Philosophical issues surrounding fiction have attracted increasingattention from philosophers over the past few decades. What follows isa discussion of one familiar and quite fundamental topic in this area:fictional entities (both the issue of what such entities might be likeand whether there really are such entities).

A familiar characteristic of works of fiction is that they featurefictional characters: individuals whose exploits are written about inworks of fiction and who make their first appearance in a work offiction. Shakespeare’sHamlet, for example, featuresthe fictional character Hamlet, Doyle’sA Study inScarlet features Sherlock Holmes, Tolstoy’sAnnaKarenina features Anna Karenina, and so on. All of these worksfeature numerous other fictional characters, of course (Ophelia and DrWatson, for example); indeed, some works of fiction are characterizedby the sheer abundance of their characters (Russian novels are oftensaid to have this characteristic). Fictional characters belong to theclass of entities variously known asfictional entities orfictional objects orficta, a class that includesnot just animate objects of fiction (fictional persons, animals,monsters, and so on) but also inanimate objects of fiction such asfictional places (Anthony Trollope’s cathedral town ofBarchester and Tolkien’s home of the elves, Rivendell, forexample). As stated, however, it doesn’t include entitieslocated in the real world, although real entities do have an importantrole to play in works of fiction. Thus, neither London nor Napoleonare fictional entities, but the first is the quite essential backdropto what goes on in the Holmes stories while the second plays animportant role in the events described inWar and Peace.(While London and Napoleon are not fictional entities, some havethought that the London of the Holmes stories and the Napoleon ofWar and Peace should be classed as special fictionalentities. This view has recently gained some popularity: cf. Landini1990, Bonomi 2008, Voltolini 2006, 2013, 2020b, Motoarca 2014.)

The above characterization suggests that fictional entities constitutea special type of entity. Not surprisingly, then, one fundamentalphilosophical question we can ask about fictional entities is aquestion about theirnature: what kind of thing is afictional entity? This question is separate from what seems an evenmore fundamental question: why suppose thatthere are anyfictional entities in the first place? After all, our world nevercontained a Sherlock Holmes or a Rivendell—these allegedentities make their appearance in works offiction, not worksoffact. Following the division in Thomasson 1999, we shallcall the first question themetaphysical question, and thesecond theontological question.

• 1. The Metaphysics of Fictional Entities
  • 1.1 Possibilism
  • 1.2 Meinong and Neo-Meinongianism
    • 1.2.1 Meinong’s theory of objects
    • 1.2.2 Concrete and abstract neo-Meinongianism
    • 1.2.3 Two kinds of properties vs. two modes of predication
  • 1.3 Creationism
• 2. The Ontology of Fictional Entities
  • 2.1 Semantical Arguments for and Against Realism
    • 2.1.1 Russell’s anti-realism
    • 2.1.2 Metafictional sentences and “in the fiction” operators
    • 2.1.3 The descriptivist problem for theories of fictional names
    • 2.1.4 Pretense Theory
    • 2.1.5 Quantificational arguments for realism
  • 2.2 Ontological Arguments for and Against Realism
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. The Metaphysics of Fictional Entities

As Thomasson (1999: 5) puts it, the first question amounts to asking:what would fictional entities be if there were any? Different answershave been proposed to this question. But however much the answersdiffer, they all try to accommodate in some way or other what seems tobe an intuitive datum facing philosophers who theorize about fictionalentities: these entities lack existence, or at least existence asordinary physical objects. According to this datum—call itthe nonexistence datum—paradigmatic objects of fictionlike Hamlet and Holmes do not exist. In support of this datum, notethat the layperson would almost certainly answerNo to thequestion of whether such objects exist, although she might qualifythis answer by allowing that there may be another sense in which theydo (Barbero et al. 2023). We also appeal to nonexistence in this sensewhen we want to dispute the view that some alleged individual is agenuine historical figure; we might say, for example, that King Arthurdoes not exist, thereby underlining our view that a search for ahistorical King Arthur would be in vain.

Those who do not believe that there are any fictional entities(fictional antirealists, as we shall call them) will claimthat the nonexistence datum has anontological reading only:to say that fictional entities do not exist amounts to saying that inthe overall domain of what there is there are no such things asfictional entities. As they see it,fictional realists (thosewho do believe that there are fictional entities) are the only ones togive the datum a certainmetaphysical reading, namely thatfictional entities have the property ofnot existing (in somesense or other). They might also insist that fictional realists arethe only ones to think that the nonexistence of fictional entities isdetermined by their nature as fictional entities. But this overstatesthe case. Because they hold that there are no such things as fictionalentities, even antirealists are likely to admit that the fact thatthere is no such thing as some alleged entityX follows fromthe fact thatX has been shown to be fictional. That is whathappened in the case of King Arthur and many other legendary ormythological entities (fictional entities in the broad sense). Peopleoriginally supposed that King Arthur was a real person, a Britishleader who ruled England after the departure of the Romans (cf.Geoffrey of Monmouth’sHistoria Regum Britanniae),until it was discovered that King Arthur is merely a figure of legend,a fictional entity. It was this discovery that licensed the conclusionthat King Arthur doesn’t exist. So it seems that evenantirealists have a stake in the answer to the metaphysical question“What would it take for something to be a fictionalentity?”

One further comment about the nonexistence datum before we turn tovarious accounts of fictional objects and the ways in which suchaccounts cope with the datum. As we have already seen, it is naturalwhen discussing the datum to use quantifiers such as “Somethings are …” (“There are things that are…”), and “Everything is…”, whosedomain appears to include both existent and nonexistent objects. We doso when we say, for example, thatthere are objects, such asfictional objects, that don’t exist. Fictional antirealists willtake such talk with a grain of salt, since they do not acknowledge asense in which there really are any fictional objects. Fictionalrealists, on the other hand, will think that a sentence like“There are objects, among them Hamlet and Holmes, thatdon’t exist” is either literally true or at least itconveys a truth. They typically acknowledge a distinction betweenunrestricted quantifiers, whose domain includes even nonexistentobjects, and restricted quantifiers, whose domain includes onlyexistent objects (cf., e.g., Berto 2013).

1.1 Possibilism

One way to account for the nonexistence datum is thepossibilisttheory of fictional entities, which holds that fictional entitiesdo not exist in theactual world but only in some otherpossible worlds. In this respect, fictional entities are thought to belike other merely possible entities such as talking donkeys. Accordingto standard versions of the possible worlds framework, some things notpresent at the actual world exist as talking donkeys at some merelypossible worlds. Similarly, the possibilist theory holds that SherlockHolmes does not exist in the actual world, although he does exist atsome merely possible worlds in which the Holmes stories are fact.

