Talking about Something

Abstract

In Talking about Nothing Azzouni defends a unified nominalist treatment of hallucinated objects, fictional objects and mathematical objects. I focus on his views about fictional objects, in particular, his objections to fictional realism. Azzouni's view is that fictional characters do not exist, i.e., ‘that the characters and events depicted aren't real; they correspond to nothing at all’ (Azzouni 2010: 3). However, he rejects any account of fictional discourse that replaces the ‘empty’ names of fictional characters with descriptions, or that in any other way seeks to make fictional discourse meaningful by reinterpreting it. He argues that when we use the ‘empty’ names of fictional characters to ‘refer’, our discourse has all the essential hallmarks of singular, object-directed speech. I will argue that Azzouni's arguments have an unintended consequence: they clear away many of the obstacles to commonsense realism about fictional objects. In fact, a fictional realist of a certain stripe can agree with almost everything Azzouni says, except for the bit about there being no fictional objects. The fictional realism I suggest denies that, in order to qualify as existent, fictional objects should be judged against non-fictional objects. Fictional entities are very different sorts of creatures from non-fictional entities, but they exist in a quite ordinary way.