Abstract
Statements about fictional characters, such as “Gregor Samsa has been changed into a beetle,” pose the problem of how we can say something true (or false) using empty names. I propose an original solution to this problem that construes such utterances as reports of the “prescriptions to imagine” generated by works of fiction. In particular, I argue that we should construe these utterances as specifying, not what we are supposed to imagine—the propositional object of the imagining—but how we are supposed to imagine. Most other theories of thought and discourse about fictional characters either fail to capture the intentionality of our imaginings, or else obscure the differences between imaginings directed toward fictional characters and those directed toward real individuals. I argue that once we have an account of prescriptions to imagine about real individuals, we can adapt the same framework to specify the contents of prescriptions to imagine about fictional characters, and thereby to account for the truth (or falsity) of statements about fictional characters.
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Notes
On some accounts such statements cannot be true or false, but only correct or incorrect; I address this below.
In fact Eagle’s account of correctness conditions appears similar to my proposal, though it is not developed in detail.
Though Braun (2005) argues that gappy propositions are just false.
Hanley (2004) argues that Lewis should use the method of intersection to deal with many of these cases and, where the method of intersection fails, we need not necessarily accept a contradiction just because it is in the text. Even if Hanley’s defense of Lewis is sufficient—and I am skeptical—I think Walton’s approach is to be preferred, both because it captures the central role of imagining in response to fictions and because it applies to a wider range of fictional discourse (as discussed below). Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.
This does not mean that we are obligated to imagine everything that is fictionally true. To say that it is fictionally true that Anna Karenina needs oxygen is just to say that if the question arises—which it usually doesn’t—and we have to decide between imagining that Anna needs oxygen and imagining that she does not, we should imagine the former (Walton 1990, p. 40).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing this out.
This is merely an assumption. While Nabokov makes a good argument, there is no fact of the matter whether we are supposed to imagine that Gregor becomes a beetle or any other kind of vermin. This indeterminacy does not indicate anything mysterious about the nature of fictional characters, but is rather a result of the fact that there is a limit to the amount of information a work of fiction gives us in prescribing imaginings.
Not all languages translate the Greek and Latin names for this character differently, and this is one reason to think that the English names co-identify. But the justification of any claims about reference in works of fiction must appeal to the interpretation of those works. I would defend the identity of the character between Homer’s Iliad and Dante’s Inferno, for example, by arguing that one could not properly understand the latter without recognizing the character as Homer’s.
There are differences among these theories. One view is that the names of fictional characters function as variables in existentially quantified sentences prefixed by a fictionality operator; the name’s semantic contribution consists in all the predicates associated with it in the fiction (Kaplan 1973; Currie 1990). An alternative view is that a name appearing within the scope of a fictionality operator refers to its “customary sense,” which is given by the core of salient properties associated with the name (Lamarque and Olsen 1994). My objections are meant to apply to both approaches.
As Walton has pointed out to me, the solution I offer below can be construed as a way of individuating kinds of pretense within the constraints of his account.
Adams and Dietrich (2004) also invoke the “causal history of the name” (p. 128ff) to fill out the pragmatic portion of the gappy proposition view, but do not develop the idea in detail.
While it makes a difference that we represent contents with structured propositions (rather than possible worlds), nothing in my argument depends on how these propositions are construed. I take propositions to be nothing more than a way of representing truth conditions.
This claim purposely leaves open the possibility that in other fictions in which the name ‘London’ is used, our interpretation of the work would lead us to conclude that there is no reference to the real city.
As Anthony Everett has pointed out to me, there could be fictions that require us to imagine about real individuals under distinct modes of presentation, for instance a story in which “Chomsky the linguist” and “Chomsky the political activist” are two different people. I take it that such stories are rare, though they do deserve fuller discussion than I can offer here.
Ian Proops drew this to my attention.
The assumption that propositional attitudes can be understood as involving structured mental representations is not uncontroversial, but in my view it is the best explanation of many features of propositional attitudes; see, e.g., Fodor (1987, 1990). Further, research on narrative comprehension in cognitive psychology and linguistics supports the hypothesis that we create and update mental representations of characters while reading (see, e.g., the papers in Goldman et al. 1999). I say nothing here about the relations that constitute attitude-types, such as imagining, believing, desiring, etc., though I assume they are distinguished functionally.
I owe this terminology to Ian Proops (in conversation).
This terminology is introduced in Crimmins and Perry (1989).
The term dossier originates in Grice (1969).
We can, of course, have notions that are not labeled with names, including notions of fictional characters. In these cases we usually appeal to a description as a way of accessing information stored in memory.
This is not to say that the psychological mode of presentation is identical to the (linguistic) character (see Recanati 1993, p. 69ff). The distinction is not important for present purposes, however, so long as there is a systematic correspondence.
I take the term ‘root’ from Perry’s unpublished “Saying Nothing?” (1997).
If it is possible to refer to abstract objects that lack causal powers, we should doubt that this relation can be reduced to purely causal connections; but the basic idea of notion networks does not assume any such reduction.
A theory need not assume referentialism about names to invoke something like notion networks (see, e.g., Sainsbury 2005).
It is possible that there be more than one notion network rooted in a real individual. I address this issue below. For now I assume that Pierre, Frank, etc., participate in only one network.
More needs to be said about how to distinguish different “branches” of notion networks (see Everett 2000). One other advantage of appealing to segments of notion networks is that they help explain cases in which our intuitions about identification diverge. For instance, we typically identify Superman and Clark Kent but there are (Frege-style) contexts in which we might not. We typically identify Odysseus/Ulysses as the same character in Homer, Virgil, and Dante; but sometimes it is useful to speak of distinct characters. The contrasts can be explained by appealing to the whole network or to different branches. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to this point.).
To say that the convention was instituted in the story is a simplification, since Kafka would have come up with the name and the character beforehand, for example in working the story out in rough drafts. I ignore this complication here.
Perry offers a brief account of fictional discourse (Perry 2001, pp. 170–172), but it differs from mine in several respects.
Thanks to Jason Stanley.
I owe this suggestion and its elaboration to Anthony Everett.
John Perry suggested this line of argument.
For example, one could argue that “Gregor Samsa is a fictional character” is true so long as (very roughly) (i) the Gregor-network originates in a fiction, and (ii) that fiction prescribes imagining that the network has a root.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for emphasizing these further applications.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Kendall Walton, lan Proops, Peter Ludlow, Jason Stanley, Jessica Wilson, Gabriel Segal and Anthony Everett for very helpful comments on previous drafts. Thanks especially to John Perry, whose assistance from the beginning of this project has been invaluable. Thanks also to audiences at the Institut Jean Nicod (March 2005), the University of Michigan Aesthetics Discussion Group (November 2002) and the NEH Institute in Art, Mind, and Cognitive Science at College Park, Maryland (July 2002) where I presented early versions of this paper.
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Friend, S. The great beetle debate: a study in imagining with names. Philos Stud 153, 183–211 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9485-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9485-4