Fictional entities

3. Hospitable theories

A presupposition behind deflationary theories is that if there is no such thing as X then X cannot (literally) be referred to or spoken about. The focus in all cases is in removing the appearance of reference. Some philosophers, notably Richard Rorty, find this association between reference and ontological commitment unjustified. Referring, for Rorty, is just ‘talking about’ and he claims we can talk about Holmes, the number three, the beauty of a landscape or moral values, for instance, without engaging any deep issues in ontology. Rorty views the very idea of ‘ontological commitment’ as pointless.

A more widely held view is that ‘referring to fictional entities’ does have ontological significance but that different kinds of being are involved. Fictional entities are, after all, entities. If Russell’s Theory of Descriptions is the starting point for (modern) deflationary theories, then Alexius Meinong’s Theory of Objects (Gegenstandstheorie) is the starting point for (modern) hospitable theories (see Meinong, A. §§2–4). Meinong postulated a realm of objects of which only a tiny subset are existent objects. He seems at least partially to have worked with a syntactic criterion for objecthood: any expression functioning as a singular term in a well-formed sentence designates an object. Notoriously, Meinong held that even ‘the round square’ denotes an object (albeit one that does not, and could not, exist in reality). Although Meinong’s theory was strongly attacked by Russell, it has proved remarkably resilient, with defences by, for example, Terence Parsons and Charles Crittenden. The point, again, is not to collapse the distinction between Socrates and Sherlock Holmes but only to claim they are both objects, the one existent, the other nonexistent. An added difference, for Parsons, is that Holmes, unlike Socrates, is an ‘incomplete’ object, in the sense that for any given property it is not always determinate whether Holmes has that property or not. But what is to be gained by saying that there are nonexistent objects? Principally, it makes sense out of common ways of speaking, without the need for paraphrase: we refer to Holmes, we distinguish him from Dr Watson, we ascribe properties to him. What could be more natural than saying there is an object here?

Other theorists sympathetic to fictional entities attribute to them existence as abstract objects. Nicholas Wolterstorff has argued that fictional characters are kinds (the character Holmes is a person-kind, though not a kind of person), Peter van Inwagen views them as ‘theoretical entities of literary criticism’, comparable in status to plots, metres and rhyme schemes. A consequence for Wolterstorff is that characters not only exist (as kinds) but do so eternally; a writer ‘selects’ but does not strictly create characters, for the properties (‘being a detective’, ‘solving mysteries’, etc.) that constitute the relevant kinds are not themselves created. If fictional characters exist as abstract objects, what properties do they possess? Holmes, it seems, is a detective, yet no abstract object could be a detective. Van Inwagen responds by distinguishing those properties ‘ascribed’ to characters (such as ‘being a man’, ‘smoking a pipe’) that they do not literally possess and those which characters ‘exemplify’ (such as ‘being introduced in Chapter 29’, ‘being wittily conceived’). The intuition that fictional characters are in some such way real is further supported by other common modes of speech, as when we say, for example, that Dostoevsky’s characters are more realistic than those of Cervantes. It is difficult for deflationary theories to paraphrase away such references.

The debate about fictional entities goes to the heart of methodological issues in philosophy. It highlights the status and role of logical analysis, the nature of ontological commitment, and above all the remarkable indifference of ordinary language to philosophical worries about what does and does not exist.