## 1. The Metaphysics of Fictional Entities



As Thomasson (1999: 5) puts it, the first question amounts to asking:
what would fictional entities be if there were any? Different answers
have been proposed to this question. But however much the answers
differ, they all try to accommodate in some way or other what seems to
be an intuitive datum facing philosophers who theorize about fictional
entities: these entities lack existence, or at least existence as
ordinary physical objects. According to this datum--call it
*the nonexistence datum*--paradigmatic objects of fiction
like Hamlet and Holmes do not exist. In support of this datum, note
that the layperson would almost certainly answer *No* to the
question of whether such objects exist, although she might qualify
this answer by allowing that there may be another sense in which they
do (Barbero et al. 2023). We also appeal to nonexistence in this sense
when we want to dispute the view that some alleged individual is a
genuine historical figure; we might say, for example, that King Arthur
does not exist, thereby underlining our view that a search for a
historical King Arthur would be in vain.



Those who do not believe that there are any fictional entities
(*fictional antirealists*, as we shall call them) will claim
that the nonexistence datum has an *ontological* reading only:
to say that fictional entities do not exist amounts to saying that in
the overall domain of what there is there are no such things as
fictional entities. As they see it, *fictional realists* (those
who do believe that there are fictional entities) are the only ones to
give the datum a certain *metaphysical* reading, namely that
fictional entities have the property of *not existing* (in some
sense or other). They might also insist that fictional realists are
the only ones to think that the nonexistence of fictional entities is
determined by their nature as fictional entities. But this overstates
the case. Because they hold that there are no such things as fictional
entities, even antirealists are likely to admit that the fact that
there is no such thing as some alleged entity *X* follows from
the fact that *X* has been shown to be fictional. That is what
happened in the case of King Arthur and many other legendary or
mythological entities (fictional entities in the broad sense). People
originally supposed that King Arthur was a real person, a British
leader who ruled England after the departure of the Romans (cf.
Geoffrey of Monmouth's *Historia Regum Britanniae*),
until it was discovered that King Arthur is merely a figure of legend,
a fictional entity. It was this discovery that licensed the conclusion
that King Arthur doesn't exist. So it seems that even
antirealists have a stake in the answer to the metaphysical question
"What would it take for something to be a fictional
entity?"



One further comment about the nonexistence datum before we turn to
various accounts of fictional objects and the ways in which such
accounts cope with the datum. As we have already seen, it is natural
when discussing the datum to use quantifiers such as "Some
things are ..." ("There are things that are
..."), and "Everything is...", whose
domain appears to include both existent and nonexistent objects. We do
so when we say, for example, that *there are* objects, such as
fictional objects, that don't exist. Fictional antirealists will
take such talk with a grain of salt, since they do not acknowledge a
sense in which there really are any fictional objects. Fictional
realists, on the other hand, will think that a sentence like
"There are objects, among them Hamlet and Holmes, that
don't exist" is either literally true or at least it
conveys a truth. They typically acknowledge a distinction between
unrestricted quantifiers, whose domain includes even nonexistent
objects, and restricted quantifiers, whose domain includes only
existent objects (cf., e.g., Berto 2013).


### 1.1 Possibilism



One way to account for the nonexistence datum is the *possibilist
theory* of fictional entities, which holds that fictional entities
do not exist in the *actual* world but only in some other
possible worlds. In this respect, fictional entities are thought to be
like other merely possible entities such as talking donkeys. According
to standard versions of the possible worlds framework, some things not
present at the actual world exist as talking donkeys at some merely
possible worlds. Similarly, the possibilist theory holds that Sherlock
Holmes does not exist in the actual world, although he does exist at
some merely possible worlds in which the Holmes stories are fact.



Such a possibilist theory is faced with a problem of ontological
indeterminacy. For there is more than one possible world in which
Conan Doyle's Holmes stories are fact, and in which there is a
witty, cocaine-addicted detective called "Holmes" who
lives at 221B Baker St., has a friend called "Watson", and
does the things recorded of him in the Holmes stories. Not all of
these Holmes-candidates are the same; while they all match each other
in terms of what the stories say about Holmes, they may be very
different in other crucial ways--they may have had very different
childhoods, including different parents, and so on. (Indeed, when
characters are underdescribed in a story, a single possible world may
contain many individuals who fit exactly what the story says about the
character.) We can now ask: *which* of these different witty,
cocaine-addicted detectives is Holmes? (cf. Kaplan 1973: 505-6;
Kripke 1972 [1980: 156-8]). There seems to be no principled way
of deciding.



Kripke suggests that this indeterminacy shows that none of these
possible entities is Holmes, "[f]or if so, which one?"
(Kripke 1972 [1980: 157-8]). But suppose, for argument's
sake, that this indeterminacy could somehow be resolved, perhaps by
the story including details of certain properties that, arguably, only
Holmes could have, such as his being the only person to have
originated from certain gametes. Even in that case, there would be
strong reason not to identify Holmes with a merely possible entity. To
see this, take a different case, that of the mythical sword Excalibur
extracted from a rock by King Arthur. Because we know that the story
of King Arthur is merely fictional, we know that this sword does not
exist. Its nonexistence would not be threatened by someone's
discovering an object with the physical properties that the Breton
cycle ascribes to Excalibur (unless, of course, that gave us reason to
think the Breton cycle was based on fact). No matter how similar, an
actual object that resembles a fictional object would not be that
fictional object (Kripke 1972 [1980: 157-8]). Now, moving from
the actual world to merely possible worlds does not change things: why
should Excalibur be identified even with a merely *possible*
entity? Had a merely possible entity exactly matching Excalibur in its
properties been actual, it would not have been the fictional
Excalibur, by the Kripkean argument rehearsed above. So how are things
different if this merely possible Excalibur-like sword remains merely
possible? In a nutshell, if there is a gap between fiction and
reality, there is also a gap between fiction and possibility.



These difficulties for possibilism do not equally affect all versions
of the doctrine. Consider David Lewis's version of the doctrine,
which is embedded in his realist account of possible objects (Lewis
1986). Roughly speaking, Lewis takes a possible individual to be a
Holmes candidate if it has Holmes's properties in a possible
world in which the Holmes stories are told as known fact (Lewis 1978).
For Lewis, each such individual is a part of one world and not part of
any other world (possible individuals are in a sense
'world-bound' on Lewis's view); no Holmes candidate
is therefore identical to any other Holmes candidate. But unlike more
doctrinaire possibilists, Lewis can use his counterpart theory (Lewis
1986) to offer a principled way of counting each such Holmes candidate
as being Holmes. Suppose you are a reader of the Holmes stories. Each
Holmes candidate is a counterpart for you of every other Holmes
candidate. For even if they should differ substantially in terms of
overall qualitative similarity, the various Holmes candidates are all
counterparts by *acquaintance* for you (or, as Lewis seems to
have thought, for your community of fellow readers)--they are
all, in their respective worlds, the person called
"Holmes" whom you or your community (or rather, your
counterparts) learn about by reading the Holmes stories, told as known
fact (cf. Lewis 1983b; Currie 1990: 137-9; Kroon 1994). In
short, the fact that there are so many distinct Holmes candidates is
less embarrassing for Lewis than it is for other possibilists. (See
also the suggestion in Sainsbury 2010 (pp. 82-3) that Lewis
could have accommodated a plurality of possible Holmes candidates by
refusing to identify Holmes with any of them, instead modeling the
relation between talk of Holmes and talk of these possible Holmes
candidates on the model of the notion of precisification used in
Lewis's semantics of vagueness.)



Lewis's counterpart theory is not widely accepted, however. In
general, Kripkean objections against possibilism about fictional
entities have been more influential. Some have argued, however, that
such objections only succeed if we use a 'variable domain'
conception of what there is to quantify over at any particular world,
a conception that allows the set of objects available at one world to
differ from the set of objects available at another world
(Kripke's preferred semantics for modal logic is of this kind.)
Suppose instead that one adopts a version of a 'fixed
domain' conception of quantification on which one has a
fictional individual at one's disposal as a nonexistent entity
in the actual world and as an existent entity in other possible worlds
(Priest 2005, Berto 2011). If so, the indeterminacy problem may not
arise. As Priest (2005: 119-20) puts it, we first of all have
Doyle's conception of Sherlock Holmes; *this* Sherlock
Holmes--the Holmes that Doyle conceives of--is an individual
in the actual world but *it* does not exist there; it exists
only in other worlds. For Priest, then, Doyle doesn't
arbitrarily pick one Holmes candidate from among all possible Holmes
candidates, each located in its own possible world. Rather, Doyle
*intends* a particular individual that does not exist in the
actual world but instead fits, or realizes, the Holmes stories in some
other possible worlds. Trivially, this individual is Holmes. (Doyle
manages this even though the actual world contains many other possible
individuals that don't exist there but realize the Holmes
stories in other possible worlds (Priest 2005: 93-4).)



Priest and Berto call their version of possibilism *Modal
Meinongianism* because it uses a modal framework to capture
central features of Meinong's famous account of nonexistent
objects (to be discussed below), but also because they see it as a
descendent of Richard Routley's early attempts at defending
Meinong's views (cf. Routley 1980). But Modal Meinongianism has
faced considerable criticism, some of it directed at its account of
the way authors manage to pick out nonexistent objects. One might
wonder how it is that Doyle is acquainted with a particular Holmes
candidate via the intentionality of his thought rather than with any
of the other Holmes candidates. Is authorial intending a
*creative* act, perhaps, one that first brings it about that
there is an object of the right kind, as Thomasson (1999: 90)
suggests? All the indications are that Priest and Berto reject this
view. For them, "an act of pure intention can intend an object
even when there are other indiscriminable objects" (2005: 142).
Such a response has struck a number of critics as deeply problematic:
without the ability to identify Holmes as the unique such-and-such,
Modal Meinongianism seems unable to guarantee that there is a
determinate Holmes (this problem may, in fact, be the reason why
Routley himself did not go on to develop a modal version of
Meinongianism; cf. Kroon 2019). Bueno & Zalta (2017) contrast
Modal Meinongianism's apparent troubles on this score with the
resources available for identification in Zalta's version of
Meinongianism (for a response, see Priest et al. 2020).