Such a possibilist theory is faced with a problem of ontologicalindeterminacy. For there is more than one possible world in whichConan Doyle’s Holmes stories are fact, and in which there is awitty, cocaine-addicted detective called “Holmes” wholives at 221B Baker St., has a friend called “Watson”, anddoes the things recorded of him in the Holmes stories. Not all ofthese Holmes-candidates are the same; while they all match each otherin terms of what the stories say about Holmes, they may be verydifferent in other crucial ways—they may have had very differentchildhoods, including different parents, and so on. (Indeed, whencharacters are underdescribed in a story, a single possible world maycontain many individuals who fit exactly what the story says about thecharacter.) We can now ask:which of these different witty,cocaine-addicted detectives is Holmes? (cf. Kaplan 1973: 505–6;Kripke 1972 [1980: 156–8]). There seems to be no principled wayof deciding.

Kripke suggests that this indeterminacy shows that none of thesepossible entities is Holmes, “[f]or if so, which one?”(Kripke 1972 [1980: 157–8]). But suppose, for argument’ssake, that this indeterminacy could somehow be resolved, perhaps bythe story including details of certain properties that, arguably, onlyHolmes could have, such as his being the only person to haveoriginated from certain gametes. Even in that case, there would bestrong reason not to identify Holmes with a merely possible entity. Tosee this, take a different case, that of the mythical sword Excaliburextracted from a rock by King Arthur. Because we know that the storyof King Arthur is merely fictional, we know that this sword does notexist. Its nonexistence would not be threatened by someone’sdiscovering an object with the physical properties that the Bretoncycle ascribes to Excalibur (unless, of course, that gave us reason tothink the Breton cycle was based on fact). No matter how similar, anactual object that resembles a fictional object would not be thatfictional object (Kripke 1972 [1980: 157–8]). Now, moving fromthe actual world to merely possible worlds does not change things: whyshould Excalibur be identified even with a merelypossibleentity? Had a merely possible entity exactly matching Excalibur in itsproperties been actual, it would not have been the fictionalExcalibur, by the Kripkean argument rehearsed above. So how are thingsdifferent if this merely possible Excalibur-like sword remains merelypossible? In a nutshell, if there is a gap between fiction andreality, there is also a gap between fiction and possibility.

These difficulties for possibilism do not equally affect all versionsof the doctrine. Consider David Lewis’s version of the doctrine,which is embedded in his realist account of possible objects (Lewis1986). Roughly speaking, Lewis takes a possible individual to be aHolmes candidate if it has Holmes’s properties in a possibleworld in which the Holmes stories are told as known fact (Lewis 1978).For Lewis, each such individual is a part of one world and not part ofany other world (possible individuals are in a sense‘world-bound’ on Lewis’s view); no Holmes candidateis therefore identical to any other Holmes candidate. But unlike moredoctrinaire possibilists, Lewis can use his counterpart theory (Lewis1986) to offer a principled way of counting each such Holmes candidateas being Holmes. Suppose you are a reader of the Holmes stories. EachHolmes candidate is a counterpart for you of every other Holmescandidate. For even if they should differ substantially in terms ofoverall qualitative similarity, the various Holmes candidates are allcounterparts byacquaintance for you (or, as Lewis seems tohave thought, for your community of fellow readers)—they areall, in their respective worlds, the person called“Holmes” whom you or your community (or rather, yourcounterparts) learn about by reading the Holmes stories, told as knownfact (cf. Lewis 1983b; Currie 1990: 137–9; Kroon 1994). Inshort, the fact that there are so many distinct Holmes candidates isless embarrassing for Lewis than it is for other possibilists. (Seealso the suggestion in Sainsbury 2010 (pp. 82–3) that Lewiscould have accommodated a plurality of possible Holmes candidates byrefusing to identify Holmes with any of them, instead modeling therelation between talk of Holmes and talk of these possible Holmescandidates on the model of the notion of precisification used inLewis’s semantics of vagueness.)

Lewis’s counterpart theory is not widely accepted, however. Ingeneral, Kripkean objections against possibilism about fictionalentities have been more influential. Some have argued, however, thatsuch objections only succeed if we use a ‘variable domain’conception of what there is to quantify over at any particular world,a conception that allows the set of objects available at one world todiffer from the set of objects available at another world(Kripke’s preferred semantics for modal logic is of this kind.)Suppose instead that one adopts a version of a ‘fixeddomain’ conception of quantification on which one has afictional individual at one’s disposal as a nonexistent entityin the actual world and as an existent entity in other possible worlds(Priest 2005, Berto 2011). If so, the indeterminacy problem may notarise. As Priest (2005: 119–20) puts it, we first of all haveDoyle’s conception of Sherlock Holmes;this SherlockHolmes—the Holmes that Doyle conceives of—is an individualin the actual world butit does not exist there; it existsonly in other worlds. For Priest, then, Doyle doesn’tarbitrarily pick one Holmes candidate from among all possible Holmescandidates, each located in its own possible world. Rather, Doyleintends a particular individual that does not exist in theactual world but instead fits, or realizes, the Holmes stories in someother possible worlds. Trivially, this individual is Holmes. (Doylemanages this even though the actual world contains many other possibleindividuals that don’t exist there but realize the Holmesstories in other possible worlds (Priest 2005: 93–4).)

Priest and Berto call their version of possibilismModalMeinongianism because it uses a modal framework to capturecentral features of Meinong’s famous account of nonexistentobjects (to be discussed below), but also because they see it as adescendent of Richard Routley’s early attempts at defendingMeinong’s views (cf. Routley 1980). But Modal Meinongianism hasfaced considerable criticism, some of it directed at its account ofthe way authors manage to pick out nonexistent objects. One mightwonder how it is that Doyle is acquainted with a particular Holmescandidate via the intentionality of his thought rather than with anyof the other Holmes candidates. Is authorial intending acreative act, perhaps, one that first brings it about thatthere is an object of the right kind, as Thomasson (1999: 90)suggests? All the indications are that Priest and Berto reject thisview. For them, “an act of pure intention can intend an objecteven when there are other indiscriminable objects” (2005: 142).Such a response has struck a number of critics as deeply problematic:without the ability to identify Holmes as the unique such-and-such,Modal Meinongianism seems unable to guarantee that there is adeterminate Holmes (this problem may, in fact, be the reason whyRoutley himself did not go on to develop a modal version ofMeinongianism; cf. Kroon 2019). Bueno & Zalta (2017) contrastModal Meinongianism’s apparent troubles on this score with theresources available for identification in Zalta’s version ofMeinongianism (for a response, see Priest et al. 2020).

