The Grand Central Conundrum in the Philosophy of Fiction

As I see it, 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.

(1) looks to be an analytic truth: by definition, what is purely fictional is not, i.e., does not exist.  George Harvey Bone, the main character in Patrick Hamilton's 1941 booze novel Hangover Square, does not now and never did exist.  He is not a real alcoholic like his creator, Patrick Hamilton, who was a real alcoholic.  What is true is that

3. Bone is a purely fictional alcoholic.

That (3) is true is clear from the fact that if a student wrote on a test that Bone was a teetotaler, his answer  would be marked wrong.  But if (3) is true, then, given that nothing can satisfy a predicate unless it exists, it follows that

4. Bone exists

and, given the validity of Existential Generalization, it follows that

5. There is a purely fictional alcoholic.

But  if (5) is true, then so is (2).

It should now be spectacularly obvious what the problem is.  There are two propositions, each the logical contradictory of the other, which implies that they cannot both be true, and yet we have excellent reason to think that both are true.

Now what are all the possible ways of solving this problem?  I need a list.  London Ed et al. can help me construct it.  Right now all I want is a list, a complete list if possible, not arguments for or against any item on the list.  Not all of the following are serious contenders, but I am aiming at completeness.

A. Dialetheism.  Accept dialetheism, which amounts to the claim that there are true contradictions and that the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC) is false. 

B. Paraphrasticism.  Reject (2) by attempting to show that sentences such as (3) can be paraphrased in such a way that the apparent reference to ficta is eliminated.  For example, one might offer the following paraphrase of (3): 'Hamilton wrote a story implying that here is an alcoholic named Bone.'  The paraphrastic approach works only if every reference to a fictional item, whether it be a person or place or event or fiction, can be paraphrased away.  (As Kripke and others have noted, there are fictional fictions, fictional plays for example, such as a fictional play referenced within a play.)

C. Logic Reform.  Reject Existential Generalization (off load existence from the particular quantifier) and reject the anti-Meinongian principle that nothing can satisfy a predicate (or exemplify a property) unless it exists. One could then block the inference from (3) to (2).

D. Ontology Reform.  Reject (1) by arguing that fictional items, without prejudice to their being purely fictional, do exist.  Saul Kripke, for example, maintains that a fictional character is an abstract entity that "exists in virtue of more concrete activities of telling stories, writing plays, writing novels, and so on . . . the same way that a nation is an abstract entity which exists in virtue of concrete relations between people." (Reference and Existence: The John Locke Lectures, Oxford UP, 2013, p. 73.)  Or one might hold that fictional items are abstract items that exist necessarily like numbers.

E.  Dissolutionism.  Somehow argue that the problem as posed above is a pseudoproblem that doesn't need solving but dissolving.  One might perhaps argue that one or the other of the dyad's limbs has not even a prima facie claim on our acceptance.

F.  Neitherism.  Reject both limbs.  Strategy (A) rejects LNC.  This strategy rejects the Law of Excluded Middle. (Not promising, but I'm aiming for completeness.)

G. Mysterianism.  Accept both limbs but deny that they are mutually contradictory.  Maintain that our cognitive limitations make it either presently or permanently impossible for us to understand how the limbs can be both true and non-contradictory.  "They are both true; reality is non-contradictory; but it is a mystery how!"

H. Buddhism.  Reject the tetralemma: neither (1) nor (2), nor both, nor neither.

I. Hegelianism.  Propose a grand synthesis in which thesis (1) and antithesis (2) are aufgehoben, simultaneously cancelled and preserved.  (I have no idea what this would look like — again, I want a complete list of options.)

First question:  Have I covered all the bases?  Or are there solution strategies that cannot be brought under one of the above heads?  If you think there are, tell me what you think they are.  But don't mention something that is subsumable under one of (A)-(I).

Second question (for London Ed):  under which head would you book your solution?  Do you favor the paraphrastic approach sketched in (B) or not? Or maybe Ed thinks that the problem as I have formulated it is a pseudoproblem (option (E)).

Be a good sport, Ed, play along and answer my questions.

