"Fictional Terms without Fictional Entities"

ORLANDO, ELEONORA

CRÍTICA. Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía

Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, UNAM

Lugar: México D.F.; Año: 2008 vol. 40 p. 111 - 127

0011-1503

In this paper, I critically analyze Mark Sainsbury´s semantic explanation of fictional discourse. Take S to be "Holmes is a detective". Then (1) S is (grammatically) of the subject-predicate form, (2) 'Holmes' is the grammatical subject of S, (3) S is meaningful, (4) If S is meaningful, then S is true or false, (5) A sentence of the subject-predicate form is true if and only if there is an object named by the subject that possesses the attribute expressed by the predicate; and it is false if and only if there is an object named by the subject that does not possess the attribute in question, (6) Holmes exists. The structure of this argument has been worrying many non-analytic philosophers since the very pre-Socratic beginnings of philosophy. How is it possible to talk about objects, such as the characters of fiction, which in an intuitive sense of the word do not exist? Do we have to conclude that there is another, non-intuitive sense in which they do exist? As is known, the last path has been taken up by the so-called ontologically committed conceptions of fictional discourse, namely, Meinongianism, which take fictional objects to be actual non-existent entities, possibilism, for which they are existent objects but merely possible ones, and abstractism, which regards them as a kind of abstract entities. In "Existence and Fiction", chapter 6 of his book Reference without Referents (henceforth, RWR), Mark Sainsbury's main objective is showing that the kind of ontological commitment that serves to characterize those positions can and should be avoided; in other terms, that there is no need to establish ontological conclusions regarding characters of fiction from certain assumptions about grammatical and semantic form. In contrast with Meinongianism, possibilism and abstractism, he sets out to show that the semantic functioning of sentences like S can be accounted for with no ontological commitment whatsoever. To this aim, he makes a specific explanatory proposal, which belongs in the general framework set forth in the rest of the book. Moreover, he argues that his proposal, though sharing a disadvantage with the ontologically committed ones, namely, the fact that sentences of the likes of S must be taken to be genuinely false, has also a clear advantage over them that should inspire our preference for it: it does not commit us to the existence of some dubious intentions towards fictional objects. From his perspective, there are two main ways of interpreting the claim that there are fictional characters: in a weak sense, it means that there are stories in which characters are portrayed; in a strong sense, it means that there are some entities correlated with those characters, which are part of an extra-fictional reality. The chapter under consideration has been included to show that there are no good reasons to go beyond the first, weak sense, which does not involve the rather implausible claim that reality is partly constituted by objects of fiction. Sainsbury´s proposal is interesting and forcefully argued for. Although I feel definitely attracted by its ontological lightness and pragmatic flavor, there are certain aspects that I have not found entirely persuasive. After a brief presentation of the proposal as well as its more general semantic background, I will focus on those aspects that remain obscure to me.