Top o' the Stack.
I spent an intense and enjoyable five hours with Steven Nemes on Saturday. He's had it with philosophy and theology and is in process of reinventing himself as a novelist. So this one's for him.
Category: Fiction and Fictionalism
A Cure for Infatuation?
One of the very best is marriage.
Infatuation is a form of idolatry that cannot last long in a marriage. Marriage cures it. That's an argument for marriage. There was no cure for Don Quixote's romantic fantasies because their object, the fair Dulcinea del Toboso, existed only in his imagination.*
But while infatuation lasts, it is blissful. One is made silly, often harmlessly so. One walks on air and can think of nothing but the beloved. The moon hits your eye like a bigga pizza pie. The world starts to shine like you've had too much wine. So smitten was I in the early days of my relationship to the woman I married that I sat in my carrel at the university one day and just thought about her for eight hours straight when I was supposed to be finishing an article on Frege. Life is both love and logic. But sometimes hot love trumps cold logic.
The best marriages begin with the romantic transports of infatuation, but a marriage lasts only if the Rousseauian transports are undergirded by good solid reasons of the big head without interference from the heart or the little head. The love then matures. Real love replaces illusory idealization. The big head ought to be the ruling element in a man.
It takes an Italian to capture the aforementioned romantic transports, and Dean Martin (Dino Crocetti) does the job well in the schmaltzy That's Amore.
Il Mio Mondo is a good expression of the idolatry of infatuation. Cilla Black's 1964 rendition of the Italian song is You're My World.
But whence the idealization, the infatuation, the idolatry? And why the perennial popularity of silly love songs? What we really want in the deepest depths of the heart no man or woman can provide. That is known to all who know their own hearts and have seen through the idols. What we want is an infinite and eternal love. This infinite desire may have no object in reality. Arguments from desire are not rationally compelling.
But given the fact of the desire, a fact that does not entail the reality of its object, we have what we need to explain the idealization, the infatuation, and the idolatry of the sexual other. We substitute an immanent object for Transcendence inaccessible.
_____________________________
*The great novel of Miguel Cervantes is a work of fiction. And so both Don Quixote/Quijote and Dulcinea are fictional characters. But the first is posited as real within the fiction while the other is posited as imaginary, as Don Quixote's fiction, even if based upon the posited-in-the-fiction real Aldonza Lorenzo. Herewith a bit of grist for the mill of the philosophy of fiction. The real-imaginary distinction operates within an imaginary construct.
Identity and Quasi-Epistemic Contingency
The Opponent sends the following puzzle to vex us:
Story: there was someone called 'a', and there was someone called 'b'.
This is all we have of the story. Let the predicate F be 'The story is consistent with a
not being identical with ___'. Then clearly Fa is false, and Fb is true.This is the case even if a, in fact, is identical with b.
Is there a puzzle here? It may be only a malformed attempt at a puzzle. We are presented with a very short story consisting of exactly two claims. We are given no information as to whether the person called 'a' is the same as or different from the person called 'b.' So the story allows for the possibility that the person called 'a' is not the same as the person called 'b.' This is the case even if, in fact, outside the story, it is not the case that a = b.
It is not clear that there is a puzzle here since the following propositions are logically consistent:
A. Within the story, it is possible that the person called 'a' is not the same as the person called 'b.'
B. It is the case that a = b.
C. For any x, y, if x = y, then necessarily, x = y. (Kripke's Necessity of Identity thesis)
It is the presence of the story operator in (A) that saves the triad from inconsistency.
Suppose 'Axwell' and 'Buswell' are the two names in the story and that both refer to an existing man, the same man. That a = b is no part of the story. Given only what we know from the story it is possible that a not be identical to b. But this possibility is something like an epistemic possibility which, as such, cannot be used to show the real (non-epistemic) possibility that a not be identical to b in reality.
So on this New Year's Day I tax the Noble Opponent with a metabasis eis allo genos (μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος), which is something like a Rylean category mistake: he shifts illicitly from a story-immanent perspective to a story-transcendent perspective. Within the story there is a story-immanent contingency as to both the identity and the difference of the referents of the names. But this is a sort of epistemic contingency consequent upon the fact that literary fiction leaves much indeterminate: the literary characters have all and only the properties assigned to them in the story.
So it looks as if the Opponent may be conflating a sort of epistemic contingency with real contingency. He does not have the makings of a sound argument for the claim that real-world identities are contingent, contra Kripke.
By contrast, the following triad is plainly inconsistent. This is the case whether we take names to be Kripkean rigid designators or Russellian definite descriptions in disguise.
A*. Possibly, it is not the case that a = b.
B. It is the case that a = b.
C. For any x, y, if x = y, then necessarily, x = y.
God as Biblical Character and as Divine Reality
When Thomas Aquinas and Baruch Spinoza write about the God of the Old Testament, they write about numerically the same Biblical character using the same Latin word, Deus. They write about this character, refer to it, and indeed succeed in referring to it. But Aquinas and Spinoza do not believe in the same divine reality. Of course they both believe in a divine reality; but their conceptions of a divine reality are so different that it cannot be maintained — or so I argue here contra F. Beckwith — that it is one and the same reality that they believe in. Nor do they succeed in referring to the same reality. Since it cannot be the case that both divine realities exist, one of the two philosophers fails to refer to anything at all. It follows that they cannot be said to worship the same God: one of them worships an idol.
