Results for 'Names, fictional names, Millian, empty names, descriptivism'

970 found
Order:
  1. Fiktionale Namen.Tatjana von Solodkoff - 2015 - In Nikola Kompa (ed.), Handbuch Sprachphilosophie. Stuttgart: Metzler.
    Zeitgenössische Positionen in der Debatte über fiktionale Namen lassen sich in zwei Lager aufteilen: deskriptivistische und Millsche Ansätze. Deskriptivisten nehmen an, dass der semantische Inhalt eines Namens synonym mit einer Kennzeichnung sei, während Millianerinnen, behaupten, dass der semantische Inhalt eines Namens sein Bezugsobjekt sei. Da es sich bei diesen Ansätzen um Theorien handelt, die sich nicht auf fiktionale Namen beschränken, sondern Eigennamen generell behandeln, müssen sie sich auch Einwänden stellen, die nicht nur auf fiktionale Namen zutreffen. Dieses Kapitel konzentriert sich (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  2. Kypris, Aphrodite, and Venus: More Puzzles about Belief.Heidi Savage - manuscript
    My aim in this paper is to show that the existence of empty names raise problems for the Millian that go beyond the traditional problems of accounting for their meanings. Specifically, they have implications for Millian strategies for dealing with puzzles about belief. The standard move of positing a referent for a fictional name to avoid the problem of meaning, because of its distinctly Millian motivation, implies that solving puzzles about belief, when they involve empty names, do (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  3. Fictional names in psychologistic semantics.Emar Maier - 2017 - Theoretical Linguistics 43 (1-2):1-46.
    Fictional names pose a difficult puzzle for semantics. We can truthfully maintain that Frodo is a hobbit, while at the same time admitting that Frodo does not exist. To reconcile this paradox I propose a way to formalize the interpretation of fiction as ‘prescriptions to imagine’ (Walton 1990) within an asymmetric semantic framework in the style of Kamp (1990). In my proposal, fictional statements are analyzed as dynamic updates on an imagination component of the interpreter’s mental state, while (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  4. Four Problems for Empty Names.Heidi Savage - manuscript
    Empty names vary in their referential features. Some of them, as Kripke argues, are necessarily empty -- those that are used to create works of fiction. Others appear to be contingently empty -- those which fail to refer at this world, but which do uniquely identify particular objects in other possible worlds. I argue against Kripke's metaphysical and semantic reasons for thinking that either some or all empty names are necessarily non-referring, because these reasons are either (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  5. (1 other version)Truths Containing Empty Names.Michael McKinsey - 2016 - In Piotr Stalmaszczyk & Luis Fernandez Moreno (eds.), Philosophical Approaches to Proper Names. Peter Lang. pp. 175-202.
    Abstract. On the Direct Reference thesis, proper names are what I call ‘genuine terms’, terms whose sole semantic contributions to the propositions expressed by their use are the terms’ semantic referents. But unless qualified, this thesis implies the false consequence that sentences containing names that fail to refer can never express true or false propositions. (Consider ‘The ancient Greeks worshipped Zeus’, for instance.) I suggest that while names are typically and fundamentally used as genuine terms, there is a small class (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  6. The problem of empty names and Russellian Plenitude.Joshua Spencer - 2016 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (3):1-18.
    ‘Ahab is a whaler’ and ‘Holmes is a whaler’ express different propositions, even though neither ‘Ahab’ nor ‘Holmes’ has a referent. This seems to constitute a theoretical puzzle for the Russellian view of propositions. In this paper, I develop a variant of the Russellian view, Plenitudinous Russellianism. I claim that ‘Ahab is a whaler’ and ‘Holmes is a whaler’ express distinct gappy propositions. I discuss key metaphysical and semantic differences between Plenitudinous Russellianism and Traditional Russellianism and respond to objections that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  7. Proper Names and their Fictional Uses.Heidi Tiedke - 2011 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (4):707 - 726.