Such a possibilism also faces another problem. For Priest, as forother possibilists, fictional entities do notactuallypossess the properties in terms of which they are characterized in therelevant stories; they only have these properties in (some of) theworlds in which they exist. Sherlock Holmes, for instance, is notactually a detective since he does not exist. Rather, Holmes is onlypossibly a detective; he is only a detective in possibleworlds in which he exists. (Note that he is not a detective inall the worlds in which he exists, since it is presumably atruth about Holmes that he might not have had the career that he endedup with; in some possible worlds, therefore, Holmes exists withoutbeing a detective.) Now, it is admittedly strange to say that afictional object like Holmes is a detective in the very same sense inwhich, say, a certain actual member of the New York police force is adetective. But retreating to the possibilist view that Holmes has suchproperties only in merely possible worlds carries its own costs; forone thing, it seems to underestimate the role of the actual world invarious familiar relational claims we can make about fictionalobjects. Consider cases in which we compare such objects with actualconcrete individuals. Suppose we say:

• (1) Holmes iscleverer than any actual detective.

We seem to be saying that Holmesactually has suchcomparative features, that is, has them in the actual world, notmerely in some possible world or other. Suppose that we read (1)instead as saying,à la Priest:

• (1P) Holmesispossibly cleverer than any actual detective.

(More precisely, relative to worlds in which Holmes is as he isdescribed to be in the Holmes stories, Holmes has a greater degree ofcleverness than that possessed by any detective in the actual world;cf. Priest 2005: 123.) But no such cross-world way of reading (1)matches the way we would read any other sentence involving acomparison between individuals. Take:

• (2) Stalin wascrueler than any other actual dictator.

It would clearly be incorrect to read (2) as:

• (2P) Stalinwaspossibly crueler than any other actualdictator

(say, in the sense that, relative to worlds in which Stalin fits theorthodox account of his activities, Stalin is crueler than any otherdictator in the actual world). (2) is intended to be a substantiveclaim about how Stalin actually was, not a claim about how he mighthave been. In addition, a possibilist reading like (1P) makes it hardto make sense of the attitudes we hold towards fictional characters(Kroon 2008: 201, 2012). Our belief in Holmes’s great clevernessexplains our admiration for Holmes, just as our belief in AnnaKarenina’s suffering explains our pity for Anna Karenina. It ishard to see how our belief in Holmes’spossiblecleverness could do this. In reply, Priest has insisted that this isprecisely how we should understand such claims: Holmes is admired forthe things he does in the Holmes worlds, while a real individual suchas Mandela is admired for what he actually did (2016: 217). But thisseems to beg the question. Surely the mere fact that there arepossible worlds in which Stalin dedicates his life to rescuingmigrants from death in the Mediterranean sea, say, does not make himworthy of admiration in the actual world, although it may make him anobject of admiration to people in these other worlds. Why should it beany different with Holmes?

The next approach to fictional entities to be discussed (the (neo-)Meinongian approach) is able to avoid such problems. But before wedescribe this approach, we should note that Modal Meinongians tend tosubscribe to a broader theory than possibilism. As many philosophershave noted, fictional narratives are often inconsistent. The Holmesstories, for example, characterize Dr Watson as having a war wound ona single shoulder, variously given as his left and his right shoulder.Lewis (1983a: 277–8) suggests that, typically, impossiblefictions can be dealt with by invoking only possible worlds (onLewis’s preferred view, both φ and not-φ can be true insuch an impossible fiction, but not their conjunction). But there aredifficulties with this suggestion when extended to certain deeplyentrenched contradictions. Thus consider certain time-travel stories.Priest himself concocts a story that wouldn’t make sense unlessa particular fictional box—Sylvan’s box—was animpossible object (Priest 2005: 125ff.). Philosophers like Priestinvoke impossible worlds to deal with such stories, and argue thatsome fictional objects are impossible objects to the extent that theonly worlds in which the stories that characterize them are true areimpossible worlds.

1.2 Meinong and Neo-Meinongianism

According to possibilism (perhaps extended to allow some fictionalobjects to be impossible objects), fictional objects are just likeactual objects, except that they exist only in various non-actualworlds. Like actual objects, they are determinate down to the lastdetail in worlds in which they exist (so long as the stories thatcharacterize them represent the world as being determinate down to thelast detail). This is so even if the stories do not themselves fill inthese details. For example, in worlds in which the Holmes stories aretrue, Holmes is left-handed, right-handed, or ambidextrous, eventhough the stories themselves do not tell us which (all that is truein theHolmes stories is that, having hands, he isone of these).

1.2.1 Meinong’s theory of objects

The view that fictional objects areMeinongian objectsconstitutes a very different metaphysical option. Meinong (1904)thought that among the entities that have some kind of being, therearereal entities (entities with (spatio)temporal being— these can be physical or mental) andideal entities(entities whose mode of being is non-temporal or abstract, such asnumbers and relations). In addition, there are the paradigmaticMeinongian objects that lack any kind of being, such as the goldenmountain and the round square. Meinong himself used “[mere]subsistence” (Bestand) for the non-temporal kind ofbeing, reserving “existence” (Existenz) for thetemporal kind. “Sein” was his word for the most generalkind of being, which includes bothBestand andExistenz, thus putting entities that do not have being ineither sense outside the scope ofSein. To simplifyterminological matters, unless we specify otherwise we will use“exists” for the most general mode of being, i.e.,Meinong’sSein. Meinong’s view, then, is thatthere are objects that have no form of existence, or being,whatsoever.

Even though Meinongian objects do not exist, they do have properties.In particular, Meinong thought that their being such-and-so (theirSosein) is independent of their being orSein. TheseSosein-specifying properties, moreover, are precisely theproperties in terms of which the objects are descriptively given. Thisclaim is captured by the so-calledCharacterizationPrinciple, whose explicit formulation is due to Routley (1980:46) but which is already implicit in Meinong 1904 (1960: 82).According to this Principle, objects, whether they exist or not, havethe properties in terms of which they are given or characterized;schematically, the thing that is characterized as beingF isin factF. Take, for instance, the golden mountain or theround square. The golden mountain does not exist, yet we can say thatit is both golden and a mountain since these are the properties interms of which the object is characterized; similarly, the roundsquare is both round and square, even though itcannotexist.