God, Adam, Moses, "and all them prophets good and gone" (Bob Dylan, Gospel Plow) actually exist qua characters in the Biblical narrative. But of course it does not follow that they exist 'outside' the narrative in reality.
A few months ago in the wake of the Wheaton contretemps we were much exercised over the question whether the God of the Christians is the same as the God of the Muslims. I wonder if the distinction between God as Biblical character and God as divine reality can help in that dispute. Perhaps some variants of the dispute arise from a failure to draw this distinction. Perhaps the following irenic proposal will be acceptable:
Christians and Muslims write about, talk about, and refer to one and the same Biblical character when they use 'God' and 'Allah.' In this sense, the God of the Christians and that of the Muslims is the same God. It is one and the same Biblical character, God. But Christians and Muslims do not refer to one and the same divine reality by their uses of 'God' and 'Allah.' This is because extralinguistic reference is conceptually mediated, not direct, and no one item can instantiate both the Christian and the Muslim conceptions of God. Nothing can be both triune and non-triune, to mention just one important different in the two conceptions.
So either the Christian is failing to refer to anything such that his worship is of an idol, or the Muslim is failing to refer to anything such that his worship is of an idol. The situation is strictly parallel to the Aquinas-Spinoza case. The two philosophers are clearly referring to the same Biblical character when they write Deus. But their conceptions of God are so different that they cannot be said to be referring to the same being in external reality.
My suggestion, then, is that some may have got their knickers in a knot for no good reason by failing to make the above-captioned distinction.
According to Ed Buckner over at Dale Tuggy's place,
. . . there is at least one sort of case where it is clear they [Aquinas and Spinoza] are using the name ‘God’ in exactly the same way, namely when they discuss the interpretation of the scriptures. Aquinas does this many times in Summa Theologiae, using the words of the Bible and the Church Fathers to support complex theological and philosophical arguments. Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise is an extensive commentary on the text of the Bible and its meaning, also supported throughout by biblical quotation. So when Thomas writes
According to Chrysostom (Hom. iii in Genes.), Moses prefaces his record by speaking of the works of God (Deus) collectively. (Summa TheologiaeIª q. 68 a. 1 ad 1)
and Spinoza writes
As for the fact that God [Deus] was angry with him [Balak] while he was on his journey, that happened also to Moses when he was setting out for Egypt at the command of God [Dei]. (Tractatus ch. 3, alluding to Exodus 4:24-26)
it is clear that they are talking about the same persons, i.e. they are both talking about God, and they are both talking about Moses. It is somewhat more complicated than that, because Spinoza has a special theory about what the word ‘God’ means in the scriptures, but more of that later. In the present case, it seems clear that whenever we indirectly quote the scriptures, e.g. ‘Exodus 3:1 says that Moses was setting out for Egypt at the command of God’, we are specifying what the Bible says by using the names ‘Moses’ and ‘God’ exactly as the Bible uses them. Bill might disagree here, but we shall see.
I agree that they are both talking about the same persons qua characters in the Old Testament. The fact that Ed puts 'God' and 'Moses' in italics suggests, however, that he thinks that there is more here than reference to Biblical characters: there is also reference to really existent persons, and that our two philosophers are referring to the same really existent persons. But here I suspect that Ed is attempting a reduction of bona fide extralinguistic reference to what I will call text- and discourse-immanent reference, whether intertextual (as in the present case) or intratextual (as in the case of back references within one and the same narrative). If Ed is proposing a reduction — or God forbid an elimination — of real extralinguistic reference in favor of some form of discourse-immanent reference, then I have a bone to pick with him.
The issues here are much trickier than one might suspect. They involve questions Ed and I have been wrangling over for years, questions about fiction and intentionality and existence and quantification and logical form and what all else.
What Problem Does Literary Fiction Pose?
More than one. Here is one. And as old Chisholm used to say, you are not philosophizing unless you have a puzzle. So try on this aporetic triad for size:
1. Purely fictional objects do not exist.
2. There are true sentences about purely fictional objects, e.g., 'Sherlock Holmes is a detective' and 'Sherlock Holmes is purely fictional.'
3. If a sentence of the form Fa is true, then there exists an x such that 'a' refers to x.
The triad is logically inconsistent: any two limbs entail the negation of the remaining one. So the limbs cannot all be true despite the considerable plausibility of each. So one of the propositions must be rejected. But the first is nonnegotiable since it is true by definition. The leaves two options: reject (2) or reject (3).
I want to avoid truck with Meinong if at all possible. So I should like to adhere to (3). There are no true singular sentences about what does not exist.
Suppose we reject (2). One way to do this is by supplying a paraphrase in which the apparent reference to the nonexistent is replaced by real reference to the existent. For example, the apparent reference to Sherlock, who does not exist, is replaced by real reference to a story in which he figures, a story that, of course, exists. The elliptical approach is one way of implementing this paraphrastic strategy. Accordingly,
4. Sherlock Holmes is a detective
and
5. Sherlock Holmes is fictional
are elliptical for, respectively,
6. In the Conan Doyle stories, Sherlock Holmes is a detective
and
7. In the Conan Doyle stories, Sherlock Holmes is fictional.
But note that while (5) is plainly true, (7) is plainly false. The stroies represent the detective as a real individual, not a fictional individual! So (7) cannot be taken as elliptical for (5) This is a serious problem for the 'story operator' approach. Or consider the true
8. Sherlock Holmes does not exist.
(8) is surely not short for the false
9. In the Conan Doyle stories, Sherlock Holmes does not exist.
The point can be made with other 'extranuclear' predicates such as 'merely possible' and 'mythological.' If I say that Pegasus is mythological, I don't mean that, according to legend, Pegasus is mythological.