Flannery O’Connor on Ayn Rand

Flannery O'Connor died 50 years ago today.  About Ayn Rand she has this to say:

I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

Pushing Outwards Toward the Limits of Mystery

Flannery O'Connor on the Beats and Their Lack of Discipline

A Good Woman is Hard to Figure

Good-Man-cover

The Worldly Too Know that Life is Short

And so they compose 'bucket lists' of things to do before they 'kick the bucket.'  It's as if, on the sinking Titanic, one were to try to make the most of the ship and its features and amenities instead of considering how one might survive the coming calamity.

"There are a lot of things I want to do before we sink.  I've never been to the captain's quarters or inspected the engine room or admired the gold fixtures in the first-class cabins or had a drink in the VIP lounge."

The worldly too know that life is short but they draw the wrong conclusion from the fact.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: From the Billboard Top Twenty, Fifty Years Ago, this Week

List found here.  Hyperlinks by BV to songs he is in the mood to revisit this Saturday night while he drinks a specialty boilermaker: a bourbon and sweet vermouth wine spodiodi with a Sam Adams Boston Lager 'chaser.' He will repeat as necessary to achieve the requisite mood.  He drinks only one time per week, this time of the week.  For some, alcohol is the devil in liquid form.  For BV it is a delightful adjunct to a civilized life, one he can take or leave.  To hell with Sharia and its 'liberal' and leftist enablers.

BILLBOARD (USA) MAGAZINE'S SINGLES CHART FOR WEEK OF:August 1,1964
TW LW Wks. Song-Artist
 1  2  3 A HARD DAY'S NIGHT-BEATLES
 2  1  7 Rag Doll-Four Seasons
 3  6  6 The Little Old Lady (From Pasadena)-Jan & Dean
 4 11  5 Everybody Loves Somebody-Dean Martin
 5 18  4 Where Did Our Love Go-Supremes
 6  9  7 Wishin' And Hopin'-Dusty Springfield
 7  8  8 Dang Me-Roger Miller
 8  3 11 I Get Around-Beach Boys
 9  4 10 Memphis-Johnny Rivers
10  5  9 The Girl From Ipanema-Stan Getz & Astrud Gilberto
11 13  6 Under The Boardwalk-Drifters
12 14  6 Nobody I Know-Peter & Gordon
13  7  8 Can't You See That She's Mine-Dave Clark Five
14 10  9 Keep On Pushing-The Impressions
15 20  7 I Wanna Love Him So Bad-The Jelly Beans
16 12  9 Good Times-Sam Cooke
17 22  6 How Glad I Am-Nancy Wilson
18 15  9 Try It Baby-Marvin Gaye
19 23  7 Farmer John-The Premiers
20 25  7 Steal Away-Jimmy Hughes

Another Round on Fictional Characters as Abstract Objects

London Ed recommended to me Patrick Hamilton's 1941 booze novel, Hangover Square.  It gets off to a slow start, but quickly picks up speed and now has me in its grip.  I'm on p. 60.  The main character is one George Harvey Bone.

Ed gives this argument in an earlier thread:

(*) Bone, who is depicted by Hamilton as a sad alcoholic, is living in a flat in Earl’s Court.

The argument is that either the predicates ‘is depicted by Hamilton as a sad alcoholic’ and ‘is living in a flat in Earl’s Court’ have no subject, or they have the same subject. Either way, van Inwagen’s theory is wrong.

If they have no subject, then ‘is depicted by Hamilton as a sad alcoholic’ has no subject, but PvI argues that the subject is an abstract object. If they have the same subject, then if the subject of ‘is depicted by Hamilton as a sad alcoholic’ is an abstract object, then so is the subject of ‘is living in a flat in Earl’s Court’, which he also denies.

Either way, his theory cannot explain sentences like the one above.

The first thing I would point out (and this comports somewhat with a comment by David Brightly in the earlier thread) is that (*) can be reasonably parsed as a conjunction, the conjuncts of which belong to different categories of fiction (not fictional) discourse:

(*) Bone is depicted by Hamilton as a sad alcoholic & Bone lives in Earl's Court.

