Fictional Entities Research Articles

An outline of object-oriented philosophy.

This article summarises the principles of object-oriented philosophy and explains its similarities with, and differences from, the outlook of the natural sciences. Like science, the object-oriented position avoids the notion (quite common in philosophy) that the human-world relation is the ground of all others, such that scientific statements about the world would only be statements about the world as it is for humans. But unlike science, object-oriented metaphysics treats artificial, social, and fictional entities in the same way as natural ones, and also holds that the world can only be known allusively rather than directly.

Towards a semantics for the artifactual theory of fiction and beyond

In her book Fiction and Metaphysics (1999) Amie Thomasson, influenced by the work of Roman Ingarden, develops a phenomenological approach to fictional entities in order to explain how non-fictional entities can be referred to intrafictionally and transfictionally, for example in the context of literary interpretation. As our starting point we take Thomasson’s realist theory of literary fictional objects, according to which such objects actually exist, albeit as abstract and artifactual entities. Thomasson’s approach relies heavily on the notion of ontological dependence, but its precise semantics has not yet been developed. Moreover, the modal approach to the notion of ontological dependence underlying the Artifactual Theory has recently been contested by several scholars. The main aims of this paper are (i) to develop a semantic approach to the notion of ontological dependence in the context of the Artifactual Theory of fiction, and in so doing bridge a number of philosophical and logical gaps; (ii) to generalize Thomasson’s categorial theory of ontological dependence by reconstructing ontological categories of entities purely in terms of different structures of ontological dependence, rather than in terms of the basic kinds of entities the categorical entities depend on.

Computational Modeling of Narrative

The field of narrative (or story) understanding and generation is one of the oldest in natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI), which is hardly surprising, since storytelling is such a fundamental and familiar intellectual and social activity. In recent years, the demands of interactive entertainment and interest in the creation of engaging narratives with life-like characters have provided a fresh impetus to this field. This book provides an overview of the principal problems, approaches, and challenges faced today in modeling the narrative structure of stories. The book introduces classical narratological concepts from literary theory and their mapping to computational approaches. It demonstrates how research in AI and NLP has modeled character goals, causality, and time using formalisms from planning, case-based reasoning, and temporal reasoning, and discusses fundamental limitations in such approaches. It proposes new representations for embedded narratives and fictional entities, for assessing the pace of a narrative, and offers an empirical theory of audience response. These notions are incorporated into an annotation scheme called NarrativeML. The book identifies key issues that need to be addressed, including annotation methods for long literary narratives, the representation of modality and habituality, and characterizing the goals of narrators. It also suggests a future characterized by advanced text mining of narrative structure from large-scale corpora and the development of a variety of useful authoring aids.

Players Imbuing Meaning: Co-creation of Challenges in a prototype MMO

This article discusses how components in a game world can carry meaning relevant to individual players. The discussion is grounded in work with a massively multi-player online (MMO) proto- type where players in guided play-tests created their own opponents that they battled in groups of three. The opponents are called Manifestations, and can be compared to the “boss monsters” that in adventure and role-playing games pose the greatest challenges in terms of tactical game play, or battle. When creating Manifestations players define how these shall behave in play, and what they say under different circumstances. The game play mechanics in the world is centred on emotions and social relations. One of the design goals in the creation of the prototype was to cater for a system where tactical game play can be closely tied to the potential narrative contents. The Manifestations players created in the play tests were of four main categories; reflec- tions of persons they had complicated relationships with in real life, difficult situations, abstract concepts, or purely fictional entities. In several cases players brought material into the game that had personal meaning to them. These meanings were developed further when players saw how their Manifestation behaved within the rule system of the world. For example, one player created a Manifestation of an anticipated exam, while another made a Manifestation called “Mother”. The Mother cast spells called “Focused Aggression” and “Cold Ripple of Fear”. It was able to perform acts called “Blame”, “Threaten”, and “Disagree”. The group experimented with tactical choices, while reasoning about the Mother’s potential motivations. They managed to overcome the Mother by alternating between giving each other resistance and casting spells, the winning stroke being a rapid series of spells called “Forgive”.

A theory of fictional entities based on denoting concepts

There are many data suggesting that we should acknowledge fictional entities in our ontological inventory, in spite of the paraphrasing strategies that Russell’s theory of descriptions can offer. Thus the realist attitude toward fictional entities of Meinongian and artifactualist accounts may seem well-motivated. Yet, these approaches infringe the Russellian “robust sense of reality.” A different realist account is proposed here, one that is compatible with the Russellian “robust sense of reality” in that it identifies fictional entities with denoting concepts, understood as properties of properties.