    Fictional names present unique challenges for semantic theories of proper names, challenges strong enough to warrant an account of names different from the standard treatment. The theory developed in this paper is motivated by a puzzle that depends on four assumptions: our intuitive assessment of the truth values of certain sentences, the most straightforward treatment of their syntactic structure, semantic compositionality, and metaphysical scruples strong enough to rule out fictional entities, at least. It is shown that these four (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   30 citations  
  8. Can There Be a Davidsonian Theory of Empty Names?Siu-Fan Lee - 2016 - In Piotr Stalmaszczyk & Luis Fernandez Moreno (eds.), Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations into Proper Names. Peter Lang. pp. 203-226.
    This paper examines to what extent Davidsonian truth-theoretic semantics can give an adequate account for empty names in natural languages. It argues that the prospect is dim because of a tension between metaphysical austerity, non-vacuousness of theorems and empirical adequacy. Sainsbury (2005) proposed a Davidsonian account of empty names called ‘Reference Without Referents’ (RWR), which explicates reference in terms of reference-condition rather than referent, thus avoiding the issue of existence. This is an inspiring account. However, it meets several (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  9. The great beetle debate: A study in imagining with names.Stacie Friend - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 153 (2):183-211.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   35 citations  
  10. Singular Reference in Fictional Discourse?Manuel García-Carpintero - 2019 - Disputatio 11 (54):143-177.
    Singular terms used in fictions for fictional characters raise well-known philosophical issues, explored in depth in the literature. But philosophers typically assume that names already in use to refer to “moderatesized specimens of dry goods” cause no special problem when occurring in fictions, behaving there as they ordinarily do in straightforward assertions. In this paper I continue a debate with Stacie Friend, arguing against this for the exceptionalist view that names of real entities in fictional discourse don’t work (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  11. Fictional domains.Dominic Gregory - 2024 - Noûs 58 (1):126-140.
    (Open Access.) Quantifiers frequently figure in works of fiction. But occurrences of quantificational expressions within fictions seem no more inevitably to be associated with real domains than uses of names within fictions seem inevitably to be associated with existing referents. The paper outlines some philosophical puzzles resulting from this apparent lack of associated domains, puzzles that are broadly analogous to more familiar ones raised by the apparently nonreferential nature of many fictional names. The paper argues, in the light of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  12. Fictional Realism and Negative Existentials.Tatjana von Solodkoff - 2014 - In Manuel García-Carpintero & Genoveva Martí (eds.), Empty Representations: Reference and Non-Existence. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 333-352.
    In this paper I confront what I take to be the crucial challenge for fictional realism, i.e. the view that fictional characters exist. This is the problem of accounting for the intuition that corresponding negative existentials such as ‘Sherlock Holmes does not exist’ are true (when, given fictional realism, taken literally they seem false). I advance a novel and detailed form of the response according to which we take them to mean variants of such claims as: there (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  13. Names Are Variables.Anders J. Schoubye - 2020 - Philosophical Review 129 (1):53-94.
    MILLIANISM and DESCRIPTIVISM are without question the two most prominent views with respect to the semantics of proper names. However, debates between MILLIANS and DESCRIPTIVISTS have tended to focus on a fairly narrow set of linguistic data and an equally narrow set of problems, mainly how to solve with Frege's puzzle and how to guarantee rigidity. In this article, the author focuses on a set of data that has been given less attention in these debates—namely, so-called predicative uses, bound (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  14. Names Are Predicates.Delia Graff Fara - 2015 - Philosophical Review 124 (1):59-117.
    One reason to think that names have a predicate-type semantic value is that they naturally occur in count-noun positions: ‘The Michaels in my building both lost their keys’; ‘I know one incredibly sharp Cecil and one that's incredibly dull’. Predicativism is the view that names uniformly occur as predicates. Predicativism flies in the face of the widely accepted view that names in argument position are referential, whether that be Millian Referentialism, direct-reference theories, or even Fregean Descriptivism. But names are (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   103 citations  
  15. Naming and Referring: Table of Contents.Heidi Savage - manuscript
    This book is about whether reference to an individual is the essential feature of a proper name -- a widely held view -- or whether referring to an individual is simply a contingent feature. Three questions need resolving, then. First, whether all names in particular contexts are themselves referring devices. Second, whether recognizing names types and the consequent issue of their ambiguity can be resolved simply by distinguishing between name types and tokens thereof. Last, whether names are ever referential in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  16. Fictional singular imaginings.Manuel Garcia-Carpintero - 2010 - In Robin Jeshion (ed.), New Essays on Singular Thought. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press. pp. 273--299.
