Abstract

Metaphysicians are among the very wiliest of philosophers. This means that an attack on a metaphysical position will fail if it only proceeds by showing that the posited objects are odd in some metaphysically significant way. To choose a pertinent example, if one wants to oppose the fictional realist, it isn’t enough to show that fictional entities have arbitrary individuation conditions, that they flit in and out of existence, or that they are far more numerous and varied than one imagines. As Eaker (2012) and Effingham (2012) remind us, the fictional realist and the metaphysical fundamentalist can agree that this is what fictional objects are like. It’s even insufficient to claim that such objects are mind- and language dependent, utterly dependent on our thinking of them (or on our coining terms that stipulatively ‘refer’ to them). Fictional realists and metaphysical fundamentalists can agree with this too, but deny these are sufficient conditions for non-existence.