It is commonly assumed that for Meinong fictional objects are just asubset of his Meinongian objects—they are Meinongian objectsthat are given in terms of the properties they have in the storiesthat feature them. Note that the problem for possibilism mentionedtowards the end of the last section disappears on this account. For,so conceived, fictional entities do in fact possess the properties interms of which they are characterized in the relevant narratives:Holmes really does have a high degree of cleverness, higher, perhaps,than that possessed by any actual detective, and so(1) might well be true. Note also that fictional entities so conceivedare not completely determined with respect to their properties, unlikefictional entities conceived on the model of possibilism. BecauseConan Doyle’s stories are quiet on these matters, Holmes on theMeinongian model is not right-handed; nor is he left-handed; nor is heambidextrous. He does, however, have the property of being one ofthese. (One caution. Although this is the usual understanding ofMeinong’s conception of fictional objects, Meinong may not haveendorsed it in precisely this form: his most complete account offictional objects suggests that they are higher-order entities, thatis, entities that are constructed out of simpler entities, in the samesense in which, for instance, a melody is an entity constructed out ofits constituent sounds (cf. Raspa 2001 and Marek 2008 [2013]).

1.2.2 Concrete and abstract neo-Meinongianism

Modern versions of Meinongianism accept much of what Meinong has tosay on the topic of nonexistent objects, but depart from his accountat various points. Suppose we restrict our attention to propertiesappropriate to physical, spatiotemporal objects (for example,being a mountain orbeing a detective). What,following Reicher (2023), we might callconcreteneo-Meinongianism (Parsons 1980, Routley 1980, Jacquette 1996)maintains that Meinongian objects characterized in terms of suchproperties are concrete correlates of sets of such properties,possessing the properties in exactly the same sense as ordinaryconcrete objects have properties. Corresponding to a setS ofsuch properties, there is a concrete object that has (at least) theproperties contained inS. Corresponding to {beinggolden,being a mountain}, for example, there is thegolden mountain, which has the properties ofbeing a mountainandbeing golden (as well, perhaps, as all propertiesP such that necessarily, whatever is a golden mountain isP). These properties constitute the nature or essence of thegolden mountain. But the golden mountain also has other properties, inparticular properties that reflect its relationship to actual objectsin the world (being often thought about by Meinong, forexample). Like Meinong himself, concrete Meinongians think that suchobjects lack existence in the broad sense, i.e. the kind of existenceappropriate to concrete or abstract objects. And while some areneutral on the question of whether there might be an even moreinclusive mode of being possessed by nonexistent object (Parsons 1980:10), others are adamant that there is no such mode. Routley has themost extreme version of this view; his “noneism” holdsthat the only mode of being is existence narrowly construed as thepossession of causal powers and/or spatiotemporal location, a viewshared by Priest’s version of Modal Meinongianism (Priest 2005,2016). (Against such a Routley-style concrete neo-Meinongianism, DavidLewis has famously argued that we should repudiate any understandingof existence on which “ it can be a substantive thesis that onlysome of the things there are exist—or, for that matter, …a substantive thesis that everything exists” (Lewis 1990:32).

Concrete neo-Meinongians claim that fictional objects can similarly beregarded as concrete correlates of sets of properties. ConsiderHolmes, a cocaine-addicted detective who lives (lived) in London at221B Baker Street, solves many baffling crimes, has a friend called“Watson”, and so on (where the “and so on”includes all the propertiesP such that it is true in theHolmes stories that Holmes hasP). For concreteneo-Meinongians, Holmes is a concrete, albeit nonexistent, correlateof the set having those properties as members. (An interesting variantof these neo-Meinongian views is Castañeda’sguise-theory, according to which an existent individual is a bundle ofguises—particulars formed from sets of properties by aspecial concretizing operation—related by a relation ofconsubstantiation. An object like the golden mountain is aguise that is not consubstantiated with any guise, not even itself,and so doesn’t exist. Castañeda takes fictional objectsto be bundles of guises related by a special relation ofconsociation; see Castañeda 1989: ch.11.)

While agreeing that fictional objects form a subset of Meinongianobjects,abstract neo-Meinongians (the label is again fromReicher 2023) maintain that Meinongian objects in general should beconceived of as objects that have a non-spatiotemporal mode ofexistence, and hence as abstract rather than concrete (see especiallyZalta 1983)). And while they agree with the idea that for anycollection of properties there is an individual that has all theseproperties, they do not take Meinongian objects to be correlates ofsets of properties in anything like the way described by concreteneo-Meinongians. Instead, they take them to be something like genericobjects or roles, along the model of Platonic attributes. (Indeed,Zalta and others have used his theory to model a range ofphilosophical notions, including Platonic forms; see Zalta 1983:41–7, and Pelletier & Zalta 2000.) Consider the goldenmountain again. For abstract neo-Meinongians, this object is not amountain in the same sense that Mt Taranaki, for example, is amountain. The golden mountain is an abstract object, and mountains arenot abstract objects. It is more akin to the object referred to as theU.S. President in the following statement:

• (3) The USPresident faces an election every four years,

where the subject is not a particular US President like George W. Bushor Barack Obama, but rather the role or office of US President. (WhileZalta is the clearest example of an abstract neo-Meinongian in oursense, others come close. For example, Rapaport (1978) considersM-objects (his version of Meinongian objects) to be akin toplans rather than concrete individuals, and plans are presumablyabstract objects.) Note finally that while abstract neo-Meinongianstake Meinongian objects like the golden mountain and Sherlock Holmesto exist in the broad sense, they agree on the importance of thenonexistence datum: Zalta, for example, emphasizes that whileHolmes has being, i.e., existence in the broad sense, ‘he’lacks existence in the narrow, more salient, sense of havingspatiotemporal location (Zalta 1988: 21).

There are other realist positions which, although admittedly notMeinongian, come close to this abstract form of neo-Meinongianism. Therealist view of Wolterstorff (1980), for example, takes fictionalobjects to be Platonic kinds whose instances or examples are ordinaryobjects that have properties like being a famous detective, living inLondon, being called ‘Holmes’, etc. (in the case of thefictional objectHolmes); it thereby shares with abstractneo-Meinongianism a form of Platonism about fictional objects. Otherstake them to be work-bound roles (Currie 1990), thereby holding a formof abstractionism that leads to a conception of fictional objects asdependent entities, like the conception explicitly defended bycreationists (see below). (Indeed, even the idea of fictional objectsas kinds can be given a creationist rather than Platonistinterpretation; see Terrone 2017, which interprets fictional objectsas abstract types dependent on mental files.)

Before turning to another important point of disagreement amongneo-Meinongians, it is worth emphasizing that abstractneo-Meinongianism should be considered an unorthodox variant ofMeinongianism on the usual understanding of Meinong’s view.After all, if Meinongian objects are abstract then they must all haveSein or existence in the broad sense, contrary to whatMeinong is generally taken to have thought. (There is some evidence,however, that Meinong later also contemplated a more Platonist way ofunderstanding such objects, taking them to function as abstractuniversals that serve as “auxiliary” objects for thecomprehension of real objects, see Meinong (1915 [1972]: 739f.)

