Abstract
Anna Pautz has recently argued that the pretense theory of thought about fiction cannot explain how two people can count as thinking about the same fictional character. This is based on conflating pretending and the serious thought that can be based on pretend. With this distinction in place, her objections are groundless.
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Notes
Eagle (2007), for instance, conceives Walton as discovering a kind of pseudo-assertion that is essentially non-committal.
It might still be true that “Holmes” is sometimes used to name an abstract object or a singular concept: this is irrelevant, if it is not being so used in cases like “Holmes is smart.”
Walton would agree, but he tends to stress the fact that a novel and a report can have the same words, rather than the fact that the reader engaged in putatively serious discourse can employ the same words. See Walton (1990, p. 71, 77).
References
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Pautz, A. B. (2008). Fictional coreference as a problem for the pretense theory. Philosophical Studies, 141, 147–156.
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Walton, K. L. (1990). Mimesis as make-believe: On the foundations of the representational arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Hicks, M. A note on pretense and co-reference. Philos Stud 149, 395–400 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9395-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9395-5