The Nonexistent

Abstract

The Nonexistent comprises a defence of fictional anti-realism: the view that there are no such things as fictional characters, or any of the other objects that feature in works of fiction but cannot be found in the real world. In the first half of the book, Everett develops and defends his own pretence theoretic account of thought and talk that appears to be about fictional objects. The second half is devoted to the detailed criticism of various forms of realism about fictional objects. The fictional anti-realist needs to explain our seeming ability to refer to fictional objects in the absence of such things. One strategy is to explain away apparent reference to fictional objects by denying the referential theory of names, according to which the semantic contribution a name makes to a sentence containing it is its referent. However, Everett assumes that proper names are devices of direct reference, and defends instead the Waltonian view that our thought and talk of fictional objects occurs within the scope of a pretence. While it is not true in reality that there are fictional objects, he argues, it is true according to the games of make-believe in which we engage when we think and talk about fictional objects that there are such things. Accordingly, sentences containing fictional names express incomplete or gappy propositions and can be neither true nor false, although they may count as true according to the pretence in which we engage when we utter them.