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Description, Disagreement, and Fictional Names

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2019

Peter Alward
Peter Alward*
Affiliation:
University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, AB, CanadaT1K 3M4
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Extract

In this paper, a theory of the contents of fictional names — names of fictional people, places, etc. — will be developed. The fundamental datum that must be addressed by such a theory is that fictional names are, in an important sense, empty: the entities to which they putatively refer do not exist. Nevertheless, they make substantial contributions to the truth conditions of sentences in which they occur. Not only do such sentences have truth conditions, sentences differing only in the fictional names they contain differ in their truth conditions. It is, after all, commonplace to note such things as, for example, that

Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit

is true, and

Sherlock Holmes is a hobbit

is false, while acknowledging at the same time that neither Baggins nor Holmes exists. The central problem, therefore, is that of reconciling the emptiness of fictional names with their substantial contributions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , September 2011 , pp. 423 - 448
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2011

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