1.2.3 Two kinds of properties vs. two modes of predication

The distinction between concrete and abstract neo-Meinongians is drawnat the metaphysical level. It is closely linked to another distinctionrelevant to Meinongian objects, and so to fictional objects conceivedof as Meinongian objects: that between kinds of properties and modesof predication. Recall that on the one hand it seems natural to saythat fictional objects have the properties in terms of which storiescharacterize them (for instance, Anna Karenina was a woman driven tosuicide by her failed affair, and Sherlock Holmes a cocaine-addicteddetective living in London), and on the other hand not in the leastnatural (Anna Karenina may have committed suicide, but it is no uselooking for news of her suicide in the newspapers of the day). Now,all neo-Meinongians accept Meinong’s view that a Meinongianobject possesses the properties in terms of which it is characterized.Following what Meinong (1972 [1915]) himself came to say on the basisof a suggestion by his student Ernst Mally, some neo-Meinongians (forexample, Parsons 1980, Jacquette 1996) take these properties to be theobject’s nuclear properties, where, in general, ifM isthe Meinongian object correlated with a set of propertiesS,the members ofS are the object’s nuclear properties.On this view,being a detective, for example, is a nuclearproperty of Holmes, whilebeing a king is a nuclear propertyof King Arthur. (Routley similarly talks of an object’scharacterizing properties; cf. Routley 1980: 507–10.)But a Meinongian object also has other properties on this view: itsextranuclear properties are those of its properties that arenot among its nuclear or characterizing properties. In the case offictional objects, these are the properties that a fictional objecthas outside the scope of the story in which itappears—properties, we might say, that it has in virtue of theway the worldreally is, not properties that it has from thepoint of view of that story. Consider, for example, the following twosentences:

• (4)MickeyMouse is a pop culture icon
• (5) AnnaKarenina is a fictional character.

These sentences involve properties—being a pop cultureicon,being a fictional character—that are beingascribed to Mickey Mouse and Anna Karenina even though the propertiesdo not characterize these characters in the stories in which theyappear. Mickey Mouse has the first property because of the effects ofhis enormous popularity on pop culture, not because he is depicted asa pop culture icon in the Mickey Mouse stories. Anna Karenina has thesecond property because of her status as the product of creativefiction, not because of what Tolstoy’s story says about her(according to Tolstoy’s story she is a woman, not a fictionalcharacter). These two properties are typical instances of extranuclearproperties.

(A cautionary comment. In light of what we have just said, the claimthat the properties true of a fictional object in a work count as theobject’s nuclear properties needs qualification. It is true inthe Holmes stories, for example, that Holmes exists, even thoughHolmes doesn’t actually exist. So non-existence is one ofHolmes’s (extranuclear) properties despite the fact that in thestories Holmes is as much an existent object as he is a detectiveliving in London. One way of dealing with this apparent tension is toinsist that Holmes does have a property like existence, but that thisproperty should be understood as a weaker, ‘watered-down’,version of its extranuclear counterpart, a notion first advanced byMeinong (cf. Parsons 1980: 44, 184–6). We return to the notionof watered-down versions of extranuclear properties below.)

Some other neo-Meinongians claim instead that fictional and otherMeinongian objects possess the very same kind of properties thatordinary individuals possess, but possess them in a very differentway. (This suggestion was first made by Mally (1912), but not adoptedby Meinong.) When, for example, we say that Anna Karenina was a womanand Holmes an inhabitant of London, we use a different mode ofpredication from the one we use when we say that Marilyn Monroe was awoman or Tony Blair an inhabitant of London. On Zalta’s familiarformulation of this idea (Zalta 1983), fictional entitiesencode such properties while ordinary individuals simplyexemplify them. Similarly, Castañeda (1989) appeals toaninternal as well asexternal mode of predicationof properties, while Rapaport (1978) talks of properties that areconstituents of objects and properties that are exemplified byobjects. Both Anna Karenina and Marilyn Monroe, we might say, have theproperty ofbeing a woman, but the former encodes theproperty (the property is predicated of Anna internally, or Anna hasit as a constituent), while the latter exemplifies the property (shehas it externally).

But fictional objects also exemplify properties, perhaps some of thevery same properties they encode or have internally (this happenswhenever these properties are predicated of the objects in the storiesin which they appear). Thus, what makes both(4) and(5) true is that the properties ofbeing a pop culture icon andbeing a fictional character are exemplified, or possessedexternally, by Mickey Mouse and Anna Karenina respectively. AnnaKarenina therefore turns out to be internally non-fictional (since itis true in the novel that she is a woman, not a fictional character),and externally fictional.

That said, note that there are important differences between the waysin which Zalta, on the one hand, and Castañeda and Rapaport, onthe other, formulate these distinctions. For Zalta (1983: 12),encoding is a primitive notion that he embeds in a rigoroushigher-order modal theory which is then used to prove the existence,and derive the properties, of abstract objects, including fictionalobjects. The fact that encoding is a primitive notion is not seen as adrawback, given the fruitfulness of the notion once embedded in ageneral theory of abstract objects (Bueno & Zalta 2017). For bothCastañeda (1989: 200) and Rapaport (1978: 162), on the otherhand, internal predication applies to set-correlates, and so this modeof predication can be defined in terms of set-membership: a(fictional) entityF hasP internally (or: hasP as a constituent) if and only ifP belongs to theproperty set that is correlated withF.

On the surface, the ‘modes of predication’ distinctionappears to be in a better position to handle the data than the‘kinds of properties’ distinction (for more on thesedistinctions, see the exchange between Jacquette (1989) and Zalta(1992)). For one thing, there seems to be no workable criterion fordistinguishing nuclear and extranuclear properties: some propertiesseem to be both. Consider the property ofbeing a fictionalcharacter.Being a fictional character may seem to bethe prototypical candidate of an extranuclear property, as the case of(5) above testifies, but there may well be ‘metafictional’narratives whose protagonists are not characterized in the usual wayas flesh and blood individuals, but instead as fictional characters.(The fictional character The Father in Pirandello’sSixCharacters in Search of an Author is a famous case in point.) Sobeing a fictional character seems to qualify as both anuclear and an extranuclear property. Defenders of the ‘modes ofpredication’ distinction have no problem here: they hold that wecanexternally predicatebeing a fictional characterof both Anna Karenina and Pirandello’s The Father, while we canalsointernally predicate this property of The Father. (Itshould be pointed out that defenders of the ‘kinds ofproperties’-distinction have their own way of responding to thisproblem: they say that in such cases the nuclear property in questionis the ‘watered-down’ counterpart of the correspondingextranuclear property. On this view, Pirandello’s The Father hasthe extranuclear property ofbeing a fictional character aswell as its nuclear ‘watered-down’ correlate. But apartfrom the seeminglyad hoc character of this response, it isfaced by a more serious problem: it threatens to expose thedistinction to an endless regress of ever more ‘watered-down’ nuclear properties (cf. Voltolini 2006).)