    In a series of papers, Robin Jeshion has forcefully criticized both Donnellan's and Evans’ claims on the contingent a priori, and she has developed an “acquaintanceless” account of singular thoughts as an alternative view. Jeshion claims that one can fully grasp a singular thought expressed by a sentence including a proper name, even if its reference has been descriptively fixed and one’s access to the referent is “mediated” by that description. But she still wants to reject “semantic instrumentalism”, the view (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  17. One Dogma of Millianism.Derek Ball & Bryan Pickel - 2014 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 88 (1):70-92.
    Millians about proper names typically claim that it is knowable apriori that Hesperus is Phosphorus. We argue that they should claim instead that it is knowable only aposteriori that Hesperus is Hesperus, since the Kripke-Putnam epistemic arguments against descriptivism are special cases of Quinean arguments that nothing is knowable apriori, and Millians have no resources to resist the more general Quinean arguments.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  18. Fictional Names Revisited.Panu Raatikainen - 2023 - In _Essays in the Philosophy of Language._ Acta Philosophica Fennica Vol. 100. Helsinki: Societas Philosophica Fennica. pp. 227–246.
    Several philosophers including Kripke have contended that fictional entities do exist as abstract objects, and fictional names refer to such abstract entities. Kripke and Thomasson compare fictional entities to existing social entities. Kripke also reflects on fictions inside fictions to support his view. Many philosophers appeal to the apparent fact that we quantify over fictional entities. Such arguments in favor of the existence of fictional entities are critically scrutinized. It is argued that they are much (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  19. Reality and Unreality.Nathan Salmon - manuscript
    A collection of ten previously published essays on existence, nonexistence, empty names, fiction and myth, and free logic.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  20. Quantificational Logic and Empty Names.Andrew Bacon - 2013 - Philosophers' Imprint 13.
    The result of combining classical quantificational logic with modal logic proves necessitism – the claim that necessarily everything is necessarily identical to something. This problem is reflected in the purely quantificational theory by theorems such as ∃x t=x; it is a theorem, for example, that something is identical to Timothy Williamson. The standard way to avoid these consequences is to weaken the theory of quantification to a certain kind of free logic. However, it has often been noted that in order (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  21. The Pragmatics of Empty Names.Nicole Wyatt - 2007 - Dialogue 46 (4):663-681.
    Fred Adams and collaborators advocate a view on which empty-name sentences semantically encode incomplete propositions, but which can be used to conversationally implicate descriptive propositions. This account has come under criticism recently from Marga Reimer and Anthony Everett. Reimer correctly observes that their account does not pass a natural test for conversational implicatures, namely, that an explanation of our intuitions in terms of implicature should be such that we upon hearing it recognize it to be roughly correct. Everett argues (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  22. The Meanings of Fictional Names.Fiora Salis - 2021 - Organon 28 (1):9-43.
    According to Millianism, the meaning of a name is exhausted by its referent. According to anti-realism about fictional entities, there are no such entities. If there are no fictional entities, how can we explain the apparent meaningfulness of fictional names? Our best theory of fiction, Walton’s theory of make-believe, makes the same assumptions but lacks the theoretical resources to answer the question. In this paper, I propose a pragmatic solution in terms of two main dimensions of meaning, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  23. Tichý and Fictional Names.Daniela Glavaničová - 2017 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 24 (3):384-404.
    The paper examines two possible analyses of fictional names within Pavel Tichý’s Transparent Intensional Logic. The first of them is the analysis actually proposed by Tichý in his (1988) book The Foundations of Frege’s Logic. He analysed fictional names in terms of free variables. I will introduce, explain, and assess this analysis. Subsequently, I will explain Tichý’s notion of individual role (office, thing-to-be). On the basis of this notion, I will outline and defend the second analysis of (...) names. This analysis is close to the approach known in the literature as role realism (the most prominent advocates of this position are Nicholas Wolterstorff, Gregory Currie, and Peter Lamarque). (shrink)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  24. Non‐Standard Neutral Free Logic, Empty Names and Negative Existentials.Dolf Rami - manuscript
    In this paper I am concerned with an analysis of negative existential sentences that contain proper names only by using negative or neutral free logic. I will compare different versions of neutral free logic with the standard system of negative free logic (Burge, Sainsbury) and aim to defend my version of neutral free logic that I have labeled non-standard neutral free logic.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  25. More on Fictional Names and Psychologistic Semantics: Replies to Comments.Emar Maier - 2017 - Theoretical Linguistics 43 (1-2):103-120.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  26. Existence, Identity and Empty Names.Takashi Iida - 2008 - Interdisciplinary Logic 1:107-117.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  27. Names in Fiction.Dilip Ninan - 2017 - Theoretical Linguistics 43 (1-2):61-70.