Hangover SquareThe two different categories are, first, the category of sentences we use when we engage in lit-crit discourse about fictional characters 'from the outside' while yet attending carefully to the 'internal' details of the fictional work.  An example of such a sentence would be the following.  "George Bone, like Don Birnham of Charles Jackson's 1944 Lost Weekend, have girlfriends, but Netta, the inamorata of the former, is a devil whereas Helen, the beloved of Birnham, is an angel."

Now that sentence I just wrote might be a second-rate bit of lit-crit, but it is a sentence that occurs in neither booze novel, nor is it entirely external to either novel. It is not entirely external because it reports details internal to the novels and it either gets them right or gets them wrong.  'George Bone is a purely fictional character,' by contrast, is an entirely external sentence.  That sentence does not occur in the novel, and indeed it cannot occur within the novel (as opposed to within a bit of text preceding the novel proper, or as an authorial aside in a footnote) unless it were put into the mouth of a character.  It cannot occur therein, because, within the world of Hangover Square, George Harvey Bone is precisely real, not fictional.  As the same goes for Earl's Court, although it is also a real place in London.  (One could, I suppose, argue that the Earl's Court of the novel is a fictional Earl's Court and thus distinct from the real-world Earl's Court.  Holy moly, this is tricky stuff.)

The second category I mentioned comprises sentences that are either wholly internal to pieces of fiction or sentences that occur in synopses and summaries but could occur internally to pieces of fictions.  For example, the second conjunct of (*):

C2. Bone lives in Earl's Court.

(C2) is probably too flat-footed a sentence to occur in a novel as good as Hangover Square, but it could have occurred therein and it could easily figure in a summary of the novel.  (C1), however, namely,

C1. Bone is depicted by Hamilton as a sad alcoholic

could not have occurred in Hangover Square.

Now as I understand things, the grammatical subject of a sentence is a linguistic item, a word or a phrase.  Thus (C1) and (C2) have the same grammatical subject, namely, the proper name 'Bone.'  The grammatical subject is to be distinguished from its extralinguistic referent, if there is one.  Call that the real subject. ('Logical subject' doesn't cut it since we do not typically refer to items on the logical plane such as propositions.)

So I take London Ed in his above-quoted animadversion to be referring to the real subjects of (C1) and (C2) when he uses 'subject.'  He poses a dilemma for van Inwagen's view.  Either the conjuncts  have no subject or they have the same subject. 

They cannot have no subject on van Inwagen's view because the subject of (C1) is an abstract object.  And they cannot have the same subject, because then both conjuncts would have as real subject an abstract object.  That cannot be, since on van Inwagen's view, and quite plausibly to boot, the subject of (C2) cannot be an abstract object.  No abstract object lives or resides at any particular place.  Abstract objects don't hang out or get hung over. 

So, Ed concludes, van Inwagen's theory cannot explain (*).

Now my metaphilosophy teaches that no theory is any good on this topic or on any other.  The problems of philosophy are most of them genuine, some of them humanly important, but none of them soluble. They are genuine intellectual knots that we cannot untie.  That's about as good as it gets when it comes to "nailing my colours to the mast" as Ed demands that I do.

In other words, I am not advocating a particular theory as superior to Ed's, whatever exactly it is.  (I am not being 'snarky' to use a Gen-X expression; I really don't know exactly what his theory is.)  I don't think that van Inwagen's theory is unproblematic and I am not advocating it.

But I do think that Ed has failed to refute van Inwagen.  The reason is because he conflates the two categories of fiction sentences lately distinguished, the category of lit-crit sentences like (C1), and the category of sentences that either do or could occur within pieces of fiction, an example being (C2). 

Defending van Inwagen, I reject Ed's disjunction, namely: Either the conjuncts have no subject or they have the same subject.  They have neither the same subject nor no subject.  One has a subject and the other doesn't.  (C1) has as its subject an abstract object and (C2) has as its subject nothing at all.

That's what van Inwagen could say to Ed so as to neutralize Ed's objection.