It is probably fair to say that at the current stage of the debate the‘modes of predication’ distinction is more widelyaccepted, although as far as fictional entities at least areconcerned, both distinctions are taken to be problematic (Everett2013). We should remember, however, that this debate is internal toneo-Meinongianism, and that neo-Meinongianism as a theory of fictionalobjects has important virtues that owe nothing to the outcome of thisdebate. One such virtue is that the theory can account for the ideathat fictional entitiesnecessarily have the properties thatthey are characterized as having in the relevant stories. It is hardto see how Holmes couldnot have been a detective, forexample. Of course, Doyle might have written a story in which someonecalled ‘Holmes’ was a film director, but it is hard not tointerpret this thought as simply meaning that Doyle might have createdanother character with the same name. At the same time, it is a plaintruth of the Holmes stories that Holmes might never have become adetective, that this was a purely contingent choice on Holmes’spart. No matter how it is formulated, neo-Meinongianism has a way ofcapturing both these intuitions. On Zalta’s formulation of the‘modes of predication’ distinction, for example, Holmesexemplifies the property ofbeing necessarily such that he encodesboth being a detective and being someone who might not have been adetective. A neo-Meinongian advocating the ‘types ofproperty’ distinction would say that Holmes has the extranuclearproperty ofbeing necessarily such that he has the (nuclear)property of being a detective, but that he also has the(watered-down) nuclear property ofbeing someone who might nothave been a detective.

On the basis of the essentialist idea that fictional objectsnecessarily have the properties that they are characterized as havingin the relevant stories, neo-Meinongians have suggested a simplecriterion for the identity of fictional entities, one which can betraced back to the criterion for the identity of Meinongian objects ingeneral: Ifx has all the same nuclear properties asy (alternatively, ifx andy internallypossess the same properties), then \(x = y\) (cf., for example,Parsons 1980: 28, 188).

Despite the apparent attractions of such a view, there is an evidentproblem facing the underlying thought that once you have a certaincollection of properties youipso facto have a fictionalentity. (Note that (most) neo-Meinongians accept this thought, sincethey take fictional objects to be a subset of the class of objectsgenerated on the basis of something like Meinong’s Principle ofthe Freedom of Assumption (cf. Meinong 1915 [1972: 282]), theprinciple that for any collection of (nuclear) properties there is aMeinongian object that has those properties.) But generating fictionalentities is surely not quitethat easy. Take an arbitrarycollection of properties, say {weighing more than 10kgs,bearing the name “Oscar”,having a passionfor garden gloves,being a devotee of the number 17}.The mere existence of this set of properties is not enough to generatea fictional object, Oscar, with these properties. More has to happen.(Kripke (2013: 70–1) mentions the historical case of theBiblical term ‘Moloch’, which interpreters of the Bibletook to be a name for a mythical pagan god, whereas modern philologysuggests it was in fact used as a common noun either for kings or forhuman sacrifices. If modern philology is right and Bible-interpreterswere confused, there is no mythical god Moloch. This is so even thoughwe can agree that there is a collection of properties that pastinterpreters mistakenly understood the Bible to assign to such agod.)

Neo-Meinongians have tried to circumvent this problem by stressingthat Meinongian objects, including fictional objects, are not sets ofproperties, butcorrelates of such sets. Whether this moveenables neo-Meinongians to avoid admitting objects like Oscar andMoloch into the overall domain of fictional objects will depend on howthis move is understood. (In Castañeda’s variant ofneo-Meinongianism, fictional objects are systems of set-correlates,built up, or put together, by a fiction maker (cf. Castañeda1989: ch.11). But if this implies that the activity of fiction-makingis essential to the identity of fictional objects, we no longer have apure neo-Meinongianism but a view that is closer to the‘creationist’ view described in the next section.)

Even if the idea of a set-correlate helps to solve this particularproblem, it seems that no neo-Meinongian theory is able to blockanother problem that stems from letting the identity of such an objectdepend on the properties in terms of which it is characterized. TakeJorge Luis Borges’s famous story of a man called Pierre Menardwho happens to write a text that is word for word identical withMiguel Cervantes’sDon Quixote. Assume, in this variantof Borges’s story, that Menard and Cervantes are unknown to eachother, even though they live in the very same town; one can evensuppose that they are neighbors. In that case, the Borges storydescribes a situation in which one and the same set of propertiescorresponds to different fictional objects: Cervantes’s DonQuixote and Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote are two distinctfictional characters who, nonetheless, share all the properties theyhave in the respective works. (The ‘Menard’ case was firstmentioned in this context by Lewis (1978: 39). As a problem for theidentity of fictional objects, it was then exploited by Fine (1982:107); see also Thomasson (1999: 7, 56).) In this case, claiming thatfictional objects are set-correlates rather than mere property setsdoes not solve the problem, for we have only one set-correlate, yettwo distinct objects.

Intuitively speaking, the problem is clear. Neo-Meinongianism in allits varieties tends to sketch a Platonistic picture of a fictionalentity, either as something akin to a Platonic attribute, or as acorrelate of something else that we tend to describe in Platonicterms—a set of properties. Neo-Meinongianism thus sees afictional object as something that pre-dates the story-tellingactivities that intuitively bring fictional objects into being. To seethe tension between these conceptions, note that we often speak offictional objects as thecreations of storytellers or of thehuman mind more generally. Neo-Meinongianism, so it seems, leaves nosuch room for storytellers.