I'll end with a different challenge to the story operator approach. Consider
10. Pinocchio was less of a liar than Barack Obama.
Whether you consider (1) true or false, it is certainly not elliptical for
11. In Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), Pinocchio was less of a liar than Barack Obama.
To put it vaguely, one problem with the story operator approach is that it traps fictional characters within particular stories, songs, legends, tales, etc. so that (i) it becomes difficult to understand how they can show up in different different stories, songs, etc. as they obviously do in the cases of Faust and Pinocchio, and (ii) it becomes difficult to understand how they can show up in comparisons with nonfictional individuals.
Is there a tenable solution to my triad or is it a genuine aporia?
Pre-Print: Peter van Inwagen, Existence: Essays in Ontology
The following review article is scheduled to appear later this year in Studia Neoscholastica. The editor grants me permission to reproduce it here should anyone have comments that might lead to its improvement.
REVIEW ARTICLE
William F. Vallicella
Peter van Inwagen, Existence: Essays in Ontology, Cambridge University Press, 2014, viii + 261 pp.
This volume collects twelve of Peter van Inwagen's recent essays in ontology and meta-ontology, all of them previously published except one, “Alston on Ontological Commitment.” It also includes an introduction, “Inside and Outside the Ontology Room.” It goes without saying that anyone who works in ontology should study this collection of rigorous, brilliant, and creative articles. One route into the heart of van Inwagen's philosophical position is via the theory of fictional entities he develops in chapter 4, “Existence, ontological commitment, and fictional entities.”
Fictional Entities
One might reasonably take it to be a datum that a purely fictional item such as Sherlock Holmes does not exist. After all, most of us know that Holmes is a purely fictional character, and it seems analytic that what is purely fictional does not exist. Van Inwagen, however, demurs:
The lesson I mean to convey by these examples is that the nonexistence of [Sherlock] Holmes is not an ontological datum; the ontological datum is that we can use the sentence 'Sherlock Holmes does not exist' to say something true. (105)
So, while many of us are inclined to say that the nonexistence of Holmes is an ontological datum in virtue of his being a purely fictional entity, one wholly made up by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, van Inwagen maintains that Holmes exists and that his existence is consistent with his being purely fictional. One man's datum is another man's (false) theory! To sort this out, we need to understand van Inwagen's approach to ficta.
Continue reading “Pre-Print: Peter van Inwagen, Existence: Essays in Ontology“
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.
A Cartesian Argument Against Meinong
The following is excerpted from my "Does Existence Itself Exist? Transcendental Nihilism Meets the Paradigm Theory" in The Philosophy of Panayot Butchvarov: A Collegial Evaluation, ed. Larry Lee Blackman, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005, pp. 57-73, excerpt pp. 67-68.
If anything can count as an established result in philosophy, it is the soundness of Descartes' famous cogito ergo sum 'argument.' Thus to the query, 'How do I know that I exist?', the Cartesian answer is that the very act of doubting that one exists proves that one indubitably exists. Now this may not amount to a proof that a substantial self, a res cogitans, exists; and this for the reason that one may doubt whether acts of thinking emanate from a metaphysical ego. But the cogito certainly does prove that something exists, even if this is only an act of thinking or a momentary bundle of acts of thinking. Thus I know with certainty that my present doubting is not a nonexistent object. But if Meinong were right, my present doubting could easily be a nonexistent object, indeed, a nonexistent object that actually has the property of being indubitably apparent to itself.
For on Meinongian principles, I could, for all I could claim to know, be a fictional character, one who cannot doubt his own existence. In that case, the inability to doubt one's own existence would not prove that one actually exists. This intolerable result certainly looks like a reductio ad absurdum of the Meinongian theory. If anything is clear, it is that I know, in the strictest sense of the word, that I am not a fictional character. My present doubting that I exist is an object that has the property of being indubitable, but cannot have this property without existing. It follows that there are objects whose actual possession of properties entails their existence. This implies the falsity of Meinong's principle of the independence of Sosein from Sein, and with it the view that existence is extrinsic to every object. Forced to choose between Descartes and Meinong, we ought to side with Descartes.
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.
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.
The 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.
London Paraphrastics Questioned
To block the inference from
1. Frodo is a hobbit
to
2. There are hobbits
we can invoke story operators and substitute for (1)
1*. In the Tolkien story, Frodo is a hobbit.
From (1*) one cannot validly infer (2). So far, so good. But what about the true
3. Frodo is a purely fictional character
given that the following is plainly false:
3*. In the Tolkien story, Frodo is a purely fictional character. (?)
How do we block the inference from (3) to
4. There are purely fictional characters. (?)
At this juncture, London Ed makes a paraphrastic move:
Note that 'fiction' just means what is contrived, or made up, or invented. To say that Frodo 'is' a fictional character is simply to say that he is made up, which itself no more than saying that someone (Tolkien) made him up.
Indeed, that is what 'fiction' means, 'pure fiction' leastways. 'Fiction' is from the Latin fingere. So Ed would paraphrase (3) as
3P. Someone (Tolkien) made up (created, invented, contrived) Frodo.
