Fiction and Fictional Objects

2019 ◽  
pp. 239-266
Author(s):  
Francesco Berto ◽  
Mark Jago ◽  
Christopher Badura
Keyword(s):  
Impossible Worlds ◽  
Main Topic ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Truth In Fiction ◽  
Fictional Objects ◽  
Fictional Entities

This chapter begins with the problem of what counts as true in a given fiction, beyond what’s explicitly given in that fiction. It then considers the problem of inconsistent fictions, which are naturally handled using impossible worlds. An account of truth in fiction is presented, which develops one of Lewis’s analyses into an approach which can handle inconsistent fictions with ease. The chapter then turns to the second main topic: how we should think about fictional entities. Realism and fictionalism about fictional characters are contrasted. A third option is then considered, which takes the Meinongian line that fictional characters are non-existent objects. Several versions of this idea and their various issues are discussed.

scholarly journals Actualism and Fictional Characters

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
André Leclerc
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Dimensional Space ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Moore’S Paradox ◽  
Material Basis ◽  
Fictional Entities ◽  
Moore's Paradox ◽  
Amie Thomasson

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1808-1711.2016v20n1p61In what follows, I present only part of a program that consists in developing a version of actualism as an adequate framework for the metaphysics of intentionality. I will try to accommodate in that framework suggestions found in Kripke’s works and some positions developed by Amie Thomasson. What should we change if we accept “fictional entities” in the domain of the actual world? Actualism is the thesis that everything that exists belongs to the domain of the actual world and that there are no possibilia. I shall defend that there are abstract artefacts, like fictional characters, and institutions. My argument could be seen as a version of Moore’s paradox: it is paradoxical to say: “I made (created) it, but I do not believe it exists”. Moreover, there are true sentences about them. I will examine what it means to include abstract artefacts in the domain of the actual world. I favour a use of “exist” that includes beings with no concrete occupation of tri-dimensional space; to exist, it is enough to have been introduced at some moment in history. Abstract artefacts, like fictional characters, exist in that sense. I argue that it is important to distinguish two perspectives (internal and external) in order to clarify the kind of knowledge we have of fictional characters. However, their existence presupposes a relation of dependence to a material basis and the mental activities of many people.

scholarly journals Emotions, Actions and Inclinations to Act

Erkenntnis ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christiana Werner
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
State University ◽  
Pennsylvania State University ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Fictional Objects ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Fictional Entities

Abstract Emotional responses to fiction are part of our experience with art and media. Some of these responses (“fictional emotions”) seem to be directed towards fictional entities—entities that we believe do not exist. Some philosophers argue that fictional emotions differ in nature from other emotional responses. (cf. Walton in J Philos 75(1):5–27, 1978, Mimesis as make-believe, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1990, Walton, in: Hjort, Laver (ed.) Emotion and the arts, Oxford University, New York, 1997; Currie in The nature of fiction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990; Stecker in Br J Aesthet 51(3):295–308, 2011) The claim is supposed to be supported among others by ‘the argument from action.’ In contrast to genuine emotions, proponents of this argument claim, fictional emotions do not motivate their bearers to act. (cf. Yanal in Paradoxes of emotion and fiction, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 1999; Lamarque in Br J Aesthet 21(4):291–304, 1981; Carroll in The philosophy of horror: or, paradoxes of the heart, Routledge, London, 1990; Currie 1990; Walton 1978, 1990; Suits in Pac Philos Q 87(3):369–386, 2006; Friend, in: Kind (ed.) The Routledge handbook of philosophy of imagination, Routledge, New York, 2016) This claim grounds in what may appear to be an obvious fact: that viewers and readers of are not led to act by their fictional emotions. It is certainly true that viewers and readers of fiction do not form intentions to perform actions directed towards fictional entities. In contrast to the proponents of the argument from action, I will argue that the lack of any such intentions can be explained only with reference to intending’s doxastic conditions, conditions that are unsatisfied in the fictional scenario. Decisively, this explanation does not refer to the motivational force of the agent’s emotions; indeed, it doesn’t refer to emotions at all. Thus, the lack of intentions to perform actions directed towards fictional objects provides no support for the claim that fictional emotions are no genuine emotions.

scholarly journals Impossible Worlds

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Berto ◽  
Mark Jago
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Mental Simulation ◽  
Impossible Worlds ◽  
Logical Necessity ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Truth In Fiction ◽  
General Tool ◽  
Open Issues