1.3 Creationism

The intuition that story-tellers have some kind of creative role toplay is accounted for by so calledartifactualist, orcreationist, accounts of fictional entities (see Searle 1979,Salmon 1998, Thomasson 1999, Voltolini 2006; the position was alsodefended in Kripke 2013, and elements of the position are found in vanInwagen’s (1977) theory of fictional objects as posits ofliterary criticism; Ingarden 1931 is a significant historicalforerunner). According to such accounts, fictional objects areartifacts since they come into being once they are conceived by theirauthors; to that extent, they are authorial creations. Moreover, theyare abstract entities, just as abstract neo-Meinongians believe.Unlike Platonicabstracta, however, they not only have abeginning in time, but they are alsodependent entities sincethey depend on other entities for their existence. (Roughly speaking,an entityO existentially depends on another entityO′ just ifO couldn’t exist withoutO′ existing (cf. Thomasson 1999). For a morediscriminating account, one that avoids the consequence thateverything existentially depends on necessary existents like naturalnumbers, see Fine 1994.) More specifically, fictional objects dependhistorically rigidly on the authors who create them (necessarily, ifO comes into being att, then the author(s) whocreatesO exists at some timet′ beforet) and constantly generically on the literary works thatfeature them (necessarily, ifO goes on existing, then someliterary workW or other featuringO exists duringO’s time of existence) (see Thomasson 1999 for anextended discussion of such dependencies). While historical rigiddependence accounts for a fictional object’s coming into being,constant generic dependence accounts for its continued existence orpersistence. Such an account of the persistence of fictional objectsseems as intuitive as the account of their generation. Not only do wesay that some given fictional object was created at a certain point oftime, but we might also describe it as having a certainage(Hamlet, we might point out, is now over 400 years old).

Note that creationism thus characterized earns its keep from the‘obviousness’ of the thought that authors somehow createfictional characters through the creation of fictional works in whichthey appear. Language seems to support this thought: we routinely hearstatements like “Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s mostcomplex creations”. It is on the basis of this thought thatcreationists then hypothesize that fictional objects literally are thecreations of their authors: not concrete creations, clearly, sotherefore non-concrete, abstract creations. But this move is far frominnocent. Yagisawa (2001), for example, argues that creationismconflicts sharply with other seemingly obvious thoughts, for examplethe nonexistence datum that fictional characters like Hamletdon’t exist (for a response, see Goodman 2004). At an even morefundamental level, Brock (2010) argues that the creationist’sappeal to creation is explanatorily void, leaving more questions thananswers. Not only is it left unclearwhen a fictional objectis created, but alsohow it is created. Appealing toauthorial intentions, for example, is inadequate, for such intentionsmay be lacking or overridden. (Brock considers an imaginary scenarioin which Doyle intended Holmes and Watson to be the same character,but died before writing the story that revealed this (361–362).Arguably, this wouldn’t change the fact that Holmes is distinctfrom Watson.) Some creationists have responded to such cases byarguing for models of creation on which the creation of fictionalobjects may be inadvertent, perhaps because of the role played byreaders or because of authorial confusion. (Lee 2022, Zvolenszky2016).

Creationists themselves claim that the appeal to creation does solve anumber of significant problems that afflict other metaphysicaltheories. There is, for example, no mythical god Moloch, for nobodyhas created such an object by gathering various properties andembedding them in a certain narrative. And although they share all theproperties attributed to them in the respective renditions ofDonQuixote, there aretwo Don Quixotes, Cervantes’sand Menard’s, not just one, because there were two utterlyindependent acts of authorial generation (cf. Voltolini 2006: 32ff.).It is not clear, however, how creationists can deal with a relatedproblem that affects their theory, the problem of indiscriminablefictional objects (Everett 2013: 191ff., Kroon 2015). Intuitively,there were thousands of fictional dwarves who took part inTolkien’s War between the Dwarves and Orcs, withoutTolkien’s engaging in thousands of acts of dwarf-creation. (Inresponse to this worry, some creationists have denied that there aresuch characters; see, for example, Voltolini 2006: 209–11,Schnieder & von Solodkoff 2009: 147.)

It is evident, then, that creationism is not without its problems.Perhaps the most significant ones have to do with the nature of thecreative process and the relation between the creative process and theidentity of fictional objects. It seems, for example, that what comesinto existence on the above account of the generating process (whichtalks of authors’ conceiving of their literary creations) is nota fictional object as such, but rather a (mere) intentional object,the target of a certain authorial thought. A mere intentional objectis not yet a fictional object, as Thomasson (1999:89) agrees, so whatmakes it one? Does it become one by being able to be‘shared’ by more than one person through appearing in atext (maybe not a physical copy but one stored in memory)? Or is therea more discriminating criterion to single out which intentionalobjects are fictional objects?

This question is perhaps best answered by giving a somewhat differentaccount of the generating process. Thus, some creationists (Schiffer1996, 2003; Thomasson 2003a,b) say that a fictional object comes intobeing as an abstract artifact not when an author first conceives ofit, but only once a certain make-believe process has come to an end,namely, the process in which someone—typically, astory-teller—pretends that there is an individual who issuch-and-such and does so-and-so. It is disputable whether thisprovides a sufficient condition forficta generation; perhapssomething else is needed, such as a reflexive stance on the verymake-believe process itself (Voltolini 2006, 2015a, 2020a).

Creationists may even choose to downplay the issue offictageneration. Fictional objects can perhaps be construed asinstitutional entities along the model of baptisms and marriages,entities that figure in the general inventory of what there is, but doso for free. Just as one can allow for the existence of baptisms andmarriages simply by appealing to constitutive rules along the model ofSearle’s (1969) account of illocutionary acts, so one can saythat fictional objects come to exist once certain practices having dowith make-believe (and possibly also its recognition) are in force(Thomasson 2003a,b, 2014; Voltolini 2020b). Alternatively, one mayappeal to regulative rules and say that, just like driving orqueueing, fiction requires an equilibrium solution to a coordinationproblem in the communication, among consumers of fiction, of thecontent of their imaginings. Fictional objects arguably providestability in such imaginings. On this picture, fictional objects,qua institutional entities, are simply generated by the factthat giving expression to such imaginings also counts as declaringthat things stand in a certain way, thereby constituting the very factthey declare, much like standard declarations such as a declaration ofmarriage (Abell 2020). (It is of course important for this view tojustify how the use of language resulting inficta generationcan count as authoritative in the very same sense as the words of anofficer declaring, and thereby generating, a marriage.)

But whatever the right account, another question remains: even if weagree on the nature of the process-type that gives rise to a fictionalobject,what is the thing that is purportedly generated inthis way? What are the identity conditions for fictional objects?Creationists typically do not think that a fictional object possessesthe properties that characterize it in the story in which it appears.A fictional object simply has those propertiesaccording to thestory. It is not true of Holmes, for instance, that‘he’ (or it) is a detective—only physical objects,not an abstract artifact, can be a detective. In Williamson’sterms (2000: 203), it is not true that Holmes, as a cultural artifact,is a detective that is fictional. Instead, what is true of Holmes isthat ‘he’ is a detective according to the Holmes stories(equally, Holmes is male according to those stories, and so deservingof the masculine pronoun “he”). In general, forcreationists the only properties that fictional objects genuinelypossess are the properties that neo-Meinongians would callextranuclear or take to be externally predicated: properties likebeing a fictional detective orbeing Doyle’screation or evenbeing a detective according to the Holmesstories (cf. Thomasson 1999). The approach thus fails to accountfor the idea, mentioned earlier, that there must be a sense in whichfictional objectsactually have the properties thatcharacterize them in the relevant stories.

