Abstract
In this essay, I appeal to the mental file approach in order to give an anti-realist semantic analysis of statements containing fictional names. I claim that fictive and parafictive uses of them express conceptual, though not general, propositions constituted by mental files, anchored in the conceptual world of the corresponding fictional story. Moreover, by positing a referential shift determined by the presence of a simulative referential intention characteristic of those uses, it is possible to take them to be true with respect to those conceptual worlds. As for metafictive uses, since they are grounded on mixed intentions, they are considered to express hybrid propositions, partly conceptual and partly referential.
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Notes
As must be clear, the approach shares the ontological commitment to mental representations that was characteristic of the old Representational Theory of the Mind, defended by Fodor in most of his books. See, for instance, Fodor (1990).
This is supposed to suggest the Classical Russellian contrast between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description: someone opens a file by virtue of being acquainted with a particular, as opposed to getting to it by grasping properties that it uniquely possesses, that is, by description. For the distinction, see Russell (1912).
Recanati (2012) calls those relations ‘epistemically rewarding’.
In this paper both files and descriptive concepts are conventionally designated by words in capital letters, as it is usually the case with mental representations.
The relation between files and descriptive concepts, on the one hand, and the singular thoughts constituted by them, on the other, is not always clear enough. I would say that it is the occurrence or tokening of thoughts that determine the distribution of descriptive concepts among the different files. For instance, it is the occurrence of the thought PLATO IS A PHILOSOPHER in the minds of many competent users of ‘Plato’ that makes the descriptive concept PHILOSOPHER appear in their respective PLATO files. For an interesting analysis of this point, as much as some strong criticisms of the mental file approach, see Losada (2015).
From now on, I will take the parenthetical qualification for granted.
This is also the case with mental representations, regarded as vehicles, in Fodor’s latest theory of content (1990).
Consider, for instance, the following fragment by Recanati: “The idea of ‘directness’ turns out to be ambiguous. ‘Direct reference’ can mean that the only meaning or content of a representation is its reference, to the exclusion of any sense or mode of presentation, as in Russell’s one-level semantics; or it can mean, as in singularist frameworks, that the subject is directly acquainted with the object in experience and does not think of it descriptively as the instantiator of such and such property. The two ideas are clearly independent, and it was a mistake on Russell’s part to argue from Singularism to the rejection of Frege’s two-level approach. I call it a major mistake because I think Russell’s one-level semantics is what killed Singularism by letting it succumb to cognitive significance objections” (2012: 16).
An interesting question is whether there might be also files for certain general terms that, far from being descriptive, can be taken to have a semantic profile similar to singular ones; in particular, I am thinking of natural kind general terms (like ‘water’, ‘gold’, etc.), which, according to Kripke (1972) and some other authors (see, for instance, Devitt 2005), are rigid expressions. If that were the case, the above conception of mental files should be slightly modified, so as to comprise the senses of non-descriptive, rigid general terms, which cannot be associated with descriptive concepts. Not only individual concepts but also a special kind of general, though non-descriptive, concepts would then qualify as files. However, in this essay, I will only be concerned with singular terms, more specifically, with proper names.
Although Recanati (2012) takes files to play the role of a non-referential component of meaning (broadly understood), he regards them as constitutive not of the content of singular terms but of what he calls ‘their psychological characters’.
It should be taken into account that even if files do not have a descriptive nature, they can play the same role descriptive contents do, since they serve to distinguish between co-referential names like ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’: the former is related to the HESPERUS file whereas the latter is related to the PHOSPHORUS file, which involve different historical chains of communication leading to the same object (more on this below). In this respect, I agree with Salis’ defense of the historical account as opposed to the informational one (Salis 2013). I owe this important clarification to a comment made by an anonymous referee for this journal.
Alternatively, I would say that an utterance of (1) expresses two different propositions.
The conceptual propositions expressed by utterances of sentences containing proper names, like (1) in the main text, are constituted by structures of files (or individual concepts) and descriptive concepts, namely, singular thoughts and, consequently, they are complex mental representation-tokens that can be classified into types, according to their corresponding components. In other words, these propositions inherit their mental status from the mental status of their respective components, that is, files and descriptive concepts. I call them ‘conceptual’ precisely because they are made out of (different kinds of) concepts. I owe this clarification to a worry put forward by a referee for this journal.
Therefore, my proposal will be, though different, akin to the so-called ‘pluri-propositionalist approach’ defended by Perry (2001), according to which every utterance can be associated with various kinds of contents. More specifically, my distinction between two kinds of content is akin to Perry’s distinction between referential or official content and intentional or network content. One difference seems to be that Perry takes the network underlying the use of a singular term to be a constitutive part of the file on the object referred to by the term at stake. See Perry (2001: chapter 8). As is known, Perry also adds at least a third kind of content, the reflexive content. See also Korta and Perry (2011) and Corazza (2014).