The latter half of the twentieth century witnessed an ‘intensional revolution’, a great collective effort to analyse notions which are absolutely fundamental to our understanding of the world and of ourselves—from meaning and information to knowledge, belief, causation, essence, supervenience, conditionality, as well as nomological, metaphysical, and logical necessity—in terms of a single concept. This was the concept of a possible world: a way things could have been. Possible worlds found applications in logic, metaphysics, semantics, game theory, information theory, artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of mind and cognition. However, possible worlds analyses have been facing numerous problems. This book traces them all back to hyperintensionality: the need for distinctions more fine-grained than the possible worlds apparatus can easily represent. It then introduces impossible worlds—ways things could not have been—as a general tool for modelling hyperintensional phenomena. The book discusses the metaphysics of impossible worlds and applies them to a range of central topics and open issues in logic, semantics, and philosophy: from the problem of logical omniscience in epistemic logic, to the semantics of non-classical logics, the modelling of imagination and mental simulation, the analysis of information and informative inference, truth in fiction, and counterpossible reasoning.

scholarly journals Fictional entities as artifacts: some problems for Amie Thomasson’s theory

2016 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-18
Author(s):  
Andrej Jandric
Keyword(s):  
Abstract Objects ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Singular Terms ◽  
Study Evaluation ◽  
Fictional Entities ◽  
The Common ◽  
Hybrid Account ◽  
Literary Practices ◽  
Intentional Acts ◽  
Amie Thomasson

Amie Thomasson has developed a theory of fictional entities, according to which they exist as contingent abstract objects. In her view, fictional characters are cultural artifacts just as the works of fiction they feature in. They are doubly dependent objects: for their becoming they depend on creative intentional acts of their author, and for maintaining their existence they depend on preservation of a copy of any fictional work they appear in. Thomasson claims that her theory has the advantage of vindicating the common beliefs about fictional entities embodied in the study, evaluation and interpretation of literature. However, I argue that, under this theory of fictional entities, no account of reference of fictional singular terms ? neither the descriptive, nor the causal, nor Thomasson?s preferred hybrid account ? can accommodate all the aspects of our literary practices.

scholarly journals Just My Imagination? – Creation for Creationists

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christiana Werner
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Collective Intentionality ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Story Telling ◽  
Illocutionary Acts ◽  
Illocutionary Act ◽  
Fictional Entities ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Social Entities ◽  
Fictional Story

AbstractIn the debate on the ontology of fictional entities realists claim that fictional characters exist. Some fictional realists are Platonists. They claim that fictional characters are abstract entities that exist necessarily and are non-spatial and timeless. It seems that the author’s job is just to discover these entities. Other realists claim that fictional characters are abstract artefacts. Obviously these abstract artefacts do not have much in common with platonic entities. »Abstract« means, according to this creationistic account, that these artefacts are non-spatial entities. But as artefacts they are created and thus depend on someone who creates them and on the act of creation. Surprisingly, those realists do not say much about this process of creation. This article proposes an addition to the realist account at this point, focusing on the question of how fictional characters are created. However, my proposal is only concerned with the creation of fictional characters within the framework of fictional stories told by means of linguistic utterances. Therefore my question is: how can authors create fictional entities by telling fictional stories? I will begin by discussing whether an utterance act or a mere mental action, namely someone’s imagining something, is necessary or sufficient for the successful creation of fictional entities. I will distinguish two different interpretations of the claim that a person creates entities by imaging something and I will argue that realists should reject both versions of this claim. Constructively, I will go on to emphasize similarities between fictional entities and social entities like contracts and marriages. This is important because realists in the debate about social entities provide more detailed descriptions of the creation of social entities, details which can be adapted in order to describe the process by which fictional entities are created. I emphasize that this process, namely the fictional story telling, is a social practice. The social character of this practice will be shown in mainly two aspects: Firstly, I will argue that similar to the creation of other social entities for the creation of fictional characters there has to be a collectively recognised institution, namely the institution of fictional story telling. Thus, collective intentionality plays a crucial role in the process of this creation. As such an institution plays a decisive role I will go on to claim that the creation of an abstract artefact requires the performance not only of a mere utterance act, but of a successfully executed illocutionary act. By following Austin and Searle I will finally argue that only utterance tokens which in the specific situation are necessary to realize the illocutionary point or purpose can count as performances of illocutionary acts. In order to perform an illocutionary act successfully, the utterance must bring about an illocutionary uptake in the recipient/hearer, i. e. she must understand the utterance. Therefore, illocutionary acts can in general not be performed successfully without a hearer/recipient. Thus, to understand fictional story telling and the creation of fictional characters as a social practice means that the creative process cannot be explained exclusively in terms of imaginings. This does not mean that imagination does not play any role in producing or reading fiction. But creationists need more than imagination to explain how fictional characters are created. The aim of this paper is to take a step forward towards an explanation of the creation of fictional characters and thus to rendering the creationist’s account more plausible in (1) naming necessary conditions for successfully telling a fictional story, (2) describing it as a social praxis and (3) explaining the role collective intentionality plays in this practice, we have.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Emar Maier ◽  
Andreas Stokke
Keyword(s):  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Impossible Worlds ◽  
Cutting Edge ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Interdisciplinary Work ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Human Capacity

