Fictional Realism and Negative Existentials

Abstract

Fictional realism is the view that fictional objects, such as Hermione Granger and Sherlock Holmes’s violin, are part of the ‘furniture of our world’.1 Realists take their view to be charitable to our ordinary conception of fiction and fictional characters, but no matter how well realism can accommodate common sense, there is one kind of talk with which it struggles: negative existentials. The difficulties the realist faces when it comes to explaining utterances such as ‘Holmes does not exist’ have been pointed out more than once by fictional antirealists, who reject the existence of fictional characters. And Anthony Everett (2007) has recently argued that fictional realists cannot meet the explanatory challenges posed by negative existentials. Everett’s discussion of the extant realist treatments of negative existentials about fictional objects is comprehensive, and the challenges he raises are interesting and important. And in order to overcome them, the fictional realist has to do more explanatory work than she has done so far. In this chapter, I