Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Arguing with Brightly over Ficta

Earlier I wrote that the central problem in the philosophy of fiction is to find a solution to the following aporetic dyad:

1. There are no purely fictional items.

2. There are some purely fictional items.

The problem is that while the limbs of the dyad cannot both be true, there is reason to think that each is true.

David Brightly comments:

May I offer the following resolution of the paradox? I say that 'purely fictional' does not function as a concept term. Instead, it is ambiguous between two interpretations. On the one hand, it behaves like the pseudo-concept 'inexistent'. To say that Bone is a purely fictional alcoholic is to deny that Bone exists. [BV: Biconditionality seems  too strong.  If N is a purely fictional F, then N doesn't exist; but if N doesn't exist, it does not follow that N is purely fictional.] The same goes whatever name and concept term we substitute for 'Bone' and 'alcoholic'. This leads us to assert

1. There are no purely fictional items.

On the other hand, I say that 'fictional and 'purely fictional' appear to be concept terms because sentences like

Bone is a purely fictional alcoholic

arise via a surface transformation of

Purely fictionally, Bone is an alcoholic

and inherit their meaning and truth value. We can understand the latter as asserting that

Some work of fiction says that Bone is an alcoholic.

We take this as true, as evidenced by the work of Hamilton, and running the transformation in reverse gets us to

Bone is a purely fictional alcoholic.

Taking 'purely fictional alcoholic' as a predicate, which it superficially resembles, by Existential Generalisation we arrive at

There is some purely fictional alcoholic,

and hence to

2. There are some purely fictional items.

and apparent contradiction with (1).

The idea of a surface transformation may well appear controversial and ad hoc. But the phenomenon occurs with other pseudo-concept terms, notably 'possible'. We have

Bone is a possible alcoholic <—> Possibly, Bone is an alcoholic
Bone is a fictional alcoholic <—> Fictionally, Bone is an alcoholic.

On the left we have 'possible' and 'fictional' which look like concept terms but cannot be consistently interpreted as such. On the right we have sentential operators which introduce an element of semantic ascent which is not apparent on the left. It's precisely because 'possible' and 'fictional' involve hidden semantic ascent that they do not work as concept terms.

Response

I am afraid I don't quite understand what David is saying here despite having read it many times.  This could be stupidity on my part. But I think we do need to explore his suggestion that there is an equivocation on 'purely fictional items.'  Let me begin by listing what we know, or at least reasonably believe, about purely fictional characters.

First of all, we know that George Bone never existed: that follows from his being purely fictional.

Second, we know or at least reasonably believe that Bone is a character created by its author Patrick Hamilton, a character who figures in Hamilton's 1941 novel, Hangover Square. Just as the novel was created by Hamilton, so were the characters in it.  Admittedly, this is not self-evident.  One might maintain that there are all the fictional characters (and novels, stories, plays, legends, myths, etc.) there might have been and that the novelist or story teller or playwright just picks some of them out of  Plato's topos ouranos or Meinong's realm of Aussersein.  I find this 'telescope' conception rather less reasonable than the artifact conception according to which Bone and Co. are cultural artifacts of the creative activities of Hamilton and Co.  Purely fictional characters are made up, not found or discovered.  It is interesting to note that fingere in Latin means to mold, shape, form, while in Italian it means to feign, pretend, dissemble.  That comports well with what fiction appears to be.  Of course I am not arguing from the etymology of 'fiction.'  But if you have etymology on your side, then so much the better.

Now there is a certain tension between the two points I have just made.  On the one hand, Bone does not exist.  On the other hand, Bone is not nothing.  He is an artifact of Hamilton's creativity just as much as the novel itself is in which he figures.  How can he not exist but also not be nothing? If he is not nothing, then he exists.

If Bone were to exist, he would be a human person, a concrete item.  But there is no such concretum. On the other hand, Bone is not nothing: he is an artifact created by Hamilton over a period of time in the late '30s to early '40s.  Since Bone cannot be a concrete artifact — else Hamilton would be God –  Bone is an abstract artifact.  Thus we avoid contradiction.  Bone the concretum does not exist while Bone the abstract artifact does.  This is one theory one might propose. (Cf. Kripke, van Inwagen, Thomasson, Reicher, et al.)