Now if the paraphrase is adequate, then (3) does not commit us ontologically to anything beyond Tolkien. It does not commit us to the existence of fictional characters. Ed wants to avoid views like that of van Inwagen according to which purely fictional items exist. It is worth noting that Ed agrees with van Inwagen about the univocity of 'is' and 'exists.' There are no modes of existence/being for either of them. And for both the one sense of 'is'/'exists' is supplied adequately and completely by the existential quantifier of modern predicate logic. Both are thin theorists when it comes to existence.
But is (3P) an adequate paraphrase of (3)?
I don't think so. If Tolkien made up Frodo, but Frodo does not exist, then what did Tolkien create? A mere modification of his own consciousness? No. He created a character that outlasted him and that cannot be identified with any part of Tolkien's body or mind. Tolkien ceased to exist in 1973. But no one will say that the character Frodo simply vanished in 1973. When Tolkien ceased to exist, his mental contents ceased to exist. But when the writer ceased to exist, Frodo did not stop being a quite definite fictional character. So Frodo cannot be identified with any mental content of Tolkien. Nor could Frodo be said to be an adverbial modification of one of Tolkien's acts of thinking.
I grant that Frodo is an artifact. He came into being by the creative acts of Tolkien and is dependent on Tolkien for his coming into being, and perhaps even tied to Tolkien for his very identity: essentiality of origin for ficta. Frodo is also dependent on the continuing existence of physical copies of LOTR. Frodo is an artifact that came into being and can pass out of being. This makes Frodo a contingent artifact. What's more, Frodo is not merely a content in Tolkien's mind: he can be thought about and understood and referred to by many different minds. So Frodo has a curious status: he is in one way dependent and in another independent.
Now I claim that if one admits that there are different modes of being/existence, one can make sense of this. Fictional characters have a dependent mode of being, but they are, nonetheless, items in their own right. They obviously don't exist in the way a fiction writer exists. But it would be false to say that they don't exist at all. After all, Frodo cannot be identified with a mental content of Tolkien.
So while it is true that someone made up Frodo, as Ed rightly insists, that does not suffice to show that Frodo does not exist.
Ed's paraphrase is inadequate. And so he is stuck with the problem of blocking the inference from (3) to (4).
……………………
UPDATE (7/31). I said above, "Frodo is also dependent on the continuing existence of physical copies of LOTR." That's not quite right. If all the copies of LOTR were destroyed tomorrow, Frodo would continue on as a cultural artifact in the oral tradition for as long as that tradition was maintained. But once that tradition petered out, it would be all over for Frodo if there were no physical copies of LOTR (electronic or otherwise) or writings about LOTR on hand. The dependence of abstract cultural artifacts on human beings, their practices and memories, is not easy to understand. We are in the realm of Hegel's objektiver Geist.
A Paraphrastic Approach to Fictional Sentences
Here is a dyad for your delectation:
1. There are no purely fictional characters.
2. There are some purely fictional characters, e.g., Sherlock Holmes.
(1) looks to be an analytic truth: by definition, what is purely fictional is not, i.e., does not exist. But (2) also seems to be true. And yet they cannot both be true if 'are' has the same sense in both sentences.
London Ed is against "messing about with the copula" as he puts it. Thus he is opposed to making a distinction between two senses of 'are' in alleviation of our dyad's apparent inconsistency. Is there another way to solve the problem?
One way is to look for ontologically noncommittal paraphrases of those sentences that appear to commit us to fictional items. Roderick Chisholm has some suggestions for us. Consider the sentence
3. There is no detective who is as famous as Holmes.
Chisholm's paraphrase:
To say that there is no detective who is as famous as Holmes is to compare two numbers. (1) The first is the number of people who interpret Holmes as the name of a detective; and (2) the second is the number of people who interpret some name other than Holmes as the name of a detective. The comparative statement tells us that the first number is larger than the second. (A Realistic Theory of Categories, CUP 1996, pp. 122-123.)
Boiled down, we have
3P. The number of people of who take 'Holmes' to be the name of a detective is greater than the number of people who take some name other than 'Holmes' to be the name of a detective.
Very clever. Off the top of my head, (3P) looks to be an adequate paraphrase that does not commit us to the existence of a fictional entity. But if the paraphrastic method is to work, it must work against every example. Just one recalcitrant example counts as a "spanner in the works." What about this example of mine:
4. Obama is a worse liar than Pinocchio.
Perhaps we can paraphrase away the reference to Pinocchio with
4P. The traits we know Obama to possess are more indicative of mendacity than the traits we attribute to the character named 'Pinocchio.'
Questions for London Ed (and anyone else who is following this):
a. Do you endorse this paraphrastic approach? If not, why not?
b. Van Inwagen says things that imply that he thinks that the paraphrastic approach does not work. Why does he say this? Does he have examples of sentences that cannot be treated by this approach?
London Ed on Peter van Inwagen on Fiction
Comments by BV in blue.
Inwagen gives persuasive arguments that there is only one sort of existential quantifier, that we cannot quantify over ‘things’ that are in some sense ‘beyond being’, and that ‘exists’ means the same as ‘is’ or ‘has being’. No review of his work would be complete without a careful discussion of these arguments, but as I agree with them, I will not discuss them here.
The problem I want to discuss is with his main thesis. He aims to explain what he calls ‘fictional discourse’, namely discourse like “There are characters in some 19th-century novels who are presented with a greater wealth of physical detail than is any character in any 18th-century novel." Such sentences are true, according to him, but when we translate them into quantifier-variable idiom, we have to use the existential quantifier which, on his view, is equivalent to ‘exists’. This seems to imply that fictional characters like Tom Sawyer and Mr Pickwick exist. Inwagen bites the bullet, and argues that they do exist. They are abstract objects, which exist in exactly the way that numbers exist. So when we say, in a work of literary criticism, that “Mrs Gamp is a character in a novel”, the proper name ‘Mrs Gamp’ refers to an abstract or ‘theoretical’ entity.