Such a possibilism also faces another problem. For Priest, as for
other possibilists, fictional entities do not *actually*
possess the properties in terms of which they are characterized in the
relevant stories; they only have these properties in (some of) the
worlds in which they exist. Sherlock Holmes, for instance, is not
actually a detective since he does not exist. Rather, Holmes is only
*possibly* a detective; he is only a detective in possible
worlds in which he exists. (Note that he is not a detective in
*all* the worlds in which he exists, since it is presumably a
truth about Holmes that he might not have had the career that he ended
up with; in some possible worlds, therefore, Holmes exists without
being a detective.) Now, it is admittedly strange to say that a
fictional object like Holmes is a detective in the very same sense in
which, say, a certain actual member of the New York police force is a
detective. But retreating to the possibilist view that Holmes has such
properties only in merely possible worlds carries its own costs; for
one thing, it seems to underestimate the role of the actual world in
various familiar relational claims we can make about fictional
objects. Consider cases in which we compare such objects with actual
concrete individuals. Suppose we say:


* (1) Holmes is
cleverer than any actual detective.



We seem to be saying that Holmes *actually* has such
comparative features, that is, has them in the actual world, not
merely in some possible world or other. Suppose that we read (1)
instead as saying, *a la* Priest:


* (1P) Holmes
is *possibly* cleverer than any actual detective.



(More precisely, relative to worlds in which Holmes is as he is
described to be in the Holmes stories, Holmes has a greater degree of
cleverness than that possessed by any detective in the actual world;
cf. Priest 2005: 123.) But no such cross-world way of reading (1)
matches the way we would read any other sentence involving a
comparison between individuals. Take:


* (2) Stalin was
crueler than any other actual dictator.



It would clearly be incorrect to read (2) as:


* (2P) Stalin
was *possibly* crueler than any other actual
dictator



(say, in the sense that, relative to worlds in which Stalin fits the
orthodox account of his activities, Stalin is crueler than any other
dictator in the actual world). (2) is intended to be a substantive
claim about how Stalin actually was, not a claim about how he might
have been. In addition, a possibilist reading like (1P) makes it hard
to make sense of the attitudes we hold towards fictional characters
(Kroon 2008: 201, 2012). Our belief in Holmes's great cleverness
explains our admiration for Holmes, just as our belief in Anna
Karenina's suffering explains our pity for Anna Karenina. It is
hard to see how our belief in Holmes's *possible*
cleverness could do this. In reply, Priest has insisted that this is
precisely how we should understand such claims: Holmes is admired for
the things he does in the Holmes worlds, while a real individual such
as Mandela is admired for what he actually did (2016: 217). But this
seems to beg the question. Surely the mere fact that there are
possible worlds in which Stalin dedicates his life to rescuing
migrants from death in the Mediterranean sea, say, does not make him
worthy of admiration in the actual world, although it may make him an
object of admiration to people in these other worlds. Why should it be
any different with Holmes?



The next approach to fictional entities to be discussed (the (neo-)
Meinongian approach) is able to avoid such problems. But before we
describe this approach, we should note that Modal Meinongians tend to
subscribe to a broader theory than possibilism. As many philosophers
have noted, fictional narratives are often inconsistent. The Holmes
stories, for example, characterize Dr Watson as having a war wound on
a single shoulder, variously given as his left and his right shoulder.
Lewis (1983a: 277-8) suggests that, typically, impossible
fictions can be dealt with by invoking only possible worlds (on
Lewis's preferred view, both ph and not-ph can be true in
such an impossible fiction, but not their conjunction). But there are
difficulties with this suggestion when extended to certain deeply
entrenched contradictions. Thus consider certain time-travel stories.
Priest himself concocts a story that wouldn't make sense unless
a particular fictional box--Sylvan's box--was an
impossible object (Priest 2005: 125ff.). Philosophers like Priest
invoke impossible worlds to deal with such stories, and argue that
some fictional objects are impossible objects to the extent that the
only worlds in which the stories that characterize them are true are
impossible worlds.


### 1.2 Meinong and Neo-Meinongianism



According to possibilism (perhaps extended to allow some fictional
objects to be impossible objects), fictional objects are just like
actual objects, except that they exist only in various non-actual
worlds. Like actual objects, they are determinate down to the last
detail in worlds in which they exist (so long as the stories that
characterize them represent the world as being determinate down to the
last detail). This is so even if the stories do not themselves fill in
these details. For example, in worlds in which the Holmes stories are
true, Holmes is left-handed, right-handed, or ambidextrous, even
though the stories themselves do not tell us which (all that is true
in the *Holmes stories* is that, having hands, he is
*one* of these).


#### 1.2.1 Meinong's theory of objects



The view that fictional objects are *Meinongian objects*
constitutes a very different metaphysical option. Meinong (1904)
thought that among the entities that have some kind of being, there
are *real* entities (entities with (spatio)temporal being
-- these can be physical or mental) and *ideal* entities
(entities whose mode of being is non-temporal or abstract, such as
numbers and relations). In addition, there are the paradigmatic
Meinongian objects that lack any kind of being, such as the golden
mountain and the round square. Meinong himself used "[mere]
subsistence" (*Bestand*) for the non-temporal kind of
being, reserving "existence" (*Existenz*) for the
temporal kind. "Sein" was his word for the most general
kind of being, which includes both *Bestand* and
*Existenz*, thus putting entities that do not have being in
either sense outside the scope of *Sein*. To simplify
terminological matters, unless we specify otherwise we will use
"exists" for the most general mode of being, i.e.,
Meinong's *Sein*. Meinong's view, then, is that
there are objects that have no form of existence, or being,
whatsoever.



Even though Meinongian objects do not exist, they do have properties.
In particular, Meinong thought that their being such-and-so (their
*Sosein*) is independent of their being or *Sein*. These
*Sosein*-specifying properties, moreover, are precisely the
properties in terms of which the objects are descriptively given. This
claim is captured by the so-called *Characterization
Principle*, whose explicit formulation is due to Routley (1980:
46) but which is already implicit in Meinong 1904 (1960: 82).
According to this Principle, objects, whether they exist or not, have
the properties in terms of which they are given or characterized;
schematically, the thing that is characterized as being *F* is
in fact *F*. Take, for instance, the golden mountain or the
round square. The golden mountain does not exist, yet we can say that
it is both golden and a mountain since these are the properties in
terms of which the object is characterized; similarly, the round
square is both round and square, even though it *cannot*
exist.



It is commonly assumed that for Meinong fictional objects are just a
subset of his Meinongian objects--they are Meinongian objects
that are given in terms of the properties they have in the stories
that feature them. Note that the problem for possibilism mentioned
towards the end of the last section disappears on this account. For,
so conceived, fictional entities do in fact possess the properties in
terms of which they are characterized in the relevant narratives:
Holmes really does have a high degree of cleverness, higher, perhaps,
than that possessed by any actual detective, and so
 (1)
 might well be true. Note also that fictional entities so conceived
are not completely determined with respect to their properties, unlike
fictional entities conceived on the model of possibilism. Because
Conan Doyle's stories are quiet on these matters, Holmes on the
Meinongian model is not right-handed; nor is he left-handed; nor is he
ambidextrous. He does, however, have the property of being one of
these. (One caution. Although this is the usual understanding of
Meinong's conception of fictional objects, Meinong may not have
endorsed it in precisely this form: his most complete account of
fictional objects suggests that they are higher-order entities, that
is, entities that are constructed out of simpler entities, in the same
sense in which, for instance, a melody is an entity constructed out of
its constituent sounds (cf. Raspa 2001 and Marek 2008 [2013]).


#### 1.2.2 Concrete and abstract neo-Meinongianism



Modern versions of Meinongianism accept much of what Meinong has to
say on the topic of nonexistent objects, but depart from his account
at various points. Suppose we restrict our attention to properties
appropriate to physical, spatiotemporal objects (for example,
*being a mountain* or *being a detective*). What,
following Reicher (2023), we might call *concrete*
neo-Meinongianism (Parsons 1980, Routley 1980, Jacquette 1996)
maintains that Meinongian objects characterized in terms of such
properties are concrete correlates of sets of such properties,
possessing the properties in exactly the same sense as ordinary
concrete objects have properties. Corresponding to a set *S* of
such properties, there is a concrete object that has (at least) the
properties contained in *S*. Corresponding to {*being
golden*, *being a mountain*}, for example, there is the
golden mountain, which has the properties of *being a mountain*
and *being golden* (as well, perhaps, as all properties
*P* such that necessarily, whatever is a golden mountain is
*P*). These properties constitute the nature or essence of the
golden mountain. But the golden mountain also has other properties, in
particular properties that reflect its relationship to actual objects
in the world (*being often thought about by Meinong*, for
example). Like Meinong himself, concrete Meinongians think that such
objects lack existence in the broad sense, i.e. the kind of existence
appropriate to concrete or abstract objects. And while some are
neutral on the question of whether there might be an even more
inclusive mode of being possessed by nonexistent object (Parsons 1980:
10), others are adamant that there is no such mode. Routley has the
most extreme version of this view; his "noneism" holds
that the only mode of being is existence narrowly construed as the
possession of causal powers and/or spatiotemporal location, a view
shared by Priest's version of Modal Meinongianism (Priest 2005,
2016). (Against such a Routley-style concrete neo-Meinongianism, David
Lewis has famously argued that we should repudiate any understanding
of existence on which " it can be a substantive thesis that only
some of the things there are exist--or, for that matter, ...
a substantive thesis that everything exists" (Lewis 1990:
32).



Concrete neo-Meinongians claim that fictional objects can similarly be
regarded as concrete correlates of sets of properties. Consider
Holmes, a cocaine-addicted detective who lives (lived) in London at
221B Baker Street, solves many baffling crimes, has a friend called
"Watson", and so on (where the "and so on"
includes all the properties *P* such that it is true in the
Holmes stories that Holmes has *P*). For concrete
neo-Meinongians, Holmes is a concrete, albeit nonexistent, correlate
of the set having those properties as members. (An interesting variant
of these neo-Meinongian views is Castaneda's
guise-theory, according to which an existent individual is a bundle of
*guises*--particulars formed from sets of properties by a
special concretizing operation--related by a relation of
*consubstantiation*. An object like the golden mountain is a
guise that is not consubstantiated with any guise, not even itself,
and so doesn't exist. Castaneda takes fictional objects
to be bundles of guises related by a special relation of
*consociation*; see Castaneda 1989: ch.11.)



