Abstract
There seems to be a perfectly ordinary sense in which different speakers can use an empty name to talk about the same thing. Call this fictional coreference. It is a constraint on an adequate theory of empty names that it provide a satisfactory account of fictional coreference. The main claim of this paper is that the pretense theory of empty names does not respect this constraint.
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Notes
Walton speaks of fixing the reference and this may suggest a different interpretation. He is not providing an analysis of the notion of an extended pretense game but merely fixing the reference of ‘the extended pretense game in which Sally engages’ or ‘the kind of pretense games in which Sally engages’ in terms of examples of the kind. He does not explicitly provide a reference-fixing description. One description is: ‘the class of pretense games that belong to the same extended pretense game as the pretense games in which Sally is now engaged’. But this description invokes to the relation x and y belong to the same extended pretense game without explaining it. Therefore, on this interpretation of the passage, Walton is not shedding any light on the present problem: the problem of analyzing this relation without invoking fictional characters.
The defender of the pretense theory might claim, in the manner of Kaplan (1990) and others, that a condition on two tokens being tokens of the same name is that they have a similar causal origin. On this view of names, the case of coincidental similarity is not a counterexample to the analysis of (1) now under consideration. For, on this view of names, clause (iiib) of the analysis is not true in this case after all. Given their different causal origins, the tokens of ‘Sherlock Holmes’ in Bridget’s mouth and the tokens of ‘Sherlock Holmes’ in Caroline’s mouth are not tokens of the same name, ‘Sherlock Homes’. Rather, they are tokens of different names that happen to be spelled and pronounced the same. (Here I am indebted to an anonymous referee.) The analysis that results if we accept this view on names is similar to the analysis that I will consider next, which explicitly appeals to a causal constraint. As I will argue, any analysis that appeals to a causal constraint alone will fall victim to a different type of counterexample.
Evans (1982, p. 362) defends a related view. On Evans’s view an empty name refers to the same individual through different speakers’ pretense games if the following obtains: if they would have been thinking of the same individual if they had not been pretending to think about an individual, but had actually been thinking of an existing individual. This counterfactual is true just in case the speakers’ use of an empty name, within pretense, has a common origin in an initial pretend use. Therefore, the counterfactual condition Evans proposes would seem to hold if and only if condition (iiic) is true. Evans’s proposal, then, is not substantially different from the proposal under consideration.
Thanks to Mark Crimmins, Fred Kroon, Daniel Nolan, Peter Pagin, Adam Pautz, Fredrik Stjernberg, and Ed Zalta. I am very indebted to an anonymous referee for very helpful comments. I was supported by a fellowship from STINT (The Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education) while writing this paper.
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Bjurman Pautz, A. Fictional coreference as a problem for the pretense theory. Philos Stud 141, 147–156 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9156-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9156-2