BV: I don't think Ed is representing van Inwagen correctly here. Numbers cannot come into being, but it is plausible to hold that fictional characters do. So while fictional characters, for van Inwagen, are abstract entities, he remains noncommittal on the question whether they are abstract artifacts in the way that chess could be thought of as a abstract artifact, or instead abstract non-artifacts like numbers and cognate platonica. See the last paragraph of "Existence, Ontological Commitment, and Fictional Entities."
This leads to the following problem. Inwagen argues that when a sentence like “Tom Sawyer was a boy who grew up along the banks of the Mississippi River in the 1840s” appears in a work of fiction, it is not true. Indeed, it is not even false, since it does not make an assertion at all (Existence, Ontological Commitment, and Fictional Entities, p.148, footnote 15). But when it appears in a work of literary criticism, as ‘literary discourse’, it is true. But if it is true, it seems to imply that there was some individual who is [in] the extension of the property expressed by ‘boy who grew up along the banks of the Mississippi River in the 1840s’, and yet there was no such individual.
Inwagen resolves the problem as follows. Tom Sawyer the fictional character exists, but he does not have the property ‘boy who grew up along the banks of the Mississippi River in the 1840s’. Nor does Mrs. Gamp have properties such as being old, being fat and so on. He concedes that this sounds odd (Creatures of Fiction, p. 304-5), but he argues there is something rather like it in a familiar philosophical doctrine, namely Descartes’ thesis that a person such as Jones is an immaterial substance, and so cannot have properties like ‘being tangible’, ‘weighing 220 lbs’ and so on, but only properties appropriate to immaterial objects, such as ‘thinking about Vienna’, ‘being free from pain’ and so on. Descartes says that Jones bears a relation to the properties on the former list that is not the relation of ‘having’ or ‘exemplifying’ but, rather, the relation of “animating a body” that has or exemplifies the property. We say that Jones is about six feet tall, but we should really say ‘animates a body that is six feet tall’: “what looks like predication in ordinary speech is not always predication”.
Thus when we say that Tom Sawyer is the main character in a well-known book of the same name, we are saying something that is true because the copula ‘is’ signifies the relation of having or exemplifying. But if we say, in literary discourse, that Tom is a boy, or that he is a resident of Mississippi, it is true because the copula signifies a quite different relation, which Inwagen calls ‘holding’.
BV: This is an accurate summary of van Inwagen's position as I understand it.
Problems
Bill has already identified some problems with Inwagen’s thesis. For example, he says that when I think of Mrs Gamp, I think of a woman. But according to Inwagen, I am thinking of an abstract or theoretical entity, and no theoretical entity has gender.
I shall not discuss these (although I broadly agree with them), but will mention some further ones.
1. Plot summaries. I discussed plot summaries in a comment to Bill’s post. We have a clear notion of what counts as a ‘correct’ summary. E.g. “Tom Sawyer lives with his Aunt Polly and his half-brother Sid” is correct, “Tom Sawyer lives with his Aunt Polly and his sisters Lizzie, Jane, Kitty, Lydia and Mary” is clearly not. But this notion of ‘correctness’ is close enough to the notion of truth that Inwagen’s theory needs to deal with it. If we assimilate it to Inwagen’s notion of truth in ‘literary discourse’, i.e. if we regard a statement in a plot summary as of the same kind as “Mrs Gamp is a character in a novel”, then we have the problem that plot summaries are written ‘in universe’, and that the names of the characters refer to the characters as characters, and not as abstract theoretical entities. But if we assimilate plot summaries to condensed versions of the original literary work, we have the problem of how they can be ‘correct’ at all. It is fundamental to Inwagen’s account that sentences in a work of fiction do not make assertions at all, and so cannot admit of truth or falsity – or correctness or incorrectness.
BV: Ed's point here seems to be that van Inwagen cannot account for the correctness of plot summaries. It is clear that some summaries are correct or accurate and that some are not. Now a summary of a piece of fiction is either itself a piece of (severely condensed) fiction, in which case it contains sentences that are, on van Inwagen's theory, neither true nor false, or it is not a piece of fiction but a piece of writing containing true sentences about the content of the fictional work being summarized. This disjunction appears to be a dilemma. For on the first disjunct, it is hard to see how a plot summary could be correct or true. But the second disjunct is also unacceptable. For suppose the summary contains the sentence 'Mrs Gamp is a fat old lady.' Then 'Mrs Gamp' in this sentence takes an abstract existent as its referent, an existent that does not HAVE but HOLDs the properties of being fat, being old, and being a lady, when the novel is not about abstract objects at all, but is about concrete objects one of which HAS, but does not HOLD, the properties of being fat, old and a lady.
A very astute criticism that may in the end hit the mark. I don't know.
Suppose I write a three-sentence novella:
It was a dark and rainy night. Shaky Jake, life-long insomniac, awakened from his dogmatic slumbers by the rythm of the rain, and deciding he needed a nightcap, grabbed his flashlight and his raincoat and headed for the Glass Crutch bar and grill, a local watering hole a half a mile from his house. Bellying up to the bar, he said to the 'tender: "One scotch, one bourbon, one beer."