While agreeing that fictional objects form a subset of Meinongian
objects, *abstract* neo-Meinongians (the label is again from
Reicher 2023) maintain that Meinongian objects in general should be
conceived of as objects that have a non-spatiotemporal mode of
existence, and hence as abstract rather than concrete (see especially
Zalta 1983)). And while they agree with the idea that for any
collection of properties there is an individual that has all these
properties, they do not take Meinongian objects to be correlates of
sets of properties in anything like the way described by concrete
neo-Meinongians. Instead, they take them to be something like generic
objects or roles, along the model of Platonic attributes. (Indeed,
Zalta and others have used his theory to model a range of
philosophical notions, including Platonic forms; see Zalta 1983:
41-7, and Pelletier & Zalta 2000.) Consider the golden
mountain again. For abstract neo-Meinongians, this object is not a
mountain in the same sense that Mt Taranaki, for example, is a
mountain. The golden mountain is an abstract object, and mountains are
not abstract objects. It is more akin to the object referred to as the
U.S. President in the following statement:


* (3) The US
President faces an election every four years,



where the subject is not a particular US President like George W. Bush
or Barack Obama, but rather the role or office of US President. (While
Zalta is the clearest example of an abstract neo-Meinongian in our
sense, others come close. For example, Rapaport (1978) considers
*M*-objects (his version of Meinongian objects) to be akin to
plans rather than concrete individuals, and plans are presumably
abstract objects.) Note finally that while abstract neo-Meinongians
take Meinongian objects like the golden mountain and Sherlock Holmes
to exist in the broad sense, they agree on the importance of the
*nonexistence datum*: Zalta, for example, emphasizes that while
Holmes has being, i.e., existence in the broad sense, 'he'
lacks existence in the narrow, more salient, sense of having
spatiotemporal location (Zalta 1988: 21).



There are other realist positions which, although admittedly not
Meinongian, come close to this abstract form of neo-Meinongianism. The
realist view of Wolterstorff (1980), for example, takes fictional
objects to be Platonic kinds whose instances or examples are ordinary
objects that have properties like being a famous detective, living in
London, being called 'Holmes', etc. (in the case of the
fictional object *Holmes*); it thereby shares with abstract
neo-Meinongianism a form of Platonism about fictional objects. Others
take them to be work-bound roles (Currie 1990), thereby holding a form
of abstractionism that leads to a conception of fictional objects as
dependent entities, like the conception explicitly defended by
creationists (see below). (Indeed, even the idea of fictional objects
as kinds can be given a creationist rather than Platonist
interpretation; see Terrone 2017, which interprets fictional objects
as abstract types dependent on mental files.)



Before turning to another important point of disagreement among
neo-Meinongians, it is worth emphasizing that abstract
neo-Meinongianism should be considered an unorthodox variant of
Meinongianism on the usual understanding of Meinong's view.
After all, if Meinongian objects are abstract then they must all have
*Sein* or existence in the broad sense, contrary to what
Meinong is generally taken to have thought. (There is some evidence,
however, that Meinong later also contemplated a more Platonist way of
understanding such objects, taking them to function as abstract
universals that serve as "auxiliary" objects for the
comprehension of real objects, see Meinong (1915 [1972]: 739f.)


#### 1.2.3 Two kinds of properties vs. two modes of predication



The distinction between concrete and abstract neo-Meinongians is drawn
at the metaphysical level. It is closely linked to another distinction
relevant to Meinongian objects, and so to fictional objects conceived
of as Meinongian objects: that between kinds of properties and modes
of predication. Recall that on the one hand it seems natural to say
that fictional objects have the properties in terms of which stories
characterize them (for instance, Anna Karenina was a woman driven to
suicide by her failed affair, and Sherlock Holmes a cocaine-addicted
detective living in London), and on the other hand not in the least
natural (Anna Karenina may have committed suicide, but it is no use
looking for news of her suicide in the newspapers of the day). Now,
all neo-Meinongians accept Meinong's view that a Meinongian
object possesses the properties in terms of which it is characterized.
Following what Meinong (1972 [1915]) himself came to say on the basis
of a suggestion by his student Ernst Mally, some neo-Meinongians (for
example, Parsons 1980, Jacquette 1996) take these properties to be the
object's nuclear properties, where, in general, if *M* is
the Meinongian object correlated with a set of properties *S*,
the members of *S* are the object's nuclear properties.
On this view, *being a detective*, for example, is a nuclear
property of Holmes, while *being a king* is a nuclear property
of King Arthur. (Routley similarly talks of an object's
*characterizing* properties; cf. Routley 1980: 507-10.)
But a Meinongian object also has other properties on this view: its
*extranuclear properties* are those of its properties that are
not among its nuclear or characterizing properties. In the case of
fictional objects, these are the properties that a fictional object
has outside the scope of the story in which it
appears--properties, we might say, that it has in virtue of the
way the world *really* is, not properties that it has from the
point of view of that story. Consider, for example, the following two
sentences:


* (4) Mickey
Mouse is a pop culture icon
* (5) Anna
Karenina is a fictional character.



These sentences involve properties--*being a pop culture
icon*, *being a fictional character*--that are being
ascribed to Mickey Mouse and Anna Karenina even though the properties
do not characterize these characters in the stories in which they
appear. Mickey Mouse has the first property because of the effects of
his enormous popularity on pop culture, not because he is depicted as
a pop culture icon in the Mickey Mouse stories. Anna Karenina has the
second property because of her status as the product of creative
fiction, not because of what Tolstoy's story says about her
(according to Tolstoy's story she is a woman, not a fictional
character). These two properties are typical instances of extranuclear
properties.



(A cautionary comment. In light of what we have just said, the claim
that the properties true of a fictional object in a work count as the
object's nuclear properties needs qualification. It is true in
the Holmes stories, for example, that Holmes exists, even though
Holmes doesn't actually exist. So non-existence is one of
Holmes's (extranuclear) properties despite the fact that in the
stories Holmes is as much an existent object as he is a detective
living in London. One way of dealing with this apparent tension is to
insist that Holmes does have a property like existence, but that this
property should be understood as a weaker, 'watered-down',
version of its extranuclear counterpart, a notion first advanced by
Meinong (cf. Parsons 1980: 44, 184-6). We return to the notion
of watered-down versions of extranuclear properties below.)



Some other neo-Meinongians claim instead that fictional and other
Meinongian objects possess the very same kind of properties that
ordinary individuals possess, but possess them in a very different
way. (This suggestion was first made by Mally (1912), but not adopted
by Meinong.) When, for example, we say that Anna Karenina was a woman
and Holmes an inhabitant of London, we use a different mode of
predication from the one we use when we say that Marilyn Monroe was a
woman or Tony Blair an inhabitant of London. On Zalta's familiar
formulation of this idea (Zalta 1983), fictional entities
*encode* such properties while ordinary individuals simply
*exemplify* them. Similarly, Castaneda (1989) appeals to
an *internal* as well as *external* mode of predication
of properties, while Rapaport (1978) talks of properties that are
constituents of objects and properties that are exemplified by
objects. Both Anna Karenina and Marilyn Monroe, we might say, have the
property of *being a woman*, but the former encodes the
property (the property is predicated of Anna internally, or Anna has
it as a constituent), while the latter exemplifies the property (she
has it externally).



But fictional objects also exemplify properties, perhaps some of the
very same properties they encode or have internally (this happens
whenever these properties are predicated of the objects in the stories
in which they appear). Thus, what makes both
 (4)
 and
 (5)
 true is that the properties of *being a pop culture icon* and
*being a fictional character* are exemplified, or possessed
externally, by Mickey Mouse and Anna Karenina respectively. Anna
Karenina therefore turns out to be internally non-fictional (since it
is true in the novel that she is a woman, not a fictional character),
and externally fictional.



That said, note that there are important differences between the ways
in which Zalta, on the one hand, and Castaneda and Rapaport, on
the other, formulate these distinctions. For Zalta (1983: 12),
encoding is a primitive notion that he embeds in a rigorous
higher-order modal theory which is then used to prove the existence,
and derive the properties, of abstract objects, including fictional
objects. The fact that encoding is a primitive notion is not seen as a
drawback, given the fruitfulness of the notion once embedded in a
general theory of abstract objects (Bueno & Zalta 2017). For both
Castaneda (1989: 200) and Rapaport (1978: 162), on the other
hand, internal predication applies to set-correlates, and so this mode
of predication can be defined in terms of set-membership: a
(fictional) entity *F* has *P* internally (or: has
*P* as a constituent) if and only if *P* belongs to the
property set that is correlated with *F*.



On the surface, the 'modes of predication' distinction
appears to be in a better position to handle the data than the
'kinds of properties' distinction (for more on these
distinctions, see the exchange between Jacquette (1989) and Zalta
(1992)). For one thing, there seems to be no workable criterion for
distinguishing nuclear and extranuclear properties: some properties
seem to be both. Consider the property of *being a fictional
character*. *Being a fictional character* may seem to be
the prototypical candidate of an extranuclear property, as the case of
(5) above testifies, but there may well be 'metafictional'
narratives whose protagonists are not characterized in the usual way
as flesh and blood individuals, but instead as fictional characters.
(The fictional character The Father in Pirandello's *Six
Characters in Search of an Author* is a famous case in point.) So
*being a fictional character* seems to qualify as both a
nuclear and an extranuclear property. Defenders of the 'modes of
predication' distinction have no problem here: they hold that we
can *externally* predicate *being a fictional character*
of both Anna Karenina and Pirandello's The Father, while we can
also *internally* predicate this property of The Father. (It
should be pointed out that defenders of the 'kinds of
properties'-distinction have their own way of responding to this
problem: they say that in such cases the nuclear property in question
is the 'watered-down' counterpart of the corresponding
extranuclear property. On this view, Pirandello's The Father has
the extranuclear property of *being a fictional character* as
well as its nuclear 'watered-down' correlate. But apart
from the seemingly *ad hoc* character of this response, it is
faced by a more serious problem: it threatens to expose the
distinction to an endless regress of ever more 'watered-
down' nuclear properties (cf. Voltolini 2006).)



