Fictional Realism and Commonsense Ontology

Highlights

Possibilism maintains that fictional stories represent possible worlds and that fictional entities represent possible entities that constitute these fictional worlds. Fictional possibilism is subtly introduced in Aristotle’s Poetics where he argues that fictional entities represent possible entities which are introduced by authors to present their thoughts about the way things could have been in the world.[4] However, possibilism was advanced by David Lewis who argues that fictional stories present accounts of different possible ways the world could be. Fictional entities are the actual inhabitants of their relevant worlds, and they have the same ontological status in their relevant worlds as actual objects have in our actual world.
creationism/artefactualism: Saul Kripke describes fictional entities as “abstract entities which exists in virtue of the activities of human beings.”
It is important to note that at no point in the process of creating a work of fiction is there any recourse conscious to some kind of doubt about whether the propositions uttered by the author make assertions. As Peter Pagin notes, assertions are speech acts which claims that the truths expressed by a proposition holds true of some aspects of reality.[31] Since the propositions expressed by authors in the making of fictional works are not expected to be literally true of any aspect of reality, these propositions cannot be called assertions.[32] It appears that the disclaimer found in many fictional works, expressly indicating that the content is not about any real entities, stresses the point that authors of fiction are not interested in making assertions in the making of fictional works as well as the consequent introduction of fictional entities.
Some scholars have made some attempts to explain what exactly the author of a fictional work does in introducing fictional characters, if the author is not simply representing reality. For instance, Searle argues that the author is involved in a non-deceptive act of pretence because the author does not intend that his/her audience takes the propositions as literally true. However, considering his realist position, Searle argues that this act of pretence leads to the creation of fictional entities. While engaging the work of fiction, the author also expects the audience to join in the act of pretence.[33] What is not clear from Searle’s account is how an ordinary act of pretence leads to the creation of real entities. This is a major challenge for Searle and other scholars with similar views, especially within the realist framework. Besides, as Gregory Currie argues, authors of fiction do not seem to be pretending about anything when they create their works. These authors simply create those works and questions about whether they are pretending or not do not arise at any point. As such, they “must be doing something more than merely pretending to assert.”[34]
If authors of fiction are not involved in an act of pretence, and they are not making assertions, what exactly are they doing? It is also important to note that the author of a work of fiction simply begins to introduce the characters that make up the fictional work by stipulating certain attributes or properties of these characters. This includes the stipulation of names of human and non-human characters, attributes, plot, setting, etc. This indicates an important aspect of the creative role of authors in the making fictional works and fictional entities. They simply make-up or stipulate those entities and their properties into existence. The tools available for this stipulation are linguistic devices. They include referring expressions, descriptions, etc. What the author does with these tools is to create the fictional entities. This suggests that linguistic tools do not only function to describe reality, they can also serve as ontological tools for creating objects. The idea that linguistic devices can also play ontological roles requires some explanation, but that is beyond the scope of the current paper. Suffice to say at this point that the expressions contained in a fictional work do not describe reality. Rather, these expressions create reality.

Conclusion

An appropriate theory of the ontology of fictional entities must be able to account for the fact that authors of works of fiction use linguistic devices, not to make assertions or describe reality, but to create some entities which take on a life of their own once they are thus created.
the fictional entity is an abstract entity
Given an appropriate realist theory of the ontology of fictional entities, fictional entities exist and any proposition of any ontological theory contrary to this will be false unless there are grounds to prove their truth independently of the uncritical reliance on common sense.

Backlinks

Highlights

Conclusion