Fiction, semantics of

Taken at face value, ‘Anna Karenina is a woman’ seems true. By using Tolstoi’s name ‘Anna Karenina’ and the predicate ‘is a woman’ we appear to refer to the character Anna and to attribute to her a property which she has. Yet how can this be? There is no actual woman to whom the name refers. Such problems of reference, predication and truth also arise in connection with representational art and with beliefs and other attitudes. Meinong distinguishes the ‘being’ of objects (including fictional objects) from the ‘existence’ of actual objects such as Napoleon. ‘Anna Karenina’ refers to a concrete, particular, nonexistent object that has the property of womanhood. However, Meinong’s distinction seems to many ontologically suspect. Perhaps, then, being is existence and ‘Anna Karenina is a woman’ is actually false because ‘Anna Karenina’ has no referent. Russell in ‘On Denoting’ (1905) agrees. But how can we explain the apparent contrast in truth between this sentence and the unquestionably erroneous ‘Anna Karenina is from Moscow’? Or is it that being is existence but ‘Anna Karenina’ refers to an abstract, not a concrete, thing – an existent, abstract thing that does not have the property of being a woman but has merely the property of being said, by Tolstoi’s novel, to be a woman? Then, however, the meaning of our sentence about Anna no longer parallels that of ‘Emily Dickinson is a woman’. Perhaps, as many argue, we only pretend that ‘Anna Karenina’ refers and that the sentence is true. This position may not adequately explain the intuitions that support Anna Karenina as a genuine object of reference and predication, however.

Nonexistent Objects

The issues that nonexistent entities pose for metaphysics and philosophy of language are among the oldest in philosophy, dating back to Plato and Parmenides. These issues arise because of the very natural view that true statements and false statements have the status they have only because they are about objects—broadly speaking—and they’re true (or false) depending on whether they describe those objects correctly or not. If, however, statements are about something nonexistent, it seems they cannot be true or false because there is nothing for them to be true or false of—the very phrase “something nonexistent” sounds oxymoronic. It even strikes some that attempts to say something meaningful about a nonexistent object (or some nonexistent objects) cannot succeed because there is nothing for such statements to be about. And yet we say meaningful things about nonexistents daily: “Sherlock Holmes is more famous than any real detective,” “There are as many gods as goddesses in Greek mythology,” “Hob and Nob are thinking about the same nonexistent witch.” The philosophical tangles that arise when trying to explain our talk about the nonexistent show up everywhere in philosophy, and not just in discussions of fictions, hallucinations, or dreams. If one is a proponent of nominalism in philosophy of mathematics, for example, then one has to explain (or explain away) the usefulness, the indispensability even, of mathematical statements, because such statements—on the nominalist’s view—are not about anything real. The literature on the nonexistent is a bewildering maze of strategies for circumventing or dissolving the problem of how we talk about what doesn’t exist. The key to understanding how influential concerns with nonexistence have been in philosophy is seeing the wealth of different solutions (often implicit in a particular philosophical tradition) that have been invented to solve the puzzle of how we talk, think about, and even perceive what does not exist.