It is probably fair to say that at the current stage of the debate the
'modes of predication' distinction is more widely
accepted, although as far as fictional entities at least are
concerned, both distinctions are taken to be problematic (Everett
2013). We should remember, however, that this debate is internal to
neo-Meinongianism, and that neo-Meinongianism as a theory of fictional
objects has important virtues that owe nothing to the outcome of this
debate. One such virtue is that the theory can account for the idea
that fictional entities *necessarily* have the properties that
they are characterized as having in the relevant stories. It is hard
to see how Holmes could *not* have been a detective, for
example. Of course, Doyle might have written a story in which someone
called 'Holmes' was a film director, but it is hard not to
interpret this thought as simply meaning that Doyle might have created
another character with the same name. At the same time, it is a plain
truth of the Holmes stories that Holmes might never have become a
detective, that this was a purely contingent choice on Holmes's
part. No matter how it is formulated, neo-Meinongianism has a way of
capturing both these intuitions. On Zalta's formulation of the
'modes of predication' distinction, for example, Holmes
exemplifies the property of *being necessarily such that he encodes
both being a detective and being someone who might not have been a
detective*. A neo-Meinongian advocating the 'types of
property' distinction would say that Holmes has the extranuclear
property of *being necessarily such that he has the (nuclear)
property of being a detective*, but that he also has the
(watered-down) nuclear property of *being someone who might not
have been a detective*.



On the basis of the essentialist idea that fictional objects
necessarily have the properties that they are characterized as having
in the relevant stories, neo-Meinongians have suggested a simple
criterion for the identity of fictional entities, one which can be
traced back to the criterion for the identity of Meinongian objects in
general: If *x* has all the same nuclear properties as
*y* (alternatively, if *x* and *y* internally
possess the same properties), then \(x = y\) (cf., for example,
Parsons 1980: 28, 188).



Despite the apparent attractions of such a view, there is an evident
problem facing the underlying thought that once you have a certain
collection of properties you *ipso facto* have a fictional
entity. (Note that (most) neo-Meinongians accept this thought, since
they take fictional objects to be a subset of the class of objects
generated on the basis of something like Meinong's Principle of
the Freedom of Assumption (cf. Meinong 1915 [1972: 282]), the
principle that for any collection of (nuclear) properties there is a
Meinongian object that has those properties.) But generating fictional
entities is surely not quite *that* easy. Take an arbitrary
collection of properties, say {*weighing more than 10kgs*,
*bearing the name "Oscar"*, *having a passion
for garden gloves*, *being a devotee of the number 17*}.
The mere existence of this set of properties is not enough to generate
a fictional object, Oscar, with these properties. More has to happen.
(Kripke (2013: 70-1) mentions the historical case of the
Biblical term 'Moloch', which interpreters of the Bible
took to be a name for a mythical pagan god, whereas modern philology
suggests it was in fact used as a common noun either for kings or for
human sacrifices. If modern philology is right and Bible-interpreters
were confused, there is no mythical god Moloch. This is so even though
we can agree that there is a collection of properties that past
interpreters mistakenly understood the Bible to assign to such a
god.)



Neo-Meinongians have tried to circumvent this problem by stressing
that Meinongian objects, including fictional objects, are not sets of
properties, but *correlates* of such sets. Whether this move
enables neo-Meinongians to avoid admitting objects like Oscar and
Moloch into the overall domain of fictional objects will depend on how
this move is understood. (In Castaneda's variant of
neo-Meinongianism, fictional objects are systems of set-correlates,
built up, or put together, by a fiction maker (cf. Castaneda
1989: ch.11). But if this implies that the activity of fiction-making
is essential to the identity of fictional objects, we no longer have a
pure neo-Meinongianism but a view that is closer to the
'creationist' view described in the next section.)



Even if the idea of a set-correlate helps to solve this particular
problem, it seems that no neo-Meinongian theory is able to block
another problem that stems from letting the identity of such an object
depend on the properties in terms of which it is characterized. Take
Jorge Luis Borges's famous story of a man called Pierre Menard
who happens to write a text that is word for word identical with
Miguel Cervantes's *Don Quixote*. Assume, in this variant
of Borges's story, that Menard and Cervantes are unknown to each
other, even though they live in the very same town; one can even
suppose that they are neighbors. In that case, the Borges story
describes a situation in which one and the same set of properties
corresponds to different fictional objects: Cervantes's Don
Quixote and Pierre Menard's Don Quixote are two distinct
fictional characters who, nonetheless, share all the properties they
have in the respective works. (The 'Menard' case was first
mentioned in this context by Lewis (1978: 39). As a problem for the
identity of fictional objects, it was then exploited by Fine (1982:
107); see also Thomasson (1999: 7, 56).) In this case, claiming that
fictional objects are set-correlates rather than mere property sets
does not solve the problem, for we have only one set-correlate, yet
two distinct objects.



Intuitively speaking, the problem is clear. Neo-Meinongianism in all
its varieties tends to sketch a Platonistic picture of a fictional
entity, either as something akin to a Platonic attribute, or as a
correlate of something else that we tend to describe in Platonic
terms--a set of properties. Neo-Meinongianism thus sees a
fictional object as something that pre-dates the story-telling
activities that intuitively bring fictional objects into being. To see
the tension between these conceptions, note that we often speak of
fictional objects as the *creations* of storytellers or of the
human mind more generally. Neo-Meinongianism, so it seems, leaves no
such room for storytellers.


### 1.3 Creationism



The intuition that story-tellers have some kind of creative role to
play is accounted for by so called *artifactualist*, or
*creationist*, accounts of fictional entities (see Searle 1979,
Salmon 1998, Thomasson 1999, Voltolini 2006; the position was also
defended in Kripke 2013, and elements of the position are found in van
Inwagen's (1977) theory of fictional objects as posits of
literary criticism; Ingarden 1931 is a significant historical
forerunner). According to such accounts, fictional objects are
artifacts since they come into being once they are conceived by their
authors; to that extent, they are authorial creations. Moreover, they
are abstract entities, just as abstract neo-Meinongians believe.
Unlike Platonic *abstracta*, however, they not only have a
beginning in time, but they are also *dependent* entities since
they depend on other entities for their existence. (Roughly speaking,
an entity *O* existentially depends on another entity
*O*' just if *O* couldn't exist without
*O*' existing (cf. Thomasson 1999). For a more
discriminating account, one that avoids the consequence that
everything existentially depends on necessary existents like natural
numbers, see Fine 1994.) More specifically, fictional objects depend
historically rigidly on the authors who create them (necessarily, if
*O* comes into being at *t*, then the author(s) who
creates *O* exists at some time *t*' before
*t*) and constantly generically on the literary works that
feature them (necessarily, if *O* goes on existing, then some
literary work *W* or other featuring *O* exists during
*O*'s time of existence) (see Thomasson 1999 for an
extended discussion of such dependencies). While historical rigid
dependence accounts for a fictional object's coming into being,
constant generic dependence accounts for its continued existence or
persistence. Such an account of the persistence of fictional objects
seems as intuitive as the account of their generation. Not only do we
say that some given fictional object was created at a certain point of
time, but we might also describe it as having a certain *age*
(Hamlet, we might point out, is now over 400 years old).



Note that creationism thus characterized earns its keep from the
'obviousness' of the thought that authors somehow create
fictional characters through the creation of fictional works in which
they appear. Language seems to support this thought: we routinely hear
statements like "Hamlet is one of Shakespeare's most
complex creations". It is on the basis of this thought that
creationists then hypothesize that fictional objects literally are the
creations of their authors: not concrete creations, clearly, so
therefore non-concrete, abstract creations. But this move is far from
innocent. Yagisawa (2001), for example, argues that creationism
conflicts sharply with other seemingly obvious thoughts, for example
the nonexistence datum that fictional characters like Hamlet
don't exist (for a response, see Goodman 2004). At an even more
fundamental level, Brock (2010) argues that the creationist's
appeal to creation is explanatorily void, leaving more questions than
answers. Not only is it left unclear *when* a fictional object
is created, but also *how* it is created. Appealing to
authorial intentions, for example, is inadequate, for such intentions
may be lacking or overridden. (Brock considers an imaginary scenario
in which Doyle intended Holmes and Watson to be the same character,
but died before writing the story that revealed this (361-362).
Arguably, this wouldn't change the fact that Holmes is distinct
from Watson.) Some creationists have responded to such cases by
arguing for models of creation on which the creation of fictional
objects may be inadvertent, perhaps because of the role played by
readers or because of authorial confusion. (Lee 2022, Zvolenszky
2016).



Creationists themselves claim that the appeal to creation does solve a
number of significant problems that afflict other metaphysical
theories. There is, for example, no mythical god Moloch, for nobody
has created such an object by gathering various properties and
embedding them in a certain narrative. And although they share all the
properties attributed to them in the respective renditions of *Don
Quixote*, there are *two* Don Quixotes, Cervantes's
and Menard's, not just one, because there were two utterly
independent acts of authorial generation (cf. Voltolini 2006: 32ff.).
It is not clear, however, how creationists can deal with a related
problem that affects their theory, the problem of indiscriminable
fictional objects (Everett 2013: 191ff., Kroon 2015). Intuitively,
there were thousands of fictional dwarves who took part in
Tolkien's War between the Dwarves and Orcs, without
Tolkien's engaging in thousands of acts of dwarf-creation. (In
response to this worry, some creationists have denied that there are
such characters; see, for example, Voltolini 2006: 209-11,
Schnieder & von Solodkoff 2009: 147.)



It is evident, then, that creationism is not without its problems.
Perhaps the most significant ones have to do with the nature of the
creative process and the relation between the creative process and the
identity of fictional objects. It seems, for example, that what comes
into existence on the above account of the generating process (which
talks of authors' conceiving of their literary creations) is not
a fictional object as such, but rather a (mere) intentional object,
the target of a certain authorial thought. A mere intentional object
is not yet a fictional object, as Thomasson (1999:89) agrees, so what
makes it one? Does it become one by being able to be
'shared' by more than one person through appearing in a
text (maybe not a physical copy but one stored in memory)? Or is there
a more discriminating criterion to single out which intentional
objects are fictional objects?