Real Robinson Crusoe

What is the ontological status of fiction? Do fictional people exist? In Serious Reflections during the Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720), Robinson Crusoe struggles with this very question. Defending his claim to exist in the face of accusations that his entire story was fanciful, Crusoe concedes that his life did not happen in any conventional sense; nonetheless, he asks readers to think of his life as real. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, empirical philosophy recognized a perilous disconnect between knowledge and the actual existence of things in the world. Informed by recent work on the metaphysics of fictional entities, this article reads Crusoe’s ontological self-defence in the context of John Locke’s attempt, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), to prove that knowledge was real despite being mediated entirely by our ideas. “Fiction” provides an inaccurate framework for understanding the books we call eighteenth-century novels because the concept entails ontological commitments at odds with the kind of knowledge these stories represent.

Hear Me:

Hear Me:

Che cosa socialmente c’è

Maurizio Ferraris’ theory on social entities presents many interesting analogies with artefactualist theories on fictional entities. Like artefactualism, however, it probably needs some integration. As Ferraris himself acknowledges, mere dependence on subjects does not by itself qualify an entity as social. Moreover, the very same definition of a social entity as an inscribed (social) act seems to yield merely necessary, but not sufficient, identity conditions for such an entity. To my mind, what is needed is a normative element. For a social entity is an intrinsically normative entity, which is (inter alia) composed by something like Searle’s constitutive rules.

Talking about Something

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.

Proper Names and their Fictional Uses

Fictional names present unique challenges for semantic theories of proper names, challenges strong enough to warrant an account of names different from the standard treatment. The theory developed in this paper is motivated by a puzzle that depends on four assumptions: our intuitive assessment of the truth values of certain sentences, the most straightforward treatment of their syntactic structure, semantic compositionality, and metaphysical scruples strong enough to rule out fictional entities, at least. It is shown that these four assumptions, taken together, are inconsistent with referentialism, the common view that names are uniformly associated with ordinary individuals as their semantic value. Instead, the view presented here interprets names as context-sensitive expressions, associated in a context of utterance with a particular act of introduction, or dubbing, which is then used to determine their semantic value. Some dubbings are referential, which associate names with ordinary individuals as their semantic values; others are fictional, which associate names, instead, with sets of properties. Since the semantic values of names can be of different sorts, the semantic rule interpreting predication must be complex as well. In the body of the paper, I show how this new treatment of names allows us to solve our original puzzle. I defend the complexity of the semantic predication rule, and address additional worries about ontological commitment.

Fictional objects, non-existence, and the principle of characterization

I advance an objection to Graham Priest’s account of fictional entities as nonexistent objects. According to Priest, fictional characters do not have, in our world, the properties they are represented as having; for example, the property of being a bank clerk is possessed by Joseph K. not in our world but in other worlds. Priest claims that, in this way, his theory can include an unrestricted principle of characterization for objects. Now, some representational properties attributed to fictional characters, a kind of fictional entities, involve a crucial reference to the world in which they are supposed to be instantiated. I argue that these representational properties are problematic for Priest’s theory and that he cannot accept an unrestricted version of the principle of characterization. Thus, while not refuting Priest’s theory, I show that it is no better off than other Meinongian theories.

Realism without Materialism

After years of obsession with written texts, continental philosophy has recently raised the colorful banners of materialism and realism. The two terms are often linked by a hyphen or a slash. And yet everyone vaguely senses a difference between them, as can be detected in the more fashionable status currently occupied by materialism than by realism. This article will begin by driving an explicit and (I hope) permanent wedge between the two terms. It will conclude by asserting the minority position, exalting realism at the expense of materialism. Nothing could be more urgent for present-day philosophy, which for two centuries has lost touch with all the specific real and fictional entities that populate the cosmos. My claim is that reality is object-oriented, and that a corresponding shift is needed from the analysis of consciousness and written words towards an ontology of dogs, trees, flames, monuments, societies, ghosts, gods, pirates, coins, and rubies. Despite appearances to the contrary, materialism can only ruin this shift. For it either undermines objects from below, reducing them downward to their material underpinnings, or it overmines them from above, reducing them upward to their appearance for human beings. Both strategies have abundant prestige, but both are disasters, since they strip objects of their autonomy and enslave them to a less worthy principle. To make this case will require some initial precision in how we define realism and materialism. Once this labor is accomplished, the reader will enjoy the spectacle of numerous past and present philosophies collapsing into one of two basic fallacies. What survives this collapse is a promising new standpoint in which the jaded and cynical human observer of recent centuries is dethroned in favor of a landscape riddled with countless mysterious entities. In this way, philosophy regains much of its ancient vigor and innocence. 1. Realism There have been flirtations from time to time with the word “materialism” in continental philosophy. “Realism” has been less lucky. If we consider that the continental tradition arose largely from phenomenology, then the reasons for this become obvious—both Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger usually express disdain for the crusty old dispute