    Discussion of Emar Maier's essay “Fictional Names in Psychologistic Semantics.”.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  28. The descriptivist theory of names and the problem of paradoxical reputations.Terence Rajivan Edward - manuscript
    This paper presents an objection to the theory of names according to which what a name refers to is determined by a description that the speaker or writer associates with that name. Some names are associated with paradoxical descriptions. I use the reputations of Henry Sidgwick and J.M.E. McTaggart to illustrate this problem.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  29. Defending Millian Theories.Bryan Frances - 1998 - Mind 107 (428):703-728.
    In this article I offer a three-pronged defense of Millian theories, all of which share the rough idea that all there is to a proper name is its referent, so it has no additional sense. I first give what I believe to be the first correct analysis of Kripke’s puzzle and its anti-Fregean lessons. The main lesson is that the Fregean’s arguments against Millianism and for the existence of semantically relevant senses (that is, individuative elements of propositions or belief contents (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  30. Fiction As a Vehicle for Truth: Moving Beyond the Ontic Conception.Alisa Bokulich - 2016 - The Monist 99 (3):260-279.
    Despite widespread evidence that fictional models play an explanatory role in science, resistance remains to the idea that fictions can explain. A central source of this resistance is a particular view about what explanations are, namely, the ontic conception of explanation. According to the ontic conception, explanations just are the concrete entities in the world. I argue this conception is ultimately incoherent and that even a weaker version of the ontic conception fails. Fictional models can succeed in offering (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   53 citations  
  31. The fictionality of plays.John Dilworth - 2002 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60 (3):263–273.
    The category of works of fiction is a very broad and heterogeneous one. I do have a general thesis in mind about such works, namely, that they themselves are fictional, in much the same way as are the fictional events or entities that they are about. But a defense of such a broad thesis would provide an intractably complex topic for an introductory essay, so I shall here confine myself to a presentation of a similar thesis for narrative (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  32. What's in a Name? Legal Fictions and Philosophical Fictionalism.Luft Constantin - 2024 - Law and Literature 2:1-22.
    This paper uses analytic philosophy to prevent merely verbal disputes about the concept of fiction within discussions on fictiones iuris. It provides a survey of potentially fruitful connections between legal fictions and fictionalism. More specifically, I will argue that by enriching current accounts of legal fictions in legal theory with insights from (1) the philosophy of language on fictional speech and from (2) contemporary metaphysics on philosophical fictionalism, it seems natural to explore the position that talk involving fictiones iuris (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  33. Fictional Realism and Indeterminate Identity.Brendan Murday - 2015 - Journal of Philosophical Research 40:205-225.
    Fictional realists hold that fictional characters are real entities. However, Anthony Everett [“Against Fictional Realism”, Journal of Philosophy (2005)] notes that some fictions leave it indeterminate whether character A is identical to character B, while other fictions depict A as simultaneously identical and distinct from B. Everett argues that these fictions commit the realist to indeterminate and impossible identity relations among actual entities, and that as such realism is untenable. This paper defends fictional realism: for fictions (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  34. Actualized and protected descriptivism: an answer to Celia Teixeira / Descritivismo atualizado e protegido: uma resposta à Célia Teixeira.Rodrigo Cid - 2010 - Revista Aproximação 2:9-ss.