Of course, as far as indexicals are concerned, this needs considerable elaboration. With regard to them, their senses or modes of presentation are indexical concepts. They would constitute a level of content corresponding not to Perry’s intentional content but to his reflexive content (2001). See also Recanati (2012: 166-174) for an interesting distinction between the linguistic and the psychological mode of presentation of ‘I’.
It is fair to point out that Dummett had already interpreted Frege to the effect that not all senses must be thought to be descriptive, since there are non-descriptive ways of recognising objects. See, for instance: “What is important about Frege’s theory is that a proper name, if it is to be considered as having a determinate sense, must have associated with it a specific criterion for recognising a given object as the referent of the name; the referent of the name, if any, is whatever object satisfies that criterion. Sometimes the criterion may be capable of being conveyed by means of a definite description, in other cases not” (1973: 110). Also: “All that is necessary, in order that the senses of two names which have the same referent should differ is that we should have a different way of recognising an object as the referent of each of the two names: there is no reason to suppose that the means by which we effect such a recognition should be expressible by means of a definite description or any other complex singular term. Other writers may perhaps have maintained this: but there is no ground to impute any such thesis to Frege” (1973: 97-8).
Bonomi (2008) makes a similar distinction among textual, paratextual and metatextual uses.
As pointed out by an anonymous referee, that path is not the one chosen by all the previously mentioned proposals: Lewis does not take fictional names to be rigid designators (or, for that matter, any kind of device of singular reference), since he takes them to designate, in each world, the individual who happens to satisfy the corresponding fictional description in that world, hence someone who may vary across worlds. However, I have classified him as a realist (not of a Meinongian kind, though) because he regards the individual in question (or, more strictly speaking, the set of its counterparts) as an existent but merely possible object (non-rigidly designated by the fictional name at stake).
What makes (2’) true is the fact that it is fictional in an authorised game of make-believe, the one generated by Anna Karenina, that saying (2) is making a true assertion. Although competent speakers think in terms of (2), (2’) makes explicit the state of affairs that they are saying to occur when uttering (2) –that is why Walton claims that (2’) gives the truth conditions for (2). Those are cases in which competent speakers pretend to express a proposition when in fact they are expressing no proposition at all because there is no such thing (since, in turn, there is no Anna). Fictionally, (2) expresses a true proposition. What is expressed is the proposition that in uttering those words, in pretending one is asserting something, one is speaking truly within a certain game. See Walton (1990).
Evans (1982: chapter 4) clearly defends the need to include a very strong acquaintance constraint on singular thought, which is introduced in the form of the so-called ‘Russell’s Principle’: according to it, a subject cannot make a judgment about a particular object unless she has discriminating knowledge of it, namely, a capacity to distinguish the object of her judgment from any other. Setting aside the fact that it is not completely clear what having discriminating knowledge may amount to in each case, it is clear that the principle involves the proposal of a strong epistemic constraint, which led Evans to give up the idea that historical chains of communication are in general a source of singular thought: according to him, someone may be competent in the use of a name but, at the same time, if she lacks the required discriminating knowledge of the referent, she will be completely unable to entertain a singular thought about it.
This is tantamount to what Jeshion calls the ‘Standar-Standar on Acquaintance’: “One can be acquainted with an object O only by perception, memory, and communication chains. To have a singular thought about O, someone in one’s linguistic community must have perceived O” (2010: 106, my emphasis).
According to Russell (1912), that is indeed the case, though: acquaintance involves, paradigmatically, perception and intellectual intuition of abstract objects like universals, numbers, Fregean thoughts, etc.
Among the mental file theorists, Perry (2001: chapter 7) maintains that there are different ways in which a notion may lack an origin, namely, there can be a misperception of an object or a mistake but a notion can also be freely created, as it happens with fiction: in such cases, there will be a network without an origin. Recanati (2012: 128) claims that in those cases where there is no object to be perceived at the baptism, cases of descriptive or empty names, one can still open a mental file “and put oneself in a position to entertain a singular thought” in relation to the uses of such names. This is complemented with a distinction between singular thought vehicle and singular thought content, which provides us with a way of telling apart Neptune cases from fictional ones: in the former, in which there is a right expectation of a perceptual relation to take place in the future, there is still a singular thought content involved; whereas in the latter, in which there is no room for an expectation of the likes, there can only be singular thought in the sense of vehicle –namely, there is a mental vehicle for a singular thought content without that content (2012: 133). Be that as it may, from Recanati’s point of view, being adequately inserted in a historical chain of communication constitutes a good reason to open a mental file vehicle, even when the chain at stake does not end at a particular object. Moreover, Jeshion (2010: 129-138) claims that singular thoughts are basically constrained by a significance condition: aside from any kind of acquaintance relation, a significant role played by a certain individual in our psychological lives (our knowledge, affective states, interests, emotions) is a sufficient reason for entertaining a singular thought about it –which includes cases where the individual in question is not real but still plays a strong motivational role with respect to our projects and plans. As for Friend (2011), she thinks that the semantic content of fictional names can be explained in terms of their associated notion networks, which are in turn construed in terms of Perry’s concept of network content -even if those networks end up at a block, the very networks themselves are contributed to the truth-conditions of the corresponding utterances.