Naming and Nonexistence

AbstractI defend a cluster of views about names from fiction and myth. The views are based on two claims: first, proper names refer directly to their bearers; and second, names from fiction and myth are genuinely empty, they simply do not refer. I argue that when such names are used in direct discourse, utterances containing them have truth values but do not express propositions. I also argue that it is a mistake to think that if an utterance of, for example, “Vulcan is a planet” fails to express a proposition, then an utterance of “Le Verrier believed that Vulcan is a planet” cannot express a proposition. The argument applies to claims about fiction, such as “Sherlock Holmes is strong,” and claims about the attitudes of authors and auditors. The upshot is a semantics for fictional statements that provides a satisfying way for direct reference theorists to avoid taking fictional entities to be abstract objects and to accept the commonsense view that what is true in a fiction is ultimately a matter of what is pretended to be the case.

The ontology of theoretical modelling: models as make-believe

The descriptions and theoretical laws scientists write down when they model a system are often false of any real system. And yet we commonly talk as if there were objects that satisfy the scientists’ assumptions and as if we may learn about their properties. Many attempt to make sense of this by taking the scientists’ descriptions and theoretical laws to define abstract or fictional entities. In this paper, I propose an alternative account of theoretical modelling that draws upon Kendall Walton’s ‘make-believe’ theory of representation in art. I argue that this account allows us to understand theoretical modelling without positing any object of which scientists’ modelling assumptions are true.

Isolating Representations Versus Credible Constructions? Economic Modelling in Theory and Practice

This paper examines two recent approaches to the nature and functioning of economic models: models as isolating representations and models as credible constructions. The isolationist view conceives of economic models as surrogate systems that isolate some of the causal mechanisms or tendencies of their respective target systems, while the constructionist approach treats them rather like pure constructions or fictional entities that nevertheless license different kinds of inferences. I will argue that whereas the isolationist view is still tied to the representationalist understanding of models that takes the model-target dyad as the basic unit of analysis, the constructionist perspective can better accommodate the way we actually acquire knowledge through them. Using the example of Tobin’s ultra-Keynesian model I will show how many of the epistemic characteristics of modelling tend to go unrecognised if too much focus is placed on the model-target dyad.

La insinuatio como recurso de subversión axiológica en el proemio de Lisias III

This paper aims to analyse the guiding mechanisms behind one of the most evasive and subtle persuasive resources of ancient Rhetoric: the insinuatio . To this end, we take the proemium of Lysias III as an ideal example: in fact, this defence speech can be placed within the turpe genus , that is to say, the lowest degree of defensibility. Lysias has to cause a volte-face in the Jury’s prejudices by means of a thorough captatio beneuolentiae , avoiding any direct allusion to his client’s many weak points. Lysias’ proemium is entirely based on a negative or silent rhetoric, which is typical of insinuatio : these tacit means of persuasion and a subtle pragmatics of implication enable Lysias to influence the subconscious of his audience and change the polarity of their many prejudices. All these goals can be achieved by means of an implicit game of identification with certain fictional entities emanating from the polyphony of the speech. Dissimulatio and insinuatio come together in order to shape a rhetoric of non-utterance, a kind of negative oratory, whose unquestionable modernity could be easily revealed by a careful study.

The Seven Consequences of Creationism

Creationism with respect to fictional entities, i.e., the position according to which ficta are creations of human practices, has recently become the most popular realist account of fictional entities. For it allows one to hold that there are fictional entities while simultaneously giving such entities a respectable metaphysical status, that of abstract artifacts. In this paper, I will draw what are the ontological and semantical consequences of this position, or at least of all its forms that are genuinely creationist. For some people, these consequences will sound as plagues against the position; for some others, especially realists on ficta, they are welcome results. Although I hold that all forms of genuine creationism have these consequences, I will conclude by explaining why I take moderate creationism, according to which ficta are created by means of a reflexive stance on the make-believe practice grounding them, to be the best of these forms.

The conceptualisation of dreams by adults with intellectual disabilities: relationship with theory of mind abilities and verbal ability

Empirical studies suggest that individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) have difficulties in conceptualising dreams as perceptually private, non-physical, individuated and potentially fictional entities. The aim of the current study was to replicate the results found by Stenfert Kroese et al. using a comparative sample size, and to examine putative cognitive correlates of accurate dream conceptualisation [receptive language and 1st order theory of mind (ToM) abilities]. Conceptualisation of dreams, real objects and photographs was assessed with a structured closed-question interview schedule, together with receptive language, and ToM abilities. Findings from the current study replicated those of previous research, finding that many adults with ID tend to think that dreams take place around them, can be witnessed by others, can be touched and manipulated, can be shared by others and are about real events. The ability to accurately conceptualise dreams was found to increase along with receptive language ability, and there was a non-significant association between ToM ability and the ability to understand that dreams can be about potentially fictional entities. Some individuals with ID have a different understanding of mental phenomena such as dreams, which has implications for several aspects of care and support, particularly relating to mental health and therapeutic work.

