Real Individuals in Fictions, Fictional Surrogates in Stories

Philosophia 48 (2):803-820 (2020)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

In the philosophy of fiction, a majority view is continuism, i.e., the thesis that ordinary names, or genuine singular terms in general, directly refer to ordinary real individuals in fiction-involving sentences – e.g. “Napoleon” in the sentences that constitute the text of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. But there is also a minority view, exceptionalism, which is the thesis that such terms change their semantic value in such sentences, either by directly referring to fictional surrogates of those individuals – what we may call exceptional hyperrealism about fictional characters – or by acquiring a semantic value that turns them into nonreferential terms, involving no ontological commitment to such characters – exceptional irrealism about fictional characters. In this paper, first of all, I want to support hybrid exceptionalism, according to which both parties are partly right and partly wrong. In the fictional use of fiction-involving sentences, those terms directly refer to ordinary real individuals, as continuists claim, while both in the internal and the external metafictional use of fiction-involving sentences, such terms change their semantic value, as exceptionalists claim. (By contrast, for pure exceptionalists such terms either always refer to fictional surrogates or are nonreferring on all such uses.) Moreover, I will argue that hybrid exceptional hyperrealism must be preferred to hybrid exceptional irrealism: in the latter uses, I claim, such terms directly refer to fictional surrogates.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 98,072

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Analytics

Added to PP
2020-01-06

Downloads
56 (#308,498)

6 months
10 (#316,668)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Alberto Voltolini
University of Turin

Citations of this work

Referential intentions and ordinary names in fiction.Jeonggyu Lee - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (3):1059-1079.

Add more citations

References found in this work

The Varieties of Reference.Gareth Evans - 1982 - Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edited by John Henry McDowell.
Demonstratives: An Essay on the Semantics, Logic, Metaphysics and Epistemology of Demonstratives and other Indexicals.David Kaplan - 1989 - In Joseph Almog, John Perry & Howard Wettstein (eds.), Themes From Kaplan. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 481-563.
Naming and Necessity.Saul Kripke - 1980 - Philosophy 56 (217):431-433.
Naming and Necessity.S. Kripke - 1972 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 45 (4):665-666.
Fiction and Metaphysics.Amie L. Thomasson - 1998 - New York: Cambridge University Press.

View all 55 references / Add more references