A correct plot summary: An insomniac awakened by the rain goes to a bar for a drink.
An incorrect summary: A philosopher in La Mirada, California, dreaming about the ontological argument, is awakened when an earthquake causes a copy of David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature to fall on his head.
Ed's question is how the first summary can be correct and the second incorrect if fictional sentences 'in universe' as Ed writes, lack truth-values. I am not convinced that there is a problem here. For a summary to be correct it doesn't have to be true of anything; it merely has to reproduce in condensed form the sense of the the piece of fiction summarized. I can take in the sense of a sentence without knowing whether it is true or false. A summary merely boils down the sense of the original.
2. ‘Sincere’ fiction. Not all fiction is ‘insincere’, i.e. knowingly made up. What if a sincere but deluded person writes a long account about characters (angels, spirits etc) and events which were ‘revealed’ to him in a vision? Contra Inwagen, his claims are assertions, and are capable of truth or falsity.
BV: But is this a case of literary fiction? The delusive account is fictional in that it is false, but that might be different use of 'fictional.' Why can't van Inwagen insist that literary fiction is by definition 'insincere' in Ed's sense?
3. Story-relative reference. Any serious account of fiction needs to deal with the way that names in fiction (and empty names generally) are able to identify or individuate within the story by telling the reader which character is being talked about. Inwagen needs to explain how such story-relative reference works, for his theory does not address it. He also has the problem that ‘literary discourse’ also seems to use story-relative reference. Consider the story (A) “A man called Gerald and a boy called Steve were standing by fountain. Steve had a drink”, and the statement (B) “In the second sentence the proper name ‘Steve’ identifies Steve." Statement (B) is true, and so is ‘literary discourse’, according to Inwagen, and so ‘Steve’ in (B) identifies an abstract object. But it clearly ‘refers back’ to the ‘Steve’ in (A). How can a term referring to an abstract object also refer back to a character in a story, when the character is not an abstract object?
BV: Van Inwagen might respond by saying that in (B) ''Steve' identifies Steve only in the sense that 'Steve' in the second sentence has 'Steve' in the first sentence as antecedent. So there is no (extralinguistic) reference at all, and 'Steve' in (B) does not pick out an abstract object.
Note the ambiguity of 'Ed signed his book.' It could mean that Ed signed Ed's book. Or it could mean that Ed signed a book belonging to someone distinct from Ed. (Suppose, while pointing at Tom, I say to Peter, "Ed signed his book.") In the first case, 'his' exercises no (extralinguistic) reference. In the second case it does.
4. The problem is worse in the case of names whose emptiness is in doubt. Suppose I make a reference statement: “Luke 1 v5 refers to Zachary, a high priest at the temple”. Like many characters in the New Testament, we are not certain whether Zachary existed or not. If he did exist, the name in my reference statement refers to him. If not, according to Inwagen, it refers to an abstract object. How can the semantics of the sentence be so utterly different without my knowing? For I don’t know whether Zachary existed or not, and so I don’t know what the semantics of the reference statement is. But surely I do.
BV: I don't think van Inwagen will have any trouble with this objection. Suppose we don't know whether Zachary existed or not. Our not knowing this is not the same as our not knowing whether he is nonfictional or fictional. For we know that the NT is not a work of fiction — assuming that, necessarily, every work of fiction involves pretence on the part of its author or authors. If we agree that the NT is not a work of fiction and it turns out that Zachary never existed, then van Inwagen can say that no one had all the properties ascribed to Zachary. His theory does not require him to say that 'Zachary' refers to an abstract object.
5. What about statements where we say what the author says? For example “Dickens says that Mrs Gamp is fat”. Inwagen would classify this as literary discourse, but if so, the token of ‘Mrs Gamp’ refers to an abstract object. But Dickens is surely not saying that an abstract object is fat?
The general problem, and here I think I am agreeing with Bill, is that the semantics of proper names as used in fiction (or ‘sincere’ fiction) doesn’t seem to be enormously different from the semantics of the same names as used in ‘literary discourse’. Yet, according to Inwagen, the difference is as enormous as it gets.
Do Purely Fictional Items Exist? On Van Inwagen’s Theory of Ficta
A character in a novel is an example of a purely fictional item provided that the character is wholly 'made up' by the novelist. Paul Morphy, for example, is a character in Francis Parkinson Keyes' historical novel, The Chess Players but he is also a real-life 19th century New Orleans chess prodigy. So Paul Morphy, while figuring in a piece of fiction, is not a purely fictional item like Captain Ahab or Sancho Panza or Frodo.
Earlier I said that it is a datum that Frodo, a purely fictional item, does not exist. Saying that it is a datum, I implied that it is not something that can be reasonably questioned, that it is a 'Moorean fact.' After all, most of us know that Frodo is a purely fictional character, and it is obvious — isn't it? — that what is purely fictional does not exist. Whatever is purely fictional does not exist looks to be an analytic proposition, one that merely unpacks the sense of 'purely fictional.'
But then after I uploaded my entry I remembered something that van Inwagen says in his essay Existence, Ontological Commitment, and Fictional Entities (in Existence: Essays in Ontology, CUP 2014, p. 105):
The lesson I mean to convey by these examples is that the nonexistence of [Sherlock] Holmes is not an ontological datum; the ontological datum is that we can use the sentence 'Sherlock Holmes does not exist' to say something true.
I think this sentence would make more sense if van Inwagen had 'linguistic datum' for the second occurrence of 'ontological datum.' If the nonexistence of Holmes is a datum, then it is an ontological datum; but the fact that we can use the sentence in question to say something true is a linguistic datum.