Fiction is the ultimate application of the human capacity for displacement—thinking and talking about things beyond the here and now. Fictional characters may live in very remote possible or even impossible worlds. Yet our engagement with fictional stories and characters seems effortless and permeates every aspect of our everyday lives. How is this possible? How does fictional talk relate to assertions about the here and now, or indeed to modal talk about other possible worlds? What is the relation between fiction and mental states like belief and imagination? How does a sequence of fictional statements become a story? What are fictional characters? How do narrators manage to give us access to their characters’ innermost thoughts and desires? This introductory chapter traces the development of various strands of research on these questions within linguistics, narratology, and philosophy in order to lay a foundation for the cutting-edge interdisciplinary work in this volume.

Actualisme et fiction

Dialogue ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-100
Author(s):  
Jérôme Pelletier
Keyword(s):  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Fictional Entities

AbstractThe non-existence of fictional entities does not seem incompatible with their possible existence. The aim of this paper is to give an account of the intuitive truth of statements of possible existence involving fictional proper names in an actualist framework. After having made clear the opposition between a possibilist and an actualist approach of possible worlds, I distinguish between fictional individuals and fictional characters and between the fictional use of fictional proper names and their metafictional use. On that basis, statements of possible existence involving fictional proper names appear to say of fictional characters conceived as abstact objects that they might have been exemplified.

Zalta on Encoding Fictional Properties

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Klauk
Keyword(s):  
Abstract Objects ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Abstract Object ◽  
Fictional Objects ◽  
Internal Properties ◽  
Fictional Names

AbstractTheories which take fictional objects to be a kind of abstract object are faced with the obvious problem of how to explain the seeming truth of sentences ascribing internal properties. Abstract objects cannot be cynical, be magicians or smoke pipe. Call this the problem of the wrong kind of object. There are a number of well-known strategies which abstractists have employed to evade the problem. In this paper, I discuss whether Edward Zalta’s distinction between two kinds of predication, exemplifying and encoding, can help us solve the problem.I start out in section 2 by reviewing the general debate between realists and antirealists concerning fictional objects. Realists think that fictional objects exist, while antirealists deny this. It is however useful to remember that participants in the debate differ in their interpretation of »exists« and »fictional«. Remembering this helps to locate Zalta’s account in the realist camp.Section 3 introduces the problem of the wrong kind of object, namely of how we can simultaneously take fictional objects to be abstract objects and understand sentences like »Rick Blaine is cynical« as straightforwardly true. I distinguish five strategies of dealing with this problem. Abstractists can (a) assume that fictional names are ambiguous, (b) distinguish between two kinds of properties, (c) understand such sentences as being governed by a fiction operator, (d) distinguish between two kinds of predication, or (e) take the predicate to be evaluated in some special way (which needs to be specified). I shortly comment on (a) and (b), then a problem for strategy (c) is discussed: It seems to commit us to the view that fictions prescribe recipients to imagineSection 4 introduces strategy (d), Zalta’s distinction between exemplifying and encoding. The distinction turns out to be a remedy against the problem of the wrong kind of object. Unfortunately it reintroduces the problem identified for strategy (c). I explore a radical way of evading the problem by understanding fictional objects to be representations. Although the idea can be found in Zalta’s writings, it leads to internal tensions in his account, cannot solve the problem at hand, and seems to generate additional problems. Additionally, Zalta’s assumption that fictional objects have their individuation conditions via the properties they encode is shown to be problematic on independent grounds.Section 5 discusses whether Zalta’s distinction between exemplifying and encoding is compatible with an artefactualist account of fictional characters. Assuming that most artefactualists would not want to understand existence as a discriminating predicate, I argue that combining this idea with the exemplifying/encoding distinction goes at least against the spirit of the artefactualist account.Section 6 introduces the idea of different evaluations of predicates without simultaneously being committed to Zalta’s strong assumptions. While this seems to be possible, such accounts also need to find a way of answering the argument given at the end of section 3.