    It was argued by Célia Teixeira (2003) that the actualized descriptivist theory of names have the problem of generating undesired epistemic necessities. In this paper I want to argue for a descriptivis theory that does not suffer from such problem. For this I will explain Teixeira's objections and later present my own conception of an actualized descriptivist theory of names; it is, protected against the problem of undesired necessities.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  35. What is in a name?: The development of cross-cultural differences in referential intuitions.Jincai Li, Liu Longgen, Elizabeth Chalmers & Jesse Snedeker - 2018 - Cognition 171 (C): 108-111.
    Past work has shown systematic differences between Easterners' and Westerners' intuitions about the reference of proper names. Understanding when these differences emerge in development will help us understand their origins. In the present study, we investigate the referential intuitions of English- and Chinese-speaking children and adults in the U.S. and China. Using a truth-value judgment task modeled on Kripke's classic Gödel case, we find that the cross-cultural differences are already in place at age seven. Thus, these differences cannot be attributed (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  36. “But Is It Science Fiction?”: Science Fiction and a Theory of Genre.Simon J. Evnine - 2015 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 39 (1):1-28.
    If science fiction is a genre, then attempts to think about the nature of science fiction will be affected by one’s understanding of what genres are. I shall examine two approaches to genre, one dominant but inadequate, the other better, but only occasionally making itself seen. I shall then discuss several important, interrelated issues, focusing particularly on science fiction : what it is for a work to belong to a genre, the semantics of genre names, the validity of attempts to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  37. Unspeakable names.Eliot Michaelson - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-19.
    There are some names which cannot be spoken and others which cannot be written, at least on certain very natural ways of conceiving of them. Interestingly, this observation proves to be in tension with a wide range of views about what names are. Prima facie, this looks like a problem for predicativists. Ultima facie, it turns out to be equally problematic for Millians. For either sort of theorist, resolving this tension requires embracing a revisionary account of the metaphysics of names. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  38. Truth and Reference in Fiction.Stavroula Glezakos - 2011 - In Gillian Russell & Delia Graff Fara (eds.), Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language. New York, USA: Routledge.
    Fiction is often characterized by way of a contrast with truth, as, for example, in the familiar couplet “Truth is always strange/ Stranger than fiction" (Byron 1824). And yet, those who would maintain that “we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology” (Chomsky 1988: 159) hold that some truth is best encountered via fiction. The scrupulous novelist points out that her work depicts no actual person, either living or dead; nonetheless, we (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  39. Understanding proper names.Michael McKinsey - 2010 - Linguistics and Philosophy 33 (4):325-354.
    There is a fairly general consensus that names are Millian (or Russellian) genuine terms, that is, are singular terms whose sole semantic function is to introduce a referent into the propositions expressed by sentences containing the term. This answers the question as to what sort of proposition is expressed by use of sentences containing names. But there is a second serious semantic problem about proper names, that of how the referents of proper names are determined. This is the question that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  40. On Minimal Models for Pure Calculi of Names.Piotr Kulicki - 2013 - Logic and Logical Philosophy 22 (4):429–443.
    By pure calculus of names we mean a quantifier-free theory, based on the classical propositional calculus, which defines predicates known from Aristotle’s syllogistic and Leśniewski’s Ontology. For a large fragment of the theory decision procedures, defined by a combination of simple syntactic operations and models in two-membered domains, can be used. We compare the system which employs `ε’ as the only specific term with the system enriched with functors of Syllogistic. In the former, we do not need an empty (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  41. Truth in Fiction.Franck Lihoreau (ed.) - 2010 - Ontos Verlag.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  42. Fiction and the Cultivation of Imagination.Amy Kind - 2022 - In Patrik Engisch & Julia Langkau (eds.), The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition. Routledge. pp. 262-281.
    In the same way that some people are better jugglers than others, some people are better imaginers than others. But while it might be obvious what someone can do if they want to improve their juggling skills, it’s less obvious what someone can do to improve their imaginative skills. This chapter explores this issue and argues that engagement with fiction can play a key role in the development of one’s imaginative skills. The chapter proceeds in three parts. First, using work (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  43. A Puzzle about Fictions in the Treatise.Jonathan Cottrell - 2016 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 54 (1):47-73.
    in the treatise, hume claims to identify many “fictions of the imagination” among both “vulgar” and philosophical beliefs. To name just a few, these include the fiction of one aggregate composed of many parts,1 the fiction of a material object’s identity through change, and the fiction of a human mind’s identity through change and interruption in its existence. Hume claims that these fictions and others like them are somehow defective: in his words, they are “improper,” “inexact,” or not “strict”. I (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  44. Type-Ambiguous Names.Anders J. Schoubye - 2017 - Mind 126 (503):715-767.