Note that this solution does not require the postulation of different modes of existence/being.  But it does require that one 'countenance' (as Quine would say) abstract objects (in Quine's sense of 'abstract') in addition to concrete objects.  It also requires the admission that some abstract objects are contingent and have a beginning in time.  The theory avoids Meinongianism  but is quasi-Platonic.  London Ed needs a stiff drink long about now.

Now let's bring in a third datum.   We know that there is a sense in which it is true that Bone is an alcoholic and false that he is a teetotaler.  How do we reconcile the truth of 'Bone is an alcoholic'  with the truth of 'Bone does not exist'?  There is a problem here if we assume the plausible anti-Meinongian principle that, for any x, if x is F, then x exists.  (Existence is a necessary condition of property-possession.)  To solve the problem we might reach for a story operator.  The following dyad is consistent:

3. According to the novel, Bone is an alcoholic

4. Bone does not exist.

From (3) one cannot validily move via the anti-Meinongian principle to 'Bone exists.'  But if 'Bone is an alcoholic' is elliptical for (3), then 'Bone is a purely fictional character' is elliptical for

5. According to the novel, Bone is a purely fictional character.

But (5) is false.  For according to the novel, Bone is a real man.

The point I am making is that 'Bone is a purely fictional character' is an external sentence, a sentence true in reality outside of any fictional context.  By contrast, 'Bone is an alcoholic' is an internal sentence: it is true in the novel but not true in reality outside the novel.  If it were true outside the novel, then given the anti-Meinongian principle that nothing can have properties without existing, Bone would exist — which is false.

I think Brightly and I can agree that a purely fictional man is not a man, and that a purely fictional alcoholic is not an alcoholic.  And yet Bone is at least as real as the novel of which he is the main character.  After all, there is the character Bone but no character, Son of Bone.  In keeping with Brightly's notion that there is an equivocation on 'purely fictional item,' we could say the following.  'Bone' in the internal sentence 'Bone is an alcoholic' doesn't refer to anything, while 'Bone' in the external sentence 'Bone is a purely fictional character' refers to an abstract object.

We can then reconcile (1) and (2) by replacing the original dyad with

1* There are no purely fictional concreta

2*  There are some purely fictional abstracta.

The abstract artifact theory allows us to accommodate our three datanic or near-datanic points.  The first was that Bone does not exist.  We accommodate it by saying that there is no concretum, Bone.  The second was that Bone is a creature of a novelist's creativity.  We accommodate that by saying that what Hamilton created was the abstract artifact, Bone*, which exists.  Bone does not exist, but the abstract surrogate Bone* does.  The third point was that there are truths about Bone that nevertheless do not entail his existence.  We can accommodate this by saying that while Bone does not exemplify such properties as being human and being an alcoholic, he encodes them. (To employ terminology from Ed Zalta.)  This requires a distinction between two different ways for an item to have a property.

I do not endorse the above solution.  But I would like to hear why Brightly rejects it, if he does.

Related articles
Another Round on Fictional Characters as Abstract Objects
Fiction
The Grand Central Conundrum in the Philosophy of Fiction
Do Purely Fictional Items Exist? On Van Inwagen's Theory of Ficta
More on Ficta and Impossibilia
on the reality of sherlock holmes etc

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Bill Vallicella

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14 responses to “Arguing with Brightly over Ficta”

  1. Ed Avatar
    Ed

    FWIW I thought David’s exposition was reasonably clear, even on first reading.

    Reply
  2. Ed Avatar
    Ed

    >>But (5) is false. For according to the novel, Bone is a real man.
    We have been here before. I argued earlier that in
    (*) Bone, who is depicted by Hamilton as a sad alcoholic, is [also depicted as] living in a flat in Earl’s Court
    the name ‘Bone’ is the subject of both ‘depicted by Hamilton’ and ‘living in a flat in Earl’s Court’. The solution is to see the elided story operator in square brackets.
    Or try:
    (**) Bone is a character introduced by the English writer Patrick Hamilton, who is [depicted by Hamilton as] an alcoholic living in Earl’s Court.
    The reason your (5) doesn’t work is that you are putting the story operator in twice. It’s already there with ‘is a fictional character’, so you shouldn’t be putting it in again.