In any case, PvI is saying the opposite of what I was saying earlier. I was saying something that implies that the nonexistence of Holmes is an ontological datum in virtue of his being a purely fictional entity whereas PvI is saying in effect that Holmes exists and that his existence is consistent with his being purely fictional. One man's datum is another man's (false) theory!
To sort this out, we need to understand PvI's approach to ficta.
Van Inwagen's Theory of Fictional Entities
We first note that van Inwagen holds to the univocity of 'exists' and 'is.' The ontological counterpart of this semantic thesis is that there are no modes of being/existence. He also has no truck with Meinongian Aussersein. Bear in mind that Aussersein is not a mode of being. And bear in mind that the doctrine of Aussersein is not the same as, and goes far beyond, the thesis that there is a weak mode of being had by the fictional Mrs. Gamp and her ilk. The thesis of Aussersein is that
M. Some items are such that they have no being whatsoever.
For van Inwagen, (M) is self-contradictory. He thinks that it entails that something is not identical with itself, which, if the entailment went through, would amount to a reductio ad absurdum of (M). (95) Now I have argued that van Inwagen is wrong to find (M) self-contradictory. But let's assume that he is right. Then it would follow, in conjunction with the univocity thesis, that everything exists and indeed in the same sense of 'exists.' And what sense is that? The sense supplied by the existential quantifier of standard modern predicate logic. Van Inwagen is thoroughly Quinean about existence. There is nothing more to existence than what existential quantification expresses. I call this a dogma of analysis. Fo an attempt at refutation, see my "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, eds. Novotny and Novak, Routledge, 2014, pp. 45-75.
Now consider the sentence
1. Tom Sawyer is a character in a novel by Mark Twain.
By van Inwagen's lights, when (1) is translated into the quantifier-variable idiom it can be seen to imply that Tom Sawyer exists. I won't repeat van Inwagen's tedious rigmarole, but the idea is simple enough: (1) is plainly true; (1) cannot be supplied with an ontologically noncommittal paraphrase; and (1) ontologically commits us to the existence of the fictional character, Tom Sawyer. This is plausible and let's assume for present purposes that it is right: we accept (1) as true, and this acceptance commits us to the existence of a referent for 'Tom Sawyer.' Tom Sawyer exists! The same goes for all pure ficta. They all exist! They exist in the same sense that you and I do. Indeed, they actually exist: they are not mere possibilia. (What I just said is, strictly, pleonastic; but pleonasm is but a peccadillo when precision is at a premium.)
But now we have a problem, or at least van Inwagen does. While we are ontologically committed to the existence of purely fictional characters by our use and acceptance of true sentences such as (1), we must also somehow accommodate everyone's firm conviction that purely fictional characters do not exist. How?
When we say that Sherlock Holmes does not exist, we can be taken to express the proposition that "No one has all the properties the fictional character Sherlock Holmes holds . . . ." (105, emphasis added) There are properties that fictional characters HAVE and those that they HOLD. Among the properties that fictional characters HAVE are such logical properties as existence and self-identity, and such literary properties as being a character in a novel, being introduced in chapter 6, being modelled on Sancho Panza, etc. Among the properties fictional characters HOLD are properties like being human, being fat, having high blood pressure, being a resident of Hannibal, Missouri, and being a pipe-smoking detective.
What van Inwagen is doing is making a distinction between two modes of property-possession. A fictional item can possess a property by having it, i.e., exemplifying it, in which case the corresponding sentence expresses an actual predication. For example, a use of 'Tom Sawyer was created by Mark Twain' is an actual predication. A fictional item can also possess a property by holding it. For example, 'Tom Sawyer was a boy who grew up along the banks of Mississippi River in the 1840s' is not an actual predication but a sentence that expresses the relation of HOLDING that obtains between the fictional entity and the property expressed by 'was a boy who grew up, etc.'
With this distinction, van Inwagen can defang the apparent contradiction: Tom Sawyer exists & Tom Sawyer does not exist. The second limb can be taken to express the proposition that no one exemplifies or HAS the properties HELD by the existing item, Tom Sawyer.
To put it in my own way, what van Inwagen is maintaining is that there really is an entity named by 'Tom Sawyer' and that it possesses (my word) properties. It exemplifies some of these properties, the "high-category properties," but contains (my word) the others but is not qualified (my word) by them. Thus Mrs Gamp contains the property of being fat, but she does not exemplify this property. Analogy (mine): The set {fatness} is not fat: it holds the property but does not have (exemplify) it.
For van Inwagen, creatures of fiction exist and obey the laws of logic, including the Law of Excluded Middle. So they are not incomplete objects. On a Meinongian approach, Tom Sawyer is an incomplete nonexistent object. For van Inwagen, he is a complete existent object. Now although I am not aware of a passage where van Inwagen explicitly states that purely fictional entities are abstract objects, this seems clearly to be entailed by what he does say. For Tom Sawyer exists, and indeed actually exists — he is not a merely possible being — but he does not interact causally with anything else in the actual world. He does not exist here below in the land of concreta, but up yonder in Plato land. So if abstract entities are those that are causally inert, Tom Sawyer is an abstract object. That is consistent with what van Inwagen does explicity say, namely, that "creatures of fiction" are "theoretical entities of [literary] criticism." (Ontology, Identity, and Modality, p. 53.)