    The orthodox view of proper names, Millianism, provides a very simple and elegant explanation of the semantic contribution of referential uses of names–names that occur as bare singulars and as the argument of a predicate. However, one problem for Millianism is that it cannot explain the semantic contribution of predicative uses of names. In recent years, an alternative view, so-called the-predicativism, has become increasingly popular. According to the-predicativists, names are uniformly count nouns. This straightforwardly explains why names can be used (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   33 citations  
  45. A defense of creationism in fiction.Jeffrey Goodman - 2004 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 67 (1):131-155.
    Creationism is the conjunction of the following theses: (i) fictional individuals (e.g. Sherlock Holmes) actually exist; (ii) fictional names (e.g., 'Holmes') are at least sometimes genuinely referential; (iii) fictional individuals are the creations of the authors who first wrote (or spoke, etc.) about them. CA Creationism is the conjunction of (i) - (iii) and the following thesis: (iv) fictional individuals are contingently existing abstracta; they are non-concrete artifacts of our world and various other possible worlds. TakashiYagisawa (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  46. Imagination and the Permissive View of Fictional Truth.Hannah H. Kim - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    Imagination comes with varying degrees of sensory accompaniment. Sometimes imagining is phenomenologically lean (cognitive imagining); at other times, imagining involves or requires sensory presentation such as mental imagery (sensory imagining). Philosophers debate whether contradictions can obtain in fiction and whether cognitive imagining is robust enough to explain our engagement with fiction. In this paper, I defend the Principle of Poetic License by arguing for the Permissive View of fictional truth: we can have fictions in which a contradiction is true, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  47. Reference in Fiction.Stacie Friend - 2019 - Disputatio 11 (54):179-206.
    Most discussions of proper names in fiction concern the names of fictional characters, such as ‘Clarissa Dalloway’ or ‘Lilliput.’ Less attention has been paid to referring names in fiction, such as ‘Napoleon’ (in Tolstoy’s War and Peace) or ‘London’ (in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four). This is because many philosophers simply assume that such names are unproblematic; they refer in the usual way to their ordinary referents. The alternative position, dubbed Exceptionalism by Manuel García-Carpintero, maintains that referring names make a distinctive (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  48. A Defense of Causal Creationism in Fiction.David Sackris - 2013 - Philosophical Writings 41 (1):32-46.
    In this paper I seek defend the view that fictional characters are author-created abstract entities against objections offered by Stuart Brock in his paper “The Creationist Fiction: The Case against Creationism about Fictional Characters.” I argue that his objections fall far short of his goal of showing that if philosophers want to believe in fictional characters as abstract objects, they should not view them as author-created. My defense of creationism in fiction in part rests on tying the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  49. How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love 'Sherlock Holmes': A Reply to Garcia-Carpintero.Heidi Savage - 2020 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 1 (XXXIX):105-134.
    In “Semantics of Fictional Terms,” Garcia-Carpintero critically surveys the most recent literature on the topic of fictional names. One of his targets is realism about fictional discourse. Realists about fictional discourse believe that: (a) it contains true sentences that have fictional names as their subjects; (b) sentences containing names can be true only if those names have referents; (c) fictional names have fictional characters – abstract objects – as their referents. The fundamental problem (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  50. The Self-Extinguishing Despot: Millian Democratization, or The Autophagous Autocrat.Yvonne Chiu & Robert S. Taylor - 2011 - Journal of Politics 73 (4):1239-50.
    Although there is no more iconic, stalwart, and eloquent defender of liberty and representative democracy than J.S. Mill, he sometimes endorses non-democratic forms of governance. This article explains the reasons behind this seeming aberration and shows that Mill actually has complex and nuanced views of the transition from non-democratic to democratic government, including the comprehensive and parallel material, cultural, institutional, and character reforms that must occur, and the mechanism by which they will be enacted. Namely, an enlightened despot must cultivate (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
1 — 50 / 970