), the logical form of statements “X imagines F-ing” typically involve a _PRO_ construction. Furthermore, it is generally acknowledged following Chierchia (Semant Contextual Exp 11:1–31, 1989) that _PRO_ constructions require a _de se_ reading. Consequently, (1) is argued to be an instance of _de se_ imagination (this is the “genuine _de se_” analysis of (1)). Yet, (1) is also crucially about Napoleon and, as forcefully argued for in Williams (Imagination and the self, problems of the self: philosophical papers, p 26–45, 1973), it is not even clear that it is about Williams. So (1) cannot be an instance of _de se_ imagination in the standard sense, because Williams does not self-ascribe the semantic content of the imagining episode (this is the “quasi-_de se_” analysis of (1)). In this paper, I vindicate the genuine _de se_ analysis, based on some new data involving nested imaginings. I then investigate some consequences of the view, which, I argue, are not available to the quasi-_de se_ theorists, including what the view says about failed imaginings. (shrink)