Microfoundations and the Ontology of Macroeconomics

"Microfoundations for macroeconomics" has become the ideological banner of macroeconomics since the 1970s. While often associated with methodological individualism, the paper argues that the true impetus is ontological - a fear that economics that does link aggregate behavior tightly to individual optimization trades in fictional entities, which cannot be understood economically. Taking John Searle's analysis of collective intentionality, the paper argues that this fear is misplaced. Macroeconomic aggregates arise from individuals, and their behavior is conditioned by the fact that the underlying agents are intentional, and yet they exist independently of any particular individual and enter into causal relations in which the intentions of individuals are, at best, background information that does not fundamentally contribute to successful explanation.

Pseudo-Real Referents and Their Function in Santa María de las flores negras by Hernán Rivera Letelier and Amuleto by Roberto Bolaño

Pseudo-Real Referents and Their Function in Santa María de las flores negras by Hernán Rivera Letelier and Amuleto by Roberto Bolaño Myrna Solotorevsky A trend in post-modernism is to blur the borders that separate, for example, fiction from reality, history from literature, and literary genres from each other. But if post-modernism is to achieve the rupturing effect it seeks, I believe that it is fundamental for that border to remain, thus preserving the distinction between the spheres it keeps apart. To give a particular example, the effect of metalepsis (see Genette 234-36) requires a clear awareness of the different levels whose borders are being trespassed: extradiegesis, diegesis, metadiegesis. I attach the highest importance to the demarcation, in my opinion ontologically sound, between reality and fiction—a boundary that bases the differentiation between history and literature. In line with Martínez-Bonati (1981), I consider literary works to be fiction and believe, as this critic does, that the fictional nature of the literary text stems from the imaginary character of the language that constitutes it. Thus, I assume the principle of ontological homogeneity espoused by Doležel: As non-actualized possibles, all fictional entities are ontologically homogeneous. Tolstoy's Napoleon is no less fictional than his Pierre Bezuchov and Dickens's London is no more actual than Lewis's Wonderland. The principle of ontological homogeneity is a necessary condition of the coexistence and compossibility of fictional particulars; it explains why fictional individuals can interact and communicate with one another. A naïve view which presents fictional individuals as a mixed bag of "real" people and "purely fictitious" characters is explicitly refuted. Ontological homogeneity epitomizes the sovereignty of fictional worlds. (483) [End Page 249] I advocate calling these apparently pre-existing referents, pseudo-real referents (in opposition to real referents). They spring from the text and do not escape the fictionality that encompasses the referents, the depicted world, the narrator, the implied reader, the implied author, and the ideas processed in the literary work. I even conceive the possibility of false pseudo-real referents: the text, taking its illusion of mimesis to an extreme, constructs as real the referents it invents, thus cheating the candid reader. This happens in the 1999 text by Roberto Bolaño entitled La literatura nazi en América (The Nazi Literature in America), in which non-existent authors are easily taken for real authors by the non-initiated reader. I intend to compare how pseudo-real referents operate in two novels written by Chilean authors, both inscribed in the so-called Latin American "post-boom": Santa María de las flores negras (Holy Mary of the Black Flowers), by Hernán Rivera Letelier (2002) and Amuleto (Amulet), by Roberto Bolaño (1999b). These two works are similar in that, from an ideological point of view, they denounce a crime which serves as the basic pseudo-real referent: the killing of saltpetre workers in Santa María de Iquique in northern Chile in 1907, in Letelier, and the killing of university students in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, in 1968, in Bolaño. Both novels place an imperative on the act of remembrance.1 However, they also differ from each other in that the former clearly subscribes to an aesthetic of totality, whereas the latter plays, on some levels, the game of instability and decentralization.2 Assuming that pseudo-real referents tend to perform a mimetic function, to create an illusion of reality, it will be of interest to examine the ways in which this purpose is reconciled with the notion of decentralization. [End Page 250] The narrators, from whose perspective the world is configured, are the fundamental vehicles of totality in Santa María de las flores negras and of decentralization in Amuleto. Santa María de las flores negras has two omniscient narrators, a feature that enhances the certitude of each of their accounts. One narrative voice is heterodiegetic and the other is homodiegetic. The latter is a collective voice which corresponds to the first-person plural "we." It emerges abruptly and identifies with the strikers, who are linked to a pseudo-real referent. The use of the pronoun "we" denotes...