Some Questions about/Objections to van Inwagen's Theory
1. The theory implies that Sherlock Holmes exists, and exists as robustly as I do. That he exists follows from there being truths about him. That he exists as robustly as I do follows from the rejection of Meinongian nonentities and the rejection of modes of being/existence (and also of degrees of being/existence). But when I think about Sherlock I seem to myself to be thinking about something that does not exist. For I know that Sherlock is a purely fictional item, and I know that such items do not exist. If I am asked to describe the object of my thinking, I must describe it as nonexistent, for that is how it appears. So what should we say? Should we say that when I think of Sherlock, unbeknownst to myself, I am thinking of an existing abstract object? Or should we say that there are two objects, the one I am thinking of, which is nonexistent, and the existent abstract object?
Either way there is trouble. Surely I am the final authority as to what I am thinking of. It is part of the phenomenology of the situation that when I think about a detective that I know to be purely fictional I am thinking about an item that is given as nonexistent. But then the existing abstract object is not the same as the object I am thinking of. Van Inwagen's abstract surrogate exists; the object I am think of does not exist; ergo, they are not the same object.
On the other hand, if there are two objects, and it is van Inwagen's surrogate object that I am really thinking of when I think of Sherlock, then I am always in error when I think of pure ficta. I appear to myself to be thinking about nonexistent concreta when in reality I am thinking about existent abstracta.
2. When I think of Sherlock, I think of a man, and when I think of Mrs Gamp, I think of a woman. But no abstract object has sex organs. So either I am not thinking of what I appear to be thinking of, and a systematic error infects my thinking of pure ficta, or I am thinking of what I appear to be thinking of, namely, a man or a woman, in which case I am not thinking of an abstract existent.
3. When I think of Mrs Gamp as fat, I think of her as exemplifying the property of being fat, not as holding the property or containing it or encoding (Zalta) it. But then I cannot be thinking about an existent abstract object, for no such object is (predicatively) fat.
According to the Meinongian, when one think about Mrs Gamp, one thinks about a fat woman who does not exist. According to van Inwagen, when one thinks about Mrs Gamp, one thinks about an existing abstract object that is (predicatively) neither a woman not fat. Pick your poison!
I say neither theory is acceptable.
A Possible Objection to My Critique
"In the articles you cite, van Inwagen doesn't address our thinking about fictional items. He is not doing descriptive psychology or phenomenology; his approach is linguistic. He argues that fictional discourse — discourse about fictional items — commits us ontologically to fictional entities. He then tries to square this commitment with our acceptance of such sentences as 'Sherlock Holmes does not exist.' Your objections, however, are phenomenologically based. So it is not clear that your objections hit their target.
In response I would say that no adequate theory of fictional discourse or fictional objects can abstract away from the first-person point of view of one who thinks about fictional objects. Such linguistic reference as we find in a sentence such as (1) above is parasitic upon intentional or thinking reference. But this is a very large and a very hairy theme of its own. See The Primacy of the Intentional Over the Linguistic.
Thinking About Frodo
Let me attack yesterday's puzzle from a different angle. The puzzle in one sentence: we think about things that do not exist; but how is this possible given that they do not exist?
Here is the problem set forth as an aporetic hexad:
1. When I think about Frodo, as I am doing right now, I am thinking about, precisely, Frodo: not about some semantic or epistemic intermediary or surrogate or representative. I am thinking about a concrete, albeit nonexistent, item. I am not thinking about an idea in my mind, or a mental image, or any mental content; nor am I thinking about an abstract entity of any kind such as a property; nor am I thinking of a word or a phrase or anything linguistic.
2. Thinking about (thinking of) is a relation the relata of which are a subject who thinks and an object thought of. Thinking is triadic: ego-cogito-cogitatum.
3. Every relation is such that if it obtains, then all its relata exist/are.
4. There are no different modes of existence/being. This is the ontological counterpart of the semantic thesis of the univocity of 'exists' and 'is' and cognates.
5. To exist is to exist extramentally and extralinguistically, where the minds in question are finite.
6. Frodo, a purely fictional item, does not exist.
The limbs of the hexad are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent. To solve the problem we must reject one of the limbs. But which one? (6) is a datum, and (5) is an unproblematic definition. So the the candidates for rejection are (1)-(4). I'll take these in reverse order.
Deny (4): There are two modes of being, esse reale and esse intentionale. When we say, with truth, that Frodo does not exist, we mean that he lacks esse reale. But we can still think about him in a manner to satisfy (1)-(3) since he has merely intentional being.
Deny (3): Twardowski-Meinong-Grossmann Solution. There are items that have no being at all, and there are genuine relations that connect existents such as minds to beingless items in the realm of Aussersein.
Deny (2): Thinking-of is not relational, whether or not the obtaining of a relation requires that all its relata exist. This can be developed in different ways. Adverbial theories, Brentano's theory, Butchvarov's theory.
Deny (1): One way to deny (1) is via abstract artifactualism. A number of philosophers, including van Inwagen, have been putting forth some version of this view. The idea is that purely fictional items such as Frodo are created by the authors of works of fiction in which they figure. They are a peculiar species of abstract object since they come into being, unlike 'standard' abstract objects. They exist, but they are abstract. Meinong, by contrast, held that they are concrete but do not exist or have any being at all. Here is a paper that defends artifactualism against some objections by Sainsbury.
Now, gentlemen, pick your poison! Which limb will you deny? I claim, though this is but a promissory note, that no theory works and that the problem, though genuine, is insoluble.