Mental Files and Metafictive Utterances

NICOLÁS FRANCISCO LO GUERCIO

Buenos Aires

Workshop; Issues in Contemporary Semantics and Ontology - Proper Names: Current Positions in Philosophy of Language and Linguistics; 2016

Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Filosófico

Metafictive utterances raise a kind of intuitions (intuitionsof truthfulness) that pose a problem for a view that combines a referentialistapproach to proper names with an antirealist stance on fictional characters.In this article I attempt to provide a solution to this problem within theframework of mental files. According to my position, metafictive utterancesliterally express an incomplete proposition while pragmatically conveying acomplete one, which accounts for the intuitions of truthfulness. The proposition pragmatically conveyed is ?metarepresentational?, I?ll argue, in the sense thatit is about a mental representation or mental file.