    Reply
  3. David Brightly Avatar
    David Brightly

    Good morning, Bill, and many thanks for the detailed response. Central to this view is the observation that in addition to all the things Hamilton tells us about Bone, we are also told, extra-authorially, that

    Bone is a fictional item.

    Grammatically, ‘fictional item’ looks to be a concept term. If it is, then we are being told something about Bone that Hamilton doesn’t tell us. That is odd. Now I think there may be room in all of this for van Inwagen ‘creatures of fiction’, though Ed may disagree. We might identify fictional item, with creature of fiction. But lit-crit talk is about words and forms of words, ie, representations. It’s convenient to refer to bits of the representation by reference to what they represent, just as an art critic will refer to certain bits of paint or brushstrokes by reference to the hair of the sitter as it appears in a portrait, say. What I’m reluctant to do is identify the represented, ie, Bone, with the representation, that is, say that Bone is a creature of fiction. There may be a c-of-f in all this, but it isn’t Bone, if that makes sense. It could be your Bone*. Where does that leave ‘fictional item’ as denoting a concept? I simply deny that it is a concept term at all. I just can’t see what the things are that fall under this apparent concept. Just as I can’t see what the things are that fall under ‘possible man’. So I say that doesn’t denote a concept either. How then to explain the term ‘fictional item’? I say it comes about through a linguistic surface transformation. Somehow, when we want to say ‘Fictionally, Bone is an item’ where we are in effect quoting the sentence ‘Bone is an item’ and saying something about it, that it comes from a work of fiction and one shouldn’t worry about its truth value, what we end up saying is ‘Bone is a fictional item’. Perhaps our minds are better at dealing with objects than sentences. As you reminded us recently, man is made of crooked timber. Maybe his language is rather warped too. In consequence I am extremely reluctant to use ‘fictional’ in an analysis of the puzzle, as you do in your (1*) and (2*), as if it were clear and well understood. My feeling is that the whole issue is one of elucidating how ‘fictional’ is to be used. My inclination is to say that strictly we should apply it to representations only, as in ‘Jane Austen’s Emma is fictional’, referring to the work and not its main character.

    Reply
  4. BV Avatar
    BV

    Good morning, David.
    I am not quite clear how you are using ‘concept term.’
    >>Grammatically, ‘fictional item’ looks to be a concept term. If it is, then we are being told something about Bone that Hamilton doesn’t tell us. That is odd.<< Hamilton in the novel proper tells us various things about Bone, e.g., that he is an alky, etc. He does not tell us in the novel proper that Bone is a fictional character. But he does tell us that or imply that on the cover -- Hangover Square: A Novel -- or in the pages before the novel proper begins: "Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental." So I am puzzled already about what exactly it is you find odd.

    Reply
  5. David Brightly Avatar
    David Brightly

    I guess I am saying that the text of the novel proper is the sole source of information about Bone, how tall he is, what hair colour, etc, etc. All properties of a man. Can ‘being a [purely] fictional character’ be a property of a man? At best this would seem a category mistake. The material on the cover etc we take to be about the book, that it’s a work of fiction, about an alcoholic called ‘Bone’, and so on

    Reply
  6. BV Avatar
    BV

    I would deny that ‘fictional item’ and ‘creature of fiction’ have the same sense. For one must not terminologically beg the question against those who deny that fictional items are created.
    >> But lit-crit talk is about words and forms of words, ie, representations.<< That is not obvious. What's more, I deny it. If I am thinking about Bone and how her personality differs from that of Netta, I am not thinking about any words or sentences in the novel, but about the characters conjured up by my understanding of the words. Right now I am thinking about Netta. I can describe her: she is a manipulative bitch who exploits the pussy-whipped Bone for her own selfish ends. Accurate or not, that description is about the characters. not about words or sentences. Of course, to defend my description I would have to revert to actual sentences in the novel. But the characters are distinct from the means whereby they are presented or represented, namely, the words and sentences. Phenomenologically, this seems right. But I can also give an argument. Suppose the novel has been translated into German and I am discussing Bone and Netta with a German friend who read the novel in German but not in English. We are clearly not talking about the same sentences (tokens or types). But we are talking about the same characters. Therefore, lit-crit talk is not about linguistic representations.