This question is perhaps best answered by giving a somewhat different
account of the generating process. Thus, some creationists (Schiffer
1996, 2003; Thomasson 2003a,b) say that a fictional object comes into
being as an abstract artifact not when an author first conceives of
it, but only once a certain make-believe process has come to an end,
namely, the process in which someone--typically, a
story-teller--pretends that there is an individual who is
such-and-such and does so-and-so. It is disputable whether this
provides a sufficient condition for *ficta* generation; perhaps
something else is needed, such as a reflexive stance on the very
make-believe process itself (Voltolini 2006, 2015a, 2020a).



Creationists may even choose to downplay the issue of *ficta*
generation. Fictional objects can perhaps be construed as
institutional entities along the model of baptisms and marriages,
entities that figure in the general inventory of what there is, but do
so for free. Just as one can allow for the existence of baptisms and
marriages simply by appealing to constitutive rules along the model of
Searle's (1969) account of illocutionary acts, so one can say
that fictional objects come to exist once certain practices having do
with make-believe (and possibly also its recognition) are in force
(Thomasson 2003a,b, 2014; Voltolini 2020b). Alternatively, one may
appeal to regulative rules and say that, just like driving or
queueing, fiction requires an equilibrium solution to a coordination
problem in the communication, among consumers of fiction, of the
content of their imaginings. Fictional objects arguably provide
stability in such imaginings. On this picture, fictional objects,
*qua* institutional entities, are simply generated by the fact
that giving expression to such imaginings also counts as declaring
that things stand in a certain way, thereby constituting the very fact
they declare, much like standard declarations such as a declaration of
marriage (Abell 2020). (It is of course important for this view to
justify how the use of language resulting in *ficta* generation
can count as authoritative in the very same sense as the words of an
officer declaring, and thereby generating, a marriage.)



But whatever the right account, another question remains: even if we
agree on the nature of the process-type that gives rise to a fictional
object, *what* is the thing that is purportedly generated in
this way? What are the identity conditions for fictional objects?
Creationists typically do not think that a fictional object possesses
the properties that characterize it in the story in which it appears.
A fictional object simply has those properties *according to the
story*. It is not true of Holmes, for instance, that
'he' (or it) is a detective--only physical objects,
not an abstract artifact, can be a detective. In Williamson's
terms (2000: 203), it is not true that Holmes, as a cultural artifact,
is a detective that is fictional. Instead, what is true of Holmes is
that 'he' is a detective according to the Holmes stories
(equally, Holmes is male according to those stories, and so deserving
of the masculine pronoun "he"). In general, for
creationists the only properties that fictional objects genuinely
possess are the properties that neo-Meinongians would call
extranuclear or take to be externally predicated: properties like
*being a fictional detective* or *being Doyle's
creation* or even *being a detective according to the Holmes
stories* (cf. Thomasson 1999). The approach thus fails to account
for the idea, mentioned earlier, that there must be a sense in which
fictional objects *actually* have the properties that
characterize them in the relevant stories.



In addition, the restricted nature of such properties makes it hard to
see how to individuate a fictional entity. Thomasson gives sufficient
identity conditions for fictional entities *within* a literary
work: *x* and *y* are the same fictional object
*F* if *x* and *y* are ascribed exactly the same
properties in the work (1999: 63). But what do we say in the case of
fictional objects that appear in different works? Thomasson admits
that in this case one can only provide a necessary condition:
*x* and *y* are the same fictional object only if the
author of the second work \(W'\) is competently acquainted with
*x* of the previous work \(W\), and intends to import
*x* into \(W'\) as *y* (1999: 67). The reason why she
thinks this cannot be a sufficient condition is that, no matter what
the author's intentions are, he does not succeed in importing
*x* (an entity that appears in *W*) into \(W'\) as
*y* if he attributes properties to *y* that are too
radically different from the properties that were attributed to
*x* in *W* (1999: 68). (There are other cases that show
even more clearly how authorial intention can be thwarted. Thus,
consider a case of a *fusion* of characters, in which an author
intends to import into \(W'\) two characters *x* and
*y* from a previous work *W* as a single character
*z*. Clearly, given the transitivity of identity, *z* is
not identical with either *x* or *y*, so the author
fails in her attempt. Analogous problems arise in the converse
situation of character *fission*: cf. Voltolini 2012.)



The problem of the reliability of authorial intentions also arises in
another account, close to creationism, that has recently been
developed: the hylomorphist account (Evnine 2016). Just as ordinary
artifacts (chairs, tables, statues ...) amount to the particular
arrangements of certain materials in accordance with certain creative
intentions, so fictional objects come into play by arranging material
of a specific kind, viz., the properties predicated in a certain
fiction, in accordance with certain authorial intentions. On this
model, fictional objects have their characterizing properties, albeit
merely contingently (the authorial plan may change). Once again,
however, what specific authorial intention is in play and how it may
be put into force is a matter of debate. As before, there may be no
creative intention, or it may be overridden (to come back to a
previous example, few would take Holmes to be assembled out of
properties that include *being identical to Watson*, even if
Conan Doyle had, perversely, intended this).



To conclude this discussion of the metaphysics of fictional objects,
it is worth noting that neo-Meinongian and creationist theories seem
to suffer from complementary defects. On the one hand, neo-Meinongians
provide exact identity criteria for fictional objects, but these
criteria are clearly insufficient in that they do not take into
account the fact that such objects are products of the human mind. On
the other hand, creationists do account for this fact, but they only
provide relatively non-specific identity criteria for such entities.
Those theories are normally taken to be incompatible, for they appeal
to different metaphysical models--broadly speaking, a Platonic
model as opposed to a constructivist one. This claim of
incompatibility should not be taken as definitive, however; there may
well be ways in which the two theories, or perhaps the most promising
elements of each theory, can somehow be combined (for recent attempts
to go in such a direction, cf. Zalta 2000, Voltolini 2006).


## 2. The Ontology of Fictional Entities



The metaphysical question about fictional entities asked what such
entities are like, should there be any. We now turn to the ontological
question, which simply asks whether there are any such entities.


### 2.1 Semantical Arguments for and Against Realism



Obviously the important division at the ontological level lies between
those who believe that there are fictional
entities--*fictional realists*--and those who believe
that there are no such entities--*fictional antirealists*.
For a long time, the battlefield between those two parties has been
ordinary language. Realists have always been fascinated by the fact
that there are sentences in language that seem to commit one to
fictional entities. Antirealists have instead insisted that such
appearances are deceptive: whenever a sentence seems to commit one to
fictional entities, one can always provide a paraphrase which has the
same truth-conditions as the original sentence but is not so
committed. Realists in turn try to show either that those paraphrases
are inadequate or that there are still further sentences for which no
adequate paraphrases can be found. Antirealists will reply that,
despite appearances, these sentences can also be paraphrased in
noncommittal terms; and so the game goes on.


#### 2.1.1 Russell's anti-realism



Frege (1892) is often taken to be the first champion of fictional
antirealism within analytic philosophy, in so far as he held that in
direct (*gerade*) contexts such as "Odysseus came
ashore" the fictional name "Odysseus" has a sense
but no reference. But Frege also held that in oblique
(*ungerade*) contexts such as "John believed that
Odysseus came ashore" and "The author of the
*Odyssey* says that Odysseus came ashore" this sense
becomes the new referent of the fictional name. If senses of this type
can model the notion of a fictional entity, then Frege can be
construed as a kind of fictional realist (Kunne 1990); otherwise,
he can't. (Parsons (1982) is doubtful; Zalta may be more
sympathetic, since he thinks his abstract objects can model both the
notion of sense (Zalta 2001) and the idea of a fictional object.)



The modern form of the realism-antirealism debate, however, did not
originate with anything Frege said on the matter, but with a dispute
between Meinong (1904) and Russell (1905a). Consider a sentence
like:


* (6) Apollo is
young.



According to Meinong, considered here as the paradigmatic realist, the
very meaningfulness of this statement commits one to a (broadly)
fictional entity--the deity of the Greek myths--on the
grounds, roughly, that the thought expressed by the statement is
directed at this entity, and so requires there to be such an entity.
The statement itself expresses a truth rather than a falsehood about
this entity. For Russell, however, appearances in this case were
deceptive. First of all, he thought that "Apollo", like
any other ordinary proper name, is short-hand for a definite
description--say, "the sun-god". Secondly, following
his discovery of the theory of definite descriptions Russell held that
a sentence containing a definite description has to be analyzed in
terms of another sentence in which the description is eliminated in
favor of quantifiers, predicates, logical connectives, and genuine
proper names. What (6) says on this account is given by a paraphrase
in which the definite description for which "Apollo" is
short-hand, namely "the sun-god", has disappeared on
analysis:


* (6R) There is
at least one sun-god and at most one sun-god and every sun-god is
young.



(Put more simply: There is a unique sun-god, and he is young.)



Thirdly, there is no longer even the appearance of a singular term
("Apollo") that must designate something for the
paraphrase to be meaningful. In fact, Russell saw that this result
showed the original statement to be both meaningful (because able to
be analyzed in this way) and false (given obvious facts). Say that a
definite description has a *Russellian denotation* when the
Russellian conditions for the description to have a denotation are
fulfilled; that is, when there is at least one individual satisfying
the relevant predicate, but no more than one. Then we can say that the
definite description for which "Apollo" is short-hand does
not have a Russellian denotation since (6R)'s first conjunct,
namely:


* (7) There is
at least one sun-god



is false. Far from making
 (6)
 meaningless, the absence of a denotation in this Russellian sense
when taken in conjunction with Russell's eliminative strategy
shows (6) to be false. Russell thought that his theory of definite
descriptions allowed him to show that all fictional names lacked
denotation in this way, and that sentences containing fictional names
were therefore true or false rather than meaningless.


#### 2.1.2 Metafictional sentences and "in the fiction" operators



Let us accept, for argument's sake, that the adoption of
Russell's theory of descriptions allows us to avoid ontological
commitment to such 'bizarre' entities as nonexistent
fictional and mythological entities. (Although this is a widely
accepted view, there is in fact reason to doubt it: David Kaplan
argues that it is "one of [the] virtues" of
Russell's theory that the theory is "essentially neutral
with respect to ontological commitment", that it permits
descriptions to denote nonexistent entities if there are such entities
(Kaplan 2005: 975-6; cf. also Voltolini 2006: 139ff.). Even if
Russell's theory is ontologically potent in this way, however,
the theory as formulated faces a simple and seemingly devastating
objection: many intuitively true sentences come out as *false*
on their Russellian paraphrases. Consider sentence
 (6)
 again. If we use Russell's theory to dispense with an entity
like Apollo, it follows that (6) is false, insofar as its Russellian
paraphrase is false. This is widely acknowledged to be
counterintuitive. Presented with (6), most would say that it is
intuitively true, unlike, say:


* (8) Apollo is
a rock-star.