Apparent Generalisations about Fictional Characters

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dolf Rami
Keyword(s):  
Predicate Logic ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Truth Values ◽  
First Order ◽  
The Third ◽  
Fictional Objects ◽  
Formal Framework ◽  
First Order Predicate Logic

AbstractThis essay will be concerned with an evaluation, modification, and critique of van Inwagen’s famous argument for the existence of fictional characters. In the first section a reconstruction of the original argument will be provided, and three different challenges for this version of the argument will be pointed out. The first challenge concerns van Inwagen’s commitment to first-order predicate logic as a canonical language for the formal representation of truth-conditions of assertoric sentences in natural languages, and the problematic semantic complexity of van Inwagen’s original example sentences of quantifications about fictional objects. The second challenge concerns his commitment to a Quinean conception of ordinary language quantifications that conceives of first-order quantifiers as existentially loaded. The third challenge concerns van Inwagen’s tendency to interpret our ordinary intuitions about the truth-values of specific sentences as intuitions about the truth-values of the literal contents of these sentences. In the second section, a more detailed investigation of these three challenges will be provided; and a modified, and less problematic, alternative version of the argument will be proposed. It will be shown that the truth-conditions of van Inwagen’s original example sentences cannot be adequately represented on the basis of first-order predicate logic. I will propose alternative and less complex example sentences that are sufficient for the required purpose. Additionally, a reformulation of the argument will be proposed that avoids a commitment to a specific sort of formal framework. After that, it will be shown why the assumption of a Quinean conception of quantification unnecessarily increases the burden of proof. A reformulation of the argument will be proposed that avoids the commitment to a Quinean conception of quantification. Furthermore, I will make a third and final adjustment of the argument that allows us to remain neutral concerning the specific status of our truth-value intuitions concerning the proposed example sentences of generalisations about fictional objects. In the third and final section, three possible responses of an irrealist concerning fictional objects will be evaluated. The first option makes use of a recent semantic analysis of the modifying adjective ›fictional‹ proposed by Sainsbury. According to this analysis, a sentence like ›There are fictional mice that talk‹ is semantically equivalent with the claim ›There are fictional works according to which it is the case that at least one mouse talks‹. The second option additionally makes use of Sainsbury’s conception of spotty scope for ordinary language quantifiers and other related sentential operators. It will be shown why both options cannot account for the desired true readings of our example sentences. Finally, a third solution will be proposed and defended. This solution makes use of a substitutional interpretation of specific fictional generalisations based on a negative free logic to undermine the modified argument. It will be shown how this solution allows us to provide a correct analysis of the desired readings of our example sentences of generalisations about fictional characters. After that, two problems of this account will be discussed. The first problem concerns the extension of the proposed strategy to more complicated and sophisticated example sentences. The second problem concerns the independent motivation of a substitutional treatment of at least certain natural language quantificational expressions.

scholarly journals METHOD TO INVESTIGATE FICTIONAL ENTITIES: A CASE OF ISHINOMORI SHOTARO’S “KAMENRIDER BLACK” TV SERIES IN INDONESIA

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-48
Author(s):  
Rizki Musthafa Arisun
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Television Station ◽  
Local Television ◽  
Transnational Media ◽  
Fictional Entities ◽  
Observation Method

This article reports an experiment to pursue appropriate observation method on fictional entities inside popular culture products from Japan: two dimensional characters, fictional characters in a movie. Previous research showed how Indonesian popular culture producers being empowered in production, as fictional entities involved, such as “Hatsune Miku” (HM), a virtual singer persona. This article focused on older cases where media Japan travelled to Indonesia. Back in 1989, a TV action serial "Kamen Rider Black/　Ksatria Baja Hitam" (KRB/KBH) from Japan, was broadcasted by Indonesian local television station RCTI, and dubbed in Indonesian language. The experiment on finding appropriate observation method is conducted by constructing frameworks, imagined as ‘dissecting’ fictional entities into smaller observable parts. The purpose of this paper is to map methods to examine the role of non-human entities under transnational media by evaluating through early stage experiment.

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