Fiction and Fictionalism

Abstract

What is a fictional character? Nothing, according to Mark Sainsbury. Yet it is true to say that there are fictional characters. How? Because there are fictions according to which there are specific individuals. And it can be true to say that Anna Karenina is more intelligent than Emma Bovary. How? Because the truth-value of the sentence is to be assessed under the (false) presupposition that there are such people as Emma and Anna. And it is true to say that Conan Doyle's novels represent Sherlock Holmes, that I have been thinking about Holmes, and that Holmes is a famous character. How? Because such sentences either involve, or can be explained in terms of, intensional verbs or operators, and intensional contexts do not require that something be the thing which is represented, or thought about, or regarded in such a way as to make it famous. Sainsbury offers these strategies as ways for an irrealist—somebody who denies that explaining the nature of fiction requires us to believe in objects which are the characters of fictions—to explain away certain sentences which appear to require exactly such objects to make them true. These irrealist explanations are designed to defuse certain motivations for realism: namely, the apparent commitments of certain sentences to an ontology of fictional characters. Sainsbury's arguments for the adequacy of irrealism are complemented by arguments for the inadequacy of realism, targeted at three major realist views: that fictional characters are abstract things (unlike you and me, who are concrete); that they are occupants of other possible worlds (unlike you and me, who live in the actual world); and that they are non-existent things (capable of being referred to and quantified over as we are, but nevertheless things of a different ontological status).