    Reply
  7. BV Avatar
    BV

    >> Can ‘being a [purely] fictional character’ be a property of a man?<< No. I think we agree that a fictional man is not a man. It is not as if there are two kinds of men, real men and fictional men. But a fictional man such as Bone is not nothing: we can think about him and his properties, talk about him, compare him to other purely fictional character and also compare him with real people. If we say that Bone is an abstract artifact, then we can accommodate your point that a fictional man is not a man -- since no abstract object is a man or a woman either -- and also the point that Bone is not nothing.

    Reply
  8. David Brightly Avatar
    David Brightly

    I understand ‘c-of-f’, I think. I don’t understand ‘fictional item’ as a concept term—viewed as such it leads to contradiction—but I do understand sentences in which the term ‘fictional item’ appears.
    Your thoughts about Netta aren’t lit-crit as I understand it. You are engaging with Netta as a person that may have been described to you by a mutual friend (in English or in German) and whom you would take to be real. I assume lit-crit is about the effectiveness, style, originality, of the writing, relating this to the life of the author, his times, what he is trying to say about the H.C. and so on, where the artificiality of the whole shebang is explicit and essential to the talk. One can’t do lit-crit without the former engagement, of course, and it may be hard to label a thought or sentence as one or the other, but the two polarities are there, I’d say.
    My position on ‘fictional’ is quite narrow and completely independent of PVI’s c-of-f concept, I think.

    Reply
  9. london ed Avatar
    london ed

    Is ‘fictional character’ a concept term? Consider
    (1) On p. 1 of Pride and Prejudice it says that someone has leased Netherfield.
    That statement is true. We can also replace ‘someone’ by different proper names to give true or false statements. E.g.
    (2a) On p. 1 of Pride and Prejudice it says that Darcy has leased Netherfield. (FALSE)
    (2b) On p. 1 of Pride and Prejudice it says that Bingley has leased Netherfield. (TRUE)
    And so on. So there is a sense in which ‘said by Jane Austen to have leased Netherfield’ is a concept term, satisfied by the name ‘Bingley’, but not by the name ‘Darcy’ or ‘Mr. Bennet’ and so on. But only insofar as it is satisfied within the propositional attitude. Once you move outside, you always get something false, because there are no such people as Darcy, Bingley etc. It is false to say that anything (where ‘anything’ has widest possible scope) is such that it satisfies that predicate. We merely have a sentence which is true or false as you replace different proper names for ‘someone’.

    Reply
  10. BV Avatar
    BV

    David,
    I don’t think we are engaging with each other at all.
    I need a definition of ‘concept term.’

    Reply
  11. David Brightly Avatar
    David Brightly

    Bill, re ‘concept term’, something like this:
    Any of the wide class C of extension-bearing terms that’s closed under composition as follows. If X in C and Y in C with extensions X* and Y* respectively then XY is in C and has extension (XY)* = X* ⋂ Y*. Includes ‘black’, ‘horse’, ‘female’, ‘Roman’, ‘black horse’, ‘female horse’, ‘female Roman’, and so on.

    Reply
  12. london ed Avatar
    london ed

    @David “extension-bearing term” is slippery. Consider
    (*) In War and Peace, Tolstoy said that – was an army officer .
    This predicate has a wide extension, covering officers in the Russian, French and Prussian commands. Some of them are fictional, some aren’t. We could even construct a Venn diagram consisting of fictional versus non-fictional officers, French vs non-French officers, look at the intersection or union of such extensions and so on. But I don’think this would get us very far, because talking of ‘extension’ of concepts or predicates invites the very kind of Meinongianism that Londoners should be keen to avoid.

    Reply
  13. BV Avatar
    BV

    Sainsbury’s *Fiction and Fictionalism arrived yesterday. I wonder how much Ed has been influenced by this.

    Reply
  14. David Brightly Avatar
    David Brightly

    Ed,
    Yes, and we’d get a picture of what Tolstoy said and didn’t say, which is not necessarily the same as what is and isn’t the case. Can I not rule out by fiat the slippery predicates formed by substituting into a quotation? We all draw a distinction between the way we think things are and what others tell us. This strikes me as being at the heart of the matter. We have bits of information which we take to be about the world and we also have bits of information about the bits of information, like who we learned it from, and when, plus judgements as to its reliability.

    Reply

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