As it turns out, the antirealist who follows Russell has an easy way
of circumventing this problem. She will point out that the reason why
 (6),
 but not (8), seems to be true is that *in the Greek myth*
things are exactly as (6) says. The impression that (6) is true can
then easily be accommodated by taking (6) to be elliptical for a
longer sentence, namely:


* (6I)
According to the Greek myth, Apollo is young.



Here the locution "according to the Greek myth" works as
an intensional operator, whereas the sentence following that operator,
which is nothing but (6) itself, has to be analyzed in Russellian
fashion:


* (6IR)
According to the Greek myth, there is a unique sun-god and he is
young.



(A caveat. It would be more proper to say that it is a *use* of
 (6)
 that is taken to be elliptical for (6IR), rather than (6) itself. For
(6) is a case of a *fictional* sentence, namely a sentence that
could easily occur in the body of a narrative (a myth, in this case).
Such sentences have a use on which they have merely fictional
truth-conditions, that is, truth-conditions from the stand-point of
the narrative or work of fiction, and on this kind of use even their
truth-values are merely fictional. Following Evans (1982), who here
borrows a Quinean terminology, we may call this the *conniving*
use of such sentences: the use on which the utterer is engaged in
pretense or make-believe. But there is another use of the same
sentences--what Evans calls the *non-conniving*
use--on which we take them to have real truth-conditions, hence
real truth-values: the kind of use on which we take
 (8),
 unlike (6), to express a real falsehood. A case in point would be an
utterance of (8) in response to a request for information about Apollo
in an exam on Greek mythology. We shall call sentences of the form
 (6I),
 even reshaped as (6IR), *internal metafictional* sentences,
for they purport to say how things stand in, or according to, a
certain fiction. They are meant as sentences that capture the
non-conniving use of fictional sentences like (6).)



Let us now go back to the amendment to Russellianism we were
considering. On the view being discussed, an expression like
"according to the Greek myth" is, *qua* intensional
operator, a circumstance-shifting operator, one that shifts the
circumstance of evaluation of the sentence following it. Suppose, for
the sake of argument, that a sentence of the form "According to
story *S*, *p*" is true in the actual world if and
only if "*p*" is true at the closest possible
worlds to the actual world in which *S* is true (cf. Lewis
1978). Now, any sentence that this operator embeds has to be analyzed
in Russellian terms if it contains a singular term. In that case, a
sentence like
 (6I)
 is true in the actual world if and only if
 (6),
 i.e.,
 (6R),
 is true at the closest possible worlds in which the Apollo-myth is
true. Insofar as (6R) is indeed true at such worlds, the singular term
in question--"Apollo", that is, "the
sun-god"--has a (Russellian) denotation in those worlds,
even though it lacks a denotation in the actual world. Hence, we again
get the result Russell desired: the whole sentence is true although
the relevant singular term has no actual denotation but only a
possible one. Thus, no commitment to fictional entities arises out of
the truth of that sentence.



Or rather, no such commitment arises from Russell's theory on
its own. If we assume Lewis's modal realism, then saying as we
did that a description has a possible denotation entails an
ontological commitment to fictional objects as *possibilia*.
Normally, however, this intensionalist approach is taken in an
antirealist sense (cf., e.g., Lamarque & Olsen 1994; Orenstein
2003; Rorty 1982). For the Russellian, central to this antirealist
understanding is the fact that a sentence like
 (6I)
 should be given a *de dicto*, not a *de re*, reading:
what is said to be true in the fiction is a certain *dictum* or
proposition, not the claim, about some given thing or *res*
*x*, that *x* has a certain property. On Russell's
way of understanding this distinction, the description "the
sun-god" for which "Apollo" is short-hand should be
interpreted as having a secondary, not a primary, occurrence in the
sentence, or, which is the same, the existential quantifier occurring
in the Russellian paraphrase of the sentence should be assigned
narrow, not wide, scope. (6I), that is, should be read as:
"According to the Apollo-myth, there is exactly one sun-god, and
he is young" rather than as "There is a unique sun-god,
and according to the myth he is young". The reason for this is
evident. If we adopt the wide-scope reading of the quantifier, the
sentence turns out to be false, not true (given that there is no
sun-god); and it is the truth of a sentence like (6I) that the
Russellian aims to capture.



Suppose that the Russellian amendment works for fictional sentences on
their non-conniving use. Intuitively, however, there are many
sentences that talk of fictional characters even though they do not
even *implicitly* mention stories. Let us call these
*external metafictional* sentences (some other commentators
talk of "transfictive" or "critical"
sentences).
 (4)
 and
 (5)
 above are typical examples. Clearly, (4) and (5) cannot be taken as
elliptical for internal metafictional sentences such as:


* (4I)
According to the Disney stories, Mickey Mouse is a pop culture
icon
* (5I)
According to *Anna Karenina*, Anna Karenina is a fictional
character.



For unlike
 (4)
 and
 (5),
 the latter sentences are simply false even on their *de dicto*
reading (a point already stressed by Lewis (1978: 38)): Mickey Mouse
has the status of a pop culture icon in the actual world, not in the
Disney stories; and according to *Anna Karenina*, Anna is a
woman, not a fictional character. Many realists, especially
creationists, have concluded that sentences of this kind really do
establish that we are committed to fictional characters. They argue
that even though fictional sentences on their non-conniving use can be
paraphrased as internal metafictional sentences on their *de
dicto* reading and thus do not commit us to fictional characters,
external metafictional sentences cannot be paraphrased in this way,
and their truth really does commit us to fictional characters (see,
for example, Schiffer 1996 and Thomasson 2003b).



One possible antirealist solution to this problem--although not
one that Russellians themselves have promoted--is to invoke a
kind of fictionalism about fictional characters. On this strategy,
sentences like (4) and (5) should be thought of as implicitly prefixed
by *another* intensional "in the fiction" operator,
so that even in this case the impression of reference to a fictional
entity would turn out to be baseless. In cases of this type, the
operator would appeal not to a story but rather to the realist
presumption that such an impression seems to support. The suggestion,
then, is that external metafictional sentences are to be read as
implicitly prefixed by an operator like "according to the
fiction of realism" or "according to the realist's
hypothesis":


* (4F)
According to the realist's hypothesis, Mickey Mouse is a pop
culture icon.
* (5F)
According to the realist's hypothesis, Anna Karenina is a
fictional character.



Once external metafictional sentences are read this way, any apparent
commitment to fictional entities seems to disappear, provided once
again that the resulting complex sentences are read *de dicto*
(for such a move, see Brock 2002, Phillips 2000).


#### 2.1.3 The descriptivist problem for theories of fictional names



The appeal to intensional "in the fiction" operators is a
well-known strategy for dealing with the apparent truth of statements
like
 (6),
 and because it is available to Russell this may seem like good news
for Russell's antirealism, especially given the way the strategy
might be extended to external meta-fictional statements like
 (4)
 and
 (5).
 But such an amended version of Russellianism faces a problem already
faced by the unamended version of Russell's view. If such a
Russellianism is to provide the correct analysis of sentences like
(6), one has to assume that proper names are synonymous with definite
descriptions. This is because the strategy used in arriving at a
sentence like (6IR) involves replacing a proper name
("Apollo") with an equivalent definite description
("the sun-god"). But there are well-known, and widely
accepted, arguments against such a descriptivist view of proper names
(Donnellan 1972, Kripke 1972 [1980], 2013). In particular,
descriptions of the sort that speakers or communities standardly
associate with a name might simply fail to fit what the name really
refers to (in the actual world and relative to other possible worlds).
One response to this objection as far as fictional names like
"Apollo", "Holmes", etc., are concerned is to
reject descriptivism about ordinary names but endorse it for fictional
names (see, for example, Currie 1990: 158-162). On the surface,
however, this looks like an unpromising move: for one thing, it is
possible to attempt to engage in conversation about Apollo, believing
he is real, before coming to the realization that he is merely a
mythological figure, a possibility that is hard to explain if ordinary
names and fictional names have entirely different sorts of
meanings.



This descriptivist problem presents itself as a potential challenge to
any antirealist view that endorses a *de dicto* reading of
sentences like
 (6I)
 and
 (4F)
 /
 (5F).
 For how else, if not in terms of some kind of descriptivist view of
names like Russell's, are we to understand such *de
dicto* readings? If names are instead taken to be directly
referential--that is, if they are taken to be terms that do not
secure their reference by means of descriptive meanings--there
seems to be no room left for a *de dicto* as opposed to a
*de re* reading of such sentences, and, consequently, no room
for the thought that sentences containing (allegedly) empty names like
"Apollo" even have truth-conditions.



A particularly stark form of this dilemma is faced by what is perhaps
the most widely accepted post-Kripkean alternative to descriptivism,
namely Millianism, which holds that what a name contributes
semantically to the propositions expressed through the use of
sentences containing the name is just the name's referent. The
combination of Millianism and the antirealist view that fictional
names like "Apollo" lack reference (and so make no
contribution to the expression of propositions) appears to imply that
sentences like
 (6I)
 don't express any proposition, let alone true propositions.
There is now a lively industry devoted to finding Millianism-friendly
solutions to this quandary. Some Millians argue that what we see as
meaningful and even true concerns what is implicated rather than
semantically expressed by such sentences (e.g., Taylor 2000). Others
appeal to gappy or unfilled propositions. These are proposition-like
entities expressed by sentences containing empty names that can fail
to be true because of the gaps (see Braun 1993, 2005; Adams et al.
1997). Both Braun and Adams et al. argue that such gappiness
doesn't prevent internal metafictional sentences such as
"In the Holmes stories, Holmes is a detective" from
expressing truths. But they disagree about external metafictional
sentences like "Holmes is a fictional character", with
Adams et al. insisting that these too can be true despite the names
being non-referring, and Braun (2005) arguing that such statements
call for a creationist position on which the names in such sentences
refer to genuine, created fictional entities.



