Abstract
In the previous chapter we have tried to explore ways of resolving problems concerning, first, the meaning and, then, the truth-value of fictive and fictional utterances.
“But is the unicorn a falsehood? It’s the sweetest of animals and a noble symbol. It stands for Christ, and for chastity; it can be captured only by setting a virgin in the forest, so that the animal, catching her most chaste odor will go and lay its head in her lap, offering itself as prey to the hunter’s snares”
“So it is said, Adso. But many tend to believe that it’s a fable, an invention of the pagans.”
“What a disappointment,” I said, “I would have liked to encounter one, crossing a wood. Otherwise what’s the pleasure of crossing a wood? ... Still, it grieves me to think this unicorn doesn’t exist, or never existed, or cannot exist one day.” ... “But console yourself, they exist in these books ...”
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, New York, Warner Books, 1984, pp. 379–81
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Notes
One of the impossibly wise characters of the aforementioned Stevenson interlude remarks about a fellow unreal “not that George is up to much — for he’s little more’n a name ”
Here Goodman may be leaning on his own non-depictive theory of creative representation.
Ziff’s (1979) conclusion that existence has nothing to do with successful reference, accordingly sounds too rash. He too adduces the evidence of bona fide singular reference to deceased individuals, non-concrete individuals and so on. But if audience-recognised intention to refer (rather than objective existence of the referent) is the basis of successful reference, when is such desire to refer thwarted? Ziff tries to introduce the constraint of coherence at this point. He too thinks that “refer” is an achievement verb, governed by publicly applicable, objective criteria. It is one thing to refer successfully to non-actual or fictional items and another thing to fail to refer. A coherent body of presupposed information which is socially transmissible is the minimum condition for successful reference. If I am telling you a realistic story about a giraffe called “Grunt” and you ask “How does Grunt like it in Antarctica?” your use of his name has failed to refer, i.e. you have failed, by the coherence constraint on the assumed informational package, to pick out the right individual.
Jargon brought into use in this area by Parsons. See his explanation in Parsons (1980) pp. 19–29.
For objections to Currie’s account, see David Carter (1991) and Alex Byrnne (1993).
Strawson’s Individual (1959 reprinted 1971) p. 18.
We ought not to take the above set of solutions too rigidly. Creative literature thrives on fracturing the rules of game (2). In spite of a developing body of ascribed details, climaxing with death in a car crash, George and Martha’s reference to their son (in Albee’s who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) is intended, even inside game (2) to be taken as merely shammed reference. In Italo Calvino’s self-referential novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller,the structure of reference is mind-boggling. The author tries constantly to break the barriers between game (2) and game (1). The series of unfinished pure fictions turns out to be held together only by a story written in the second-person singular about an affair between the reader and the other reader of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. And we must note that “the reader” is as much a taken reflexively as “you”.
Parsons faced this problem when he was making a distinction between native and immigrant objects. An object is native to a story if it is totally de novo “created” in the story in question. To this he adds cautiously, “The word ‘create’ here is meant in the sense in which an author is commonly said to create a character. It does not mean ‘bring into existence’ for such objects typically do not exist. Perhaps ‘create’ is a bad word, but it is customarily used in the sense I intend” Parsons (1980) p. 51. Remembering his special sense of “fictional”, Parsons can say that the author makes a Meinongian object fictional for the first time. But we do not need this special usage.
W.R. Carter (1980) makes the point which hardly needs making that those who deny the existence of fictional entities and van Inwagen, who affirms the existence of creatures of fiction, are not talking about the same things.
Such a view was apparently held by Roman Ingarden, a contemporary critic of Meinong and a creationist. See Barry Smith (1980).
Commonsensical claims–which on the face of it speak for creationism of some sort–like the following — “Tolstoy first made Anna fall in love before she visited her brother; then he reversed the order of events” — seem obviously to belong to character-locution. Applying our test, namely, attaching “in the story” to the statement brings out clearly that claims like this do not fit into F2 talk. They are true in our world, not in the world of Anna Karenina. They ought to be looked upon as some kind of cross talk between game (I) and game (4), both of whose items are existent in the absolute sense. “Anna” in the above statement must be referring to the character of Anna or, to be more precise, the core cluster of properties of that character.
Some characters may not exist as well, although I am not sure that nonexistent characters can be singularly referred to. “Cinderalla’s stepbrother does not exist” says that there is not such a character. We should recognise that such a person-type does subsist, but nobody has ever pretended in the relevant tradition that such a person-type was exemplified. So, it has not been made into a character.
Aristotle On the Art of Poetry tr. Bywater, Oxford (1920, 1988) p. 37.
See Currie (1990) pp. 171–81
Wolterstorff (1980) pp. 144–55.
Walton (1978a).
See p. 117 of Fiction and Emotion by Bijoy H. Boruah, 1988. I impugn Boruah’s insistence that our feelings for fictions are as rational and as real as our feelings for real-life situations, as will be clear below.
Woods (1970) does this with the somewhat ironical “olim”-operator. In Latin that word literally means “once upon a time”–quite the opposite of “it is fictional that”.
For this pair of terms see Kit Fine (1982).
This use of “Platonism” and “Empiricism” is Kit Fine’s (1982), not mine.
Parsons (1980), p. 44.
Meinong’s point in securing special “in-the-story” versions of even the property of existence can now be appreciated if we look at stories like Italo Calvino’s “The Non-Existent Knight”. The fully-fledged hero of the story, namely. Agiluif, has a horse, armour, several lovers and a devoted valet. Yet even in the story, he does not exist. When Charlemagne irritatedly asks him on a routine parade why he is not showing his face, Agiluif answers in a hollow voice from inside his empty helmet: “Sire, because I do not exist”
Zalta’s account (see McMichael and Zalta, 1980) solves the problem of the existent golden mountain rather elegantly. Even if we talk of the golden mountain which exemplifies existence,that object will only include,and not exemplify,the property of exemplifying existence. So it will still not manage to exist. Thus, we can have some control over but not genuine understanding of the behaviour of empty descriptions. Perhaps such fabricated descriptions deserve such technical manipulations. After all, works of fiction do not normally describe some of their characters as existent this or that.
See p. 132, The Nature of Fiction (1990).
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Chakrabarti, A. (1997). Deeper Troubles with Fiction: Reference, Emotion and Indeterminacy. In: Denying Existence. Synthese Library, vol 261. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1223-1_6
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