A caveat: is the position defended an instance of the so-called ‘semantic instrumentalism’? I am not sure on this point: it depends on what semantic instrumentalism is taken to amount to. If it involves the possibility of having a singular thought just by coining a name or using a demonstrative/indexical for an object one is thinking about descriptively, I think the answer must be negative. What I have argued for so far is the possibility of successfully thinking singularly about an object one is not strongly acquainted with, including the extreme case in which there is no object to have any kind of relation to, which may be standardly allowed by adequately inserting in a historical chain of communication -not just by coining a name or using a demonstrative/indexical, and not certainly if we think of the corresponding object descriptively. Moreover, as forcefully argued by Jeshion (2010), there seems to be cognitive constraints for the introduction of natural language names, which go beyond the possession of the corresponding semantic intentions.
As should be clear from the discussion on acquaintance, I am taking for granted that the alleged particular object that might be missing is a concrete object, belonging in the external world. As will turn out, in a more general sense of the word ‘object’ (encompassing mental files or individual concepts), there will be objects involved in the historical chains of communication associated with fictional names.
As suggested in a previous footnote, I think that one may want to extend the present account to natural kind general terms, given that they are also related to external objects by means of historical chains of communication. If that is so, some fictional general terms, such as ‘unicorns’, ‘mermaids’, etc., grounded on fictional species, should also be taken to express mental files that are not directly related to sets of individuals.
The present proposal is then clearly different from other ones put forward in the mental file framework, since most of them agree on taking fictional names to lack referents or be empty, that is, to involve a historical chain of communication or a notion network ending at a block. See, in particular, the following fragment by Friend: “(1) [Gregor Samsa has been changed into a beetle] does not express a complete proposition. At the level of referential content it expresses at most a gappy proposition. Nonetheless, because Nabokov’s use of “Gregor Samsa” constitutes participation in the Gregor-network, we can provide truth-conditions for (1) by appeal to that network”| (2011: 207, my emphasis).
Perry may be thought to hold a similar position regarding identity statements that are a posteriori true when claiming: “Perhaps the referential content is the default candidate for what is said, but in certain circumstances other levels of content can be, as I will put it, raised to subject matter” (2001: 121-122, my emphasis).
On a different basis (namely, Frege’s thesis that existence is a second-order predicate, that is, a property that is not ascribed to individuals but to individual concepts), Church (1956) held a similar thesis concerning negative existentials. Now, it seems arbitrary to think that whereas “Anna Karenina does not exist” is about an individual concept, this is not the case with (2), which is thought to be about nothing. It seems more intuitive to say that both are about an individual concept, in the terms suggested in the present essay, the ANNA file.
Howell (2002) argues that this kind of characterisation of a literary artwork is not general enough because there are some that do not involve a fixed set of sentences or text, like the Iliad and the Odyssey. I think that there is no need to come up with a completely general characterisation: one that covered a considerable number of cases would be enough.
Some authors, the defendants of the so-called ‘Speech Act Theories of Fiction’ (for instance, Searle 1975; Currie 1985 and 1990), think that the kind of intention in question gives rise to a new kind of illocutionary force, characteristic of fictive utterances. I do not want to take a stance on this issue, which is open to different problems. See Predelli (ms) for various criticisms to different versions of that idea.
As explained before concerning the relation between files and thoughts, it seems to be the tokening of the thought HER SON’S IMAGE TOOK ANNA IMMEDIATELY OUT OF THE DESPERATE CONDITION IN WHICH SHE HAD BEEN BEFORE, belonging in the conceptual world of Anna Karenina, that makes the descriptive concept BEING TAKEN IMMEDIATELY OUT OF THE DESPERATE CONDITION IN WHICH ANNA HAD BEEN BEFORE BY HER SON’S IMAGE appear in the ANNA files of their readers (and not the other way around).
It may be helpful to contrast this use with the metafictive use of (2): to assess it, it would be necessary to consider whether the property of being taken out of the desperate condition in which Anna had been before by her son’s image is ascribed to the ANNA file, which is not the case, since what is ascribed to that file is the descriptive concept BEING TAKEN OUT OF THE DESPERATE CONDITION IN WHICH ANNA HAD BEEN BEFORE BY HER SON’S IMAGE, not the property, which either does not exist or cannot be instantiated by a file.
Perry seems to be making a similar point when saying: “A person’s notions are things for which, like any other things in the world, he can have indefinitely many modes of presentation. But one can get by without modes of presentation of them just fine, except when doing philosophy. Unlike things in the world, the cognitive effects of one’s beliefs and notions on the person does not depend on the modes of presentation he has on them, but on the fact that they are his. Their influence on his cognition is due to being part of the cognitive apparatus, not in virtue of having an effect via modes of presentation on the cognitive apparatus” (2001: 183, my emphasis).
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Orlando, E. Files for Fiction. Acta Anal 32, 55–71 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-016-0298-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-016-0298-8