Millians are not the only ones to have grappled with the implications
that the Kripke-Donnellan attack on descriptivism has for the
semantics of fictional names. Michael Devitt, for example, another
early critic of descriptivism, has used the problem of fictional and
other empty names to argue against Millianism and in favor of his
version of a causal-historical theory of reference (cf. Devitt 1989).
And Mark Sainsbury argues in Sainsbury 2005 that names, including
fictional names, have singular but non-descriptive meanings that can
be specified in a Davidson-style truth theory whose background logic
is a Negative Free Logic (that is, a logic that counts simple or
atomic sentences containing empty names as false). Given the role
assigned to Negative Free Logic, it is scarcely surprising that the
greatest challenge for such a framework is again the problem of
external metafictional sentences such as
 (4):


* (4) Mickey Mouse is a
pop culture icon.



The latter has the appearance of an atomic sentence and so should,
implausibly, count as false on such a logic. In (2009) and (2011),
Sainsbury uses the idea of presupposition- / acceptance-relative truth
to deal with such problems, an idea that is related to ideas found in
the popular pretense-theoretic approach to fictional names. That is
the approach we turn to next.


#### 2.1.4 Pretense Theory



For the antirealist, the semantics of names presents an important
hurdle to attempts to accommodate the truth of internal and external
metafictional sentences featuring fictional names. Such difficulties
have suggested the need to look in a completely different direction.
As we saw before, it is important to acknowledge the role of pretense
in fictional talk and writing. A fictional sentence has a conniving
use when it is uttered within the context of a certain pretense
involving the telling of a story. Call such a context a
*fictional* context. Note that a sentence considered as uttered
in such a context does in a sense carry ontological commitments: it
carries *pretend* ontological commitments. For within the
context of the relevant pretense, the singular terms involved do refer
to things. For instance, to utter
 (6)
 in the context of telling the Greek myth is to utter a sentence in
which, from the perspective of the relevant pretense, the name
"Apollo" refers to a god. Consequently, the sentence has
*fictional* truth-conditions in that context (the sentence is
true in the world of that context just if the entity referred to as
"Apollo" in that context is young in that world) and has
also a *fictional* truth-value (considered as uttered in that
context, the sentence is true, for in the world of that
context--the world of the Greek myth--there is a god,
Apollo, who is indeed young). *Outside* that context,
however--that is, in a *real* context where there is no
pretense that the Greek myth is fact--a name like
"Apollo" refers to nothing. No endorsement of
descriptivism is here required. Quite simply, if the singular terms in
question are directly referential (currently the most popular view of
names), then a sentence containing a *fictional* proper name
will have no real truth-conditions, hence no real truth-value, since
any such term is really empty. Take the case of "Apollo",
which on this view has no referent when uttered in a real,
non-fictional context of utterance. Assuming it is a directly
referential term, it makes no truth-conditional contribution to
sentences that contain it. Hence, when uttered in a real context (6)
will have no truth-conditions, hence no truth-value. (The kernel of
this proposal is in Walton 1990; see Recanati 2000 and Everett 2013
for refinements.)



So far, so good. Remember, however, that the intuition that a sentence
like
 (6)
 is really, not just fictionally, true--hence, that it has real,
not just fictional, truth-conditions--is a powerful one. How can
a pretense antirealist account for this intuition?



As a first attempt, a pretense antirealist may try to combine the
virtues of the pretense account with the virtues of the intensionalist
approach. That is, she may first stick to the idea that on its
non-conniving use a sentence like (6) has to be taken as elliptical
for an internal metafictional sentence like
 (6I).
 But she may also insist that the "according to the story"
operator should be taken as a *context*-shifting operator, not
simply (like the familiar intensional operator "It is necessary
that") as a circumstance-shifting operator. That is, she may
insist that it is an operator that shifts not only the circumstances
of evaluation of the sentence it embeds, but also the context relevant
for the interpretation of such sentence--typically, the context
of its utterance. More precisely, if we take a fictional sentence
"*p*" on its non-conniving use as elliptical for
"According to the story *S*, *p*", then
"*p*" so understood is true in the actual world if
and only if "*p*", taken as uttered in the context
of the story *S* (that is, a fictional context), is true in the
world of that context.



The antirealist merits of this account are clear. It allows a proper
name like "Apollo" to be both genuinely empty, carrying no
commitment to any fictional entity, but also genuinely
non-descriptive. The embedded sentence containing the name ((6), say)
is understood as being uttered in a fictional context, and in that
context the name directly refers to an individual, the individual
existing in the world of the relevant pretense. Since this reference
occurs only in that fictional context, not in a real context, the name
really does remain empty. (This proposal can be traced back to Walton
1990; see also Adams et al. 1997.)



Despite these virtues, the suggestion faces a well-known criticism.
Kaplan calls such context-shifting operators 'monsters',
and claims that "none can be expressed in English (without
sneaking in a quotation device)" (1989a: 511). In the case of
indexicals, for example, "no operator can control ... the
indexicals within its scope, because they will simply leap out of its
scope to the front of the operator" (1989a: 510). To see how
this worry applies to a fictional sentence containing an indexical,
consider the famous first line of Proust's *In Search of Lost
Time*:


* (9) For a long
time I used to go to bed early.



Within the fictional context mobilized by Proust's telling his
story, the first person pronoun "I" refers to the person
narrating the events that constitute the imaginary world of
Proust's *Recherche*--an individual who exists only
in that world, not the actual world. Now, suppose we want to capture
the sense in which (9) is really true by reporting that the claim
expressed by (9) is true according to *In Search of Lost Time*.
On the above pretense-intensionalist approach, we might formulate this
suggestion as:


* (9PI)
According to *In Search of Lost Time*, for a long time I used
to go to bed early.



However, this equivalence clearly does not work. Assuming that you are
the person who utters (9PI), the sentence says that you used to go to
bed early for a long time in the imaginary world of Proust's
*Recherche*. But this is false, since you are not an inhabitant
of this world.



It may be possible to obviate Kaplan's problem in some way, for
instance by claiming that the context-shift affects the whole
sentence, not just the embedded one (Recanati 2000); but then one has
to show how such sentences may nonetheless have real truth-conditions,
and not merely fictional ones. Or the problem may turn out to be
restricted to the case of embedded indexicals, or even certain types
of indexicals. Predelli, for example, has argued that there are
examples of discourse about fiction using modal and temporal
indexicals that are best analyzed in terms of such context-shifting
Kaplanesque 'monsters' (Predelli 2008).



Be that as it may, one might try to simplify the pretense-theoretical
proposal by reversing the order of explanation. Rather than taking the
fictional sentence on its non-conniving use as elliptical for an
internal metafictional sentence, we might take the internal
metafictional sentence to be really true just when the fictional
sentence (on its non-conniving use) is really true. We might, that is,
follow Walton in treating the fictional sentence as
"primary"; cf. 1990: 401-2). It is in fact
relatively easy to discern the sense in which the fictional sentence
on its non-conniving use is really true. It is really true just in
case there is a pretense of a certain kind relative to which the
sentence on its conniving use is fictionally true. In short, the
fictional sentence is really true on its non-conniving use if and only
if it is fictionally true (for this formulation, see Crimmins 1998:
2-8). (Walton's 1990 own formulation of the point is
weaker, for it gives the proposal a *pragmatic* twist: by being
fictionally true, a sentence may be taken to assert, or to
*convey*, a real truth. See also Everett 2013.)



One advantage of such an antirealist move is that it can be used for
both fictional sentences and external metafictional sentences. For
Walton, what distinguishes the two cases is simply the kind of
pretense that makes the relevant sentence fictionally true. In the
former case, the game of make-believe that the relevant fictional
context singles out is an *authorized* one; that is, it is a
game authorized by what serves as a prop in that game (in the case of
a literary game of make-believe, the text written or narrated by the
storyteller); the prop dictates how things go in the world of that
game. In the latter case, the relevant game of make-believe is an
*unofficial*, albeit standard, one (1990: 417); in this case,
there may be no constraints--none, at least, provided by the
prop--that dictate how things stand in the world of that game
(cf. Walton 1990: 51, 406, 409).



Take (6) again. In order for (6) to be fictionally true, and hence for
it to be really true on its non-conniving use, the world of the Greek
myth must contain a god (Apollo) who is young. This is a consequence
of the fact that this is the way the myth is told. The myth-telling
functions as a prop constraining how the "Apollo" game of
make-believe has to be played; a person who makes believe that Apollo
is a rock-star is not playing the game correctly, or is perhaps
playing another game. But now consider
 (4).
 In order for an utterance of (4) to be fictionally true, hence for it
to be really true on its non-conniving use, it must allude to a game
in which there is a fictional character named "Mickey
Mouse" who has the special property of *being a pop culture
icon*--a 'Meinongian' pretense, as Recanati
(2000) calls it. Now, such a game is not constrained by any text;
there is no Mickey Mouse story that describes Mickey Mouse in these
terms. The game in question is instead one where facts about the
important place occupied in popular culture by the Mickey Mouse
stories are what make it fictionally true in the game that Mickey
Mouse has the special property of *being a pop culture icon*.
To that extent the game is an unofficial one.



On this account, then, external metafictional sentences enjoy no
special status; in particular, they don't provide us with a
reason for assuming the existence of fictional entities. Our final
example returns us to Pirandello's *Six Characters in Search
of an Author*. Consider an utterance of:


* (10) The
Father is a fictional character.



On the one hand, this is an external metafictional sentence of the
very same kind as (5), a sentence that the speaker uses to describe
the metaphysical status of one of the protagonists of
Pirandello's work. On the other hand, (10) may also be taken as
a fictional sentence, since Pirandello's play is characterized
by the fact that its protagonists are not ordinary concrete
individuals but fictional characters. In such a case, the sentence has
two distinct non-conniving uses. On its use as a fictional sentence it
is allegedly equivalent to:


* (10')
According to *Six Characters in Search of an Author*, the
Father is a fictional character.



In this case,
 (10)
 is really true in so far as it is fictionally true relative to a game
authorized by the work *Six Characters in Search of an Author*.
In the other case, it is really true in so far as it is fictionally
true relative to an unofficial game in which some entities count as
'real people' and some as 'fictional
characters', with the Father correctly singled out as one of the
latter because 'he' originated in a work of fiction.



