Towards a Semantics for the Artifactual Theory of Fiction and Beyond

Highlights

  • According to @amie-thomasson, fictional entities are inhabitants of the actual world just as non-fictional ones are. On the one hand, they are creations, or more precisely, artifacts, and as such, existent objects, like tables or buildings. On the other hand, they are abstract creations, like marriages, universities and theoretical entities postulated by physical theories, and are tied to the everyday world by their dependence on readers, authors and copies of texts.
  • Ingarden made a distinction:
    • derivation, i.e., the dependence of an entity on another in order to come into existence
    • contingency, or the dependence of an entity on another in order to remain in existence.
    • a fictional character is created by an author who constructs sentences about it. Fictional entities thus have a derivative dependence on their creators. Yet they are considered to be kept in existence thereafter not by the imagination of any individual, but by words and sentences
  • Thomasson combines the notions of historical and constant dependence with the idea of rigid and generic dependence.
  • according to the Artifactual Theory, this fixed point in time is the time of the creation of a fictional entity, but this might give rise to the objection d mentioned in section 4 that some fairy-tale characters, such as Snow White, do not appear to have been created by any specific person at any specific time
  • What the author does when he writes the story is to fix a codex, or set a canon

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