Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects of Frege’s Approach to Fictional Discourse

Abstract

In many places in his works Frege co mes to speak of fiction. Sometimes he appeals to it to get the background against which to draw the semantic boundaries of his logical investigations. Sometimes he gives examples from fiction to clarify some specific relations between his semantic concepts. It is worth analyzing Frege’s remarks on fiction in order to see if they contain insights that let us elaborate a Fregean definition of fictional discourse. It is shown that they not just negatively say what fictional discourse is not, but also do indicate what it is. Furthermore, it is important to distinguish between semantic and pragmatic features of Frege’s view of fiction. The pragmatic ones, it is argued, anticipate some basic insights of a speech-act theoretical approach to fictional discourse. In addition the paper explores what Frege would tell us about the ontological status of fictional objects if the truth conditions of statements about them are taken into consideration in a Fregean manner.