Walton's pretense-based version of antirealism has been very
influential (for a development of the view, see Everett 2013), but it
has also attracted a great deal of criticism. Some have doubted that a
sentence's fictional truth on its conniving use can ground a
sense in which it is really true on its non-conniving use (cf.
Voltolini 2006), a move that is crucial to his antirealism. Others
have doubted that Walton's appeal to unofficial games of
make-believe can yield appropriate antirealist paraphrases for
metafictional sentences in general, perhaps because these critics deny
that such sentences involve either explicit or implicit appeals to
pretense (Thomasson 1999, van Inwagen 2003).


#### 2.1.5 Quantificational arguments for realism



Of course, to show that *some* antirealist paraphrases of
fictional sentences do not work does not mean that *no* such
paraphrases will work. Perhaps it is always possible to find new
paraphrases that do not raise any of the problems hitherto pointed
out, whether such paraphrases are based on a new version of the
pretense-theoretic approach or on some other approach. To take this
point into account, some realists have pursued a different
linguistically-based strategy. To be, as Quine said, is to be the
value of a variable (Quine 1948). Hence if we can locate existentially
quantified discourse involving quantification over fictional
entities--either directly, as external metafictional sentences
that can themselves be used as premises to derive other metafictional
sentences, or indirectly, as a result of a valid inference from
external metafictional sentences--then it seems that such
ontological commitment is unavoidable. In this connection, consider
the sentence:


* (11) There is
a fictional character who, for every novel, either appears in that
novel or is a model for a character who does.



Not only can such a sentence be inferred from, say:


* (12) Sancho
Panza is a model for at least one character in every novel, apart from
the novel *Don Quixote*, in which he himself
appears,



but it also legitimizes an inference to:


* (13) If no
character appears in every novel, then some character is modelled on
another character



(cf. van Inwagen 2000: 243-4).



Now, it is certainly true that insisting on the need to preserve the
validity of the above inferences in any account of external
metafictional sentences is a good antidote to the antirealist
'paraphrase' strategy. For there is no guarantee that
validity is preserved once the above sentences are paraphrased (say,
in a pretense-theoretic manner *a la* Walton). This
suggests that such antirealist paraphrases may not capture the meaning
of the original sentences, leaving the field to realist construals of
such sentences (cf. again van Inwagen (*ibid.*); for
Walton's response, see Walton 1990: 416ff.).



Still, this may not be enough to show that antirealism should be
rejected. For while existential sentences like (11) that quantify over
fictional characters are common enough, there are other existential
claims with the same logical features as (11) that philosophers are
far less likely to take as evidence of realism. Thus consider:


* (14) While
there is an imaginary emperor who Nathan Salmon imagined took over
France, there certainly is no imaginary emperor who Nathan Salmon
imagined took over Canada.



This sentence is suggested by Nathan Salmon's account of
allegedly empty names in Salmon 1998. Salmon suggests that while
fictional names in general stand for abstract created fictional
entities, certain other terms are thoroughly non-referring or empty.
In this connection, he contemplates the possibility of there being an
armed fanatic who has just taken over the government of France by
declaring himself emperor, and then stipulates that the name
"Nappy" is to refer to whoever is the present emperor of
France if there is such a person (as there would be if this
imaginative scenario were actual), and to nothing if there
isn't. Such a name, he thinks, is clearly empty. Note, however,
that in Salmon's imaginative scenario,


* (15) Nappy is
a French emperor



is true, but that there is no similar scenario involving a present
emperor of Canada. A sentence like
 (14)
 is a natural way of recording this fact. But now we face a problem.
As Caplan (2004) points out, taking
 (11)
 as an evidence for the genuine existence of what van Inwagen calls
*creatures of fiction* suggests that we should, by parity of
reasoning, take (14) as evidence for the genuine existence of *sui
generis* creatures of the imagination. Or, to put the point the
other way round, if we don't think that linguistically-based
reasons such as the availability of an (apparently) true quantified
sentence like (14) commit us to bizarre entities like Nappy, we should
not think that such reasons commit us to fictional entities either.
For variants of the problem and complications, see Kroon (2011, 2013,
2015).



Note that we do not even need quantificational locutions to see the
problem. If one thinks that the truth of the external metafictional
sentence (5) commits us to the existence of a fictional character,
Anna Karenina, then it is hard to resist the thought that the truth of
the non-quantified sentence:


* (16) That
little green man is just a trick of the light



uttered by someone who wants to describe the mistake made by those
around him who think that they see a little green man, similarly
commits us to the existence of a certain creature of the imagination,
one who has the property of *being a trick of the light* (cf.
Kroon 1996: 186). Many would resist such an easy road to realism about
creatures of the imagination.


### 2.2 Ontological Arguments for and Against Realism



The problems that one thus encounters in trying to let
semantic-linguistic arguments ground a commitment to fictional objects
give one reason to think that there is no semantical shortcut
available to the realist. That is to say, if a realist wants to claim
that our *prima facie* commitment to fictional entities is
justified, she has to provide a genuine ontological argument to that
effect.



In her 1999 book, Thomasson tried to provide just such an argument.
Her argument claims that we cannot reject fictional objects if we
admit fictional works: given that fictional objects and fictional
works belong to the same genus of entities (the genus of created,
artifactual objects) it would be false parsimony to accept the one and
reject the other.



This argument has several problems. For one thing, it postulates an
identity of kind between fictional works and fictional entities that
is far from intuitively clear. As Thomasson herself seems to admit
(1999: 65), fictional works are syntactical-semantic entities, unlike
fictional entities. But there is a similar argument that does not rely
on a parallelism between fictional works and fictional characters, but
on the fact that the identity conditions of the fictional works refer
to fictional characters. In brief: if we admit a certain kind of
entity, we cannot but admit all the other kinds of entities that
figure in the identity conditions of such an entity; we admit
fictional works; so we cannot but also admit fictional objects because
they figure in the identity conditions of fictional works (cf.
Voltolini 2003, 2006).



If the antirealist wants to challenge the realist on directly
ontological grounds, she has to discredit such arguments, and, better
still, provide an argument for the conclusion that there
*cannot* be any fictional entities. Curiously enough, Russell,
who is usually remembered for having originated the
'paraphrase' strategy for eliminating apparent reference
to nonexistent entities (see 2.11 above), also used
non-linguistically-based ontological arguments against admitting such
entities. In fact, there is good reason to believe that he took his
*main* argument against Meinong to be that Meinongian entities
are apt to violate the law of noncontradiction (cf. Russell
(1905a,b)). In his (2005) and (2013), Everett reprises and extends
Russell's ontological criticisms so that they become a critique
of fictional entities in particular. He provides a number of arguments
that are intended to show that, first, such entities may violate some
basic logical laws--not only the law of noncontradiction, but
also the symmetry of identity--and, second, they may be
problematically indeterminate with respect to both their existence and
identity. These arguments are based on odd but intelligible stories in
which, for example, one individual is both identical to and distinct
from another, or in which it is indeterminate whether a certain
individual exists. The link to fictional characters is provided
through certain bridging principles (more refined versions of such
principles are provided in his 2013):



(P1) If the world of a story concerns a creature *a*, and if
*a* is not a real thing, then *a* is a fictional
character.



(P2) If a story concerns *a* and *b*, and if *a*
and *b* are not real things, then *a* and *b* are
identical in the world of the story if and only if the fictional
character of *a* is identical to the fictional character of
*b*.



Everett's critique is interesting and innovative, and (given the
worries expressed about language-focused arguments) in some ways a
model of how an antirealist should really pursue the battle against
what she believes are ontological illusions. But, not surprisingly,
the debate has not ended there. Although at least one influential
(erstwhile) realist has conceded the power of Everett's
argument, proposing an antirealist notion of assumption-relative truth
(Howell 2011, 2015) in place of the realist absolute notion he
championed earlier (Howell 1979), some other realists think that
Everett underestimates the conceptual resources available to them.




Take, for example, the case that seems to have exercised creationists
the most -- the argument for indeterminate identity -- and
consider an example like the following made-up nursery rhyme (from
Schnieder & von Solodkoff 2009: 139):



**Bah-Tale:**



There once was a man called Bahrooh



There once was a man called Bahraah



But nothing determined if Bahraah was Bahrooh



Or if they were actually two.



Given that "Bahraah" and "Bahrooh" are
fictional names, it follows from (P1) and (P2) that it is
indeterminate whether the fictional character Bahrooh is identical to
the fictional character Bahraah, contrary to philosophical consensus
that indeterminate identity is incoherent (see especially Evans 1980
and the ensuing literature).



Philosophers of fiction have not been slow to respond to this
argument. Few have been willing to accept fiction-generated ontic
indeterminacy (Thomasson 2011 and Paganini 2023 are among the
exceptions). Schnieder & von Solodkoff (2009) suggest that (P2)
itself is to blame, and that there is a better default principle of
identity that lets story-relative ontic indeterminacy suffice for
determinate ontic distinctness. Such a variation on (P2) would block
Bah-Tale from implying ontic indeterminacy, although some, siding with
Everett, think the variation is *ad hoc* (Caplan & Muller
2014). Others challenge the role played by principles of identity. Lee
(2022), for example, argues that the identity of fictional characters
is (usually) to be settled by appeal to authorial intentions rather
than principles of identity, and that this is enough to disarm alleged
examples of ontic determinacy. But even if we stress the importance of
principles of identity, what such principles show may not be all that
clear. One popular line of argument holds that Everett-style cases
only generate semantic, not ontic, indeterminacy (Thomasson 2011,
Cameron 2013, Woodward 2017). Some even think that an appeal to more
or less familiar neo-Meinongian distinctions between i) predicative
and propositional negation and ii) modes of predication
(alternatively, kinds of property) is enough to block the inference to
ontic indeterminacy (Voltolini 2010). Of course, antirealists take
such distinctions to be poorly understood and part of what makes
realism an unattractive option in the first place (they may also be
unusable in complex fiction-involving sentences; see again Everett
2013; for a reply, cf. Voltolini 2015b)). Hence even if such rebuttals
are successful on their own terms, this is not likely to settle the
realism-antirealism debate.