The Real, the Fictional, and the Somewhere-in-Between: Response to Julia Friederike Göhner, Tim Grafe, Yannis Krone, and Johannes Ueberfeldt

Abstract

Perhaps I should begin by emphasizing, as they do, that the ideas of mine on which Julia Friederike Gohner, Tim Grafe, Yannis Krone, and Johannes Ueberfeldt focus—ideas about fictional characters, and specifically about the fictionalized versions of real people, places, etc., that sometimes turn up in works of fiction—are only a kind of codicil to the central themes of the much more comprehensive metaphysical theory I call Innocent Realism; and that Innocent Realism itself needs to be understood against the background of my defense of an approach to metaphysics as neither a priori nor dependent on the recondite kinds of experience sought by the sciences, but as requiring, rather, reflection on aspects of our everyday experience of the world so familiar that ordinarily we hardly notice them. Moreover, I will add (though Gohner et al. don’t say this) it’s a logically independent codicil; in particular, there would be no inconsistency in accepting both my conception of metaphysics, and my Innocent Realism, in combination with a different account of fictional and quasi-fictional characters.