In addition, the restricted nature of such properties makes it hard tosee how to individuate a fictional entity. Thomasson gives sufficientidentity conditions for fictional entitieswithin a literarywork:x andy are the same fictional objectF ifx andy are ascribed exactly the sameproperties in the work (1999: 63). But what do we say in the case offictional objects that appear in different works? Thomasson admitsthat in this case one can only provide a necessary condition:x andy are the same fictional object only if theauthor of the second work \(W'\) is competently acquainted withx of the previous work \(W\), and intends to importx into \(W'\) asy (1999: 67). The reason why shethinks this cannot be a sufficient condition is that, no matter whatthe author’s intentions are, he does not succeed in importingx (an entity that appears inW) into \(W'\) asy if he attributes properties toy that are tooradically different from the properties that were attributed tox inW (1999: 68). (There are other cases that showeven more clearly how authorial intention can be thwarted. Thus,consider a case of afusion of characters, in which an authorintends to import into \(W'\) two charactersx andy from a previous workW as a single characterz. Clearly, given the transitivity of identity,z isnot identical with eitherx ory, so the authorfails in her attempt. Analogous problems arise in the conversesituation of characterfission: cf. Voltolini 2012.)

The problem of the reliability of authorial intentions also arises inanother account, close to creationism, that has recently beendeveloped: the hylomorphist account (Evnine 2016). Just as ordinaryartifacts (chairs, tables, statues ...) amount to the particulararrangements of certain materials in accordance with certain creativeintentions, so fictional objects come into play by arranging materialof a specific kind, viz., the properties predicated in a certainfiction, in accordance with certain authorial intentions. On thismodel, fictional objects have their characterizing properties, albeitmerely contingently (the authorial plan may change). Once again,however, what specific authorial intention is in play and how it maybe put into force is a matter of debate. As before, there may be nocreative intention, or it may be overridden (to come back to aprevious example, few would take Holmes to be assembled out ofproperties that includebeing identical to Watson, even ifConan Doyle had, perversely, intended this).

To conclude this discussion of the metaphysics of fictional objects,it is worth noting that neo-Meinongian and creationist theories seemto suffer from complementary defects. On the one hand, neo-Meinongiansprovide exact identity criteria for fictional objects, but thesecriteria are clearly insufficient in that they do not take intoaccount the fact that such objects are products of the human mind. Onthe other hand, creationists do account for this fact, but they onlyprovide relatively non-specific identity criteria for such entities.Those theories are normally taken to be incompatible, for they appealto different metaphysical models—broadly speaking, a Platonicmodel as opposed to a constructivist one. This claim ofincompatibility should not be taken as definitive, however; there maywell be ways in which the two theories, or perhaps the most promisingelements of each theory, can somehow be combined (for recent attemptsto go in such a direction, cf. Zalta 2000, Voltolini 2006).

2. The Ontology of Fictional Entities

The metaphysical question about fictional entities asked what suchentities are like, should there be any. We now turn to the ontologicalquestion, which simply asks whether there are any such entities.

2.1 Semantical Arguments for and Against Realism

Obviously the important division at the ontological level lies betweenthose who believe that there are fictionalentities—fictional realists—and those who believethat there are no such entities—fictional antirealists.For a long time, the battlefield between those two parties has beenordinary language. Realists have always been fascinated by the factthat there are sentences in language that seem to commit one tofictional entities. Antirealists have instead insisted that suchappearances are deceptive: whenever a sentence seems to commit one tofictional entities, one can always provide a paraphrase which has thesame truth-conditions as the original sentence but is not socommitted. Realists in turn try to show either that those paraphrasesare inadequate or that there are still further sentences for which noadequate paraphrases can be found. Antirealists will reply that,despite appearances, these sentences can also be paraphrased innoncommittal terms; and so the game goes on.

2.1.1 Russell’s anti-realism

Frege (1892) is often taken to be the first champion of fictionalantirealism within analytic philosophy, in so far as he held that indirect (gerade) contexts such as “Odysseus cameashore” the fictional name “Odysseus” has a sensebut no reference. But Frege also held that in oblique(ungerade) contexts such as “John believed thatOdysseus came ashore” and “The author of theOdyssey says that Odysseus came ashore” this sensebecomes the new referent of the fictional name. If senses of this typecan model the notion of a fictional entity, then Frege can beconstrued as a kind of fictional realist (Künne 1990); otherwise,he can’t. (Parsons (1982) is doubtful; Zalta may be moresympathetic, since he thinks his abstract objects can model both thenotion of sense (Zalta 2001) and the idea of a fictional object.)

The modern form of the realism-antirealism debate, however, did notoriginate with anything Frege said on the matter, but with a disputebetween Meinong (1904) and Russell (1905a). Consider a sentencelike:

• (6) Apollo isyoung.

According to Meinong, considered here as the paradigmatic realist, thevery meaningfulness of this statement commits one to a (broadly)fictional entity—the deity of the Greek myths—on thegrounds, roughly, that the thought expressed by the statement isdirected at this entity, and so requires there to be such an entity.The statement itself expresses a truth rather than a falsehood aboutthis entity. For Russell, however, appearances in this case weredeceptive. First of all, he thought that “Apollo”, likeany other ordinary proper name, is short-hand for a definitedescription—say, “the sun-god”. Secondly, followinghis discovery of the theory of definite descriptions Russell held thata sentence containing a definite description has to be analyzed interms of another sentence in which the description is eliminated infavor of quantifiers, predicates, logical connectives, and genuineproper names. What (6) says on this account is given by a paraphrasein which the definite description for which “Apollo” isshort-hand, namely “the sun-god”, has disappeared onanalysis:

• (6R)There isat least one sun-god and at most one sun-god and every sun-god isyoung.

(Put more simply: There is a unique sun-god, and he is young.)

Thirdly, there is no longer even the appearance of a singular term(“Apollo”) that must designate something for theparaphrase to be meaningful. In fact, Russell saw that this resultshowed the original statement to be both meaningful (because able tobe analyzed in this way) and false (given obvious facts). Say that adefinite description has aRussellian denotation when theRussellian conditions for the description to have a denotation arefulfilled; that is, when there is at least one individual satisfyingthe relevant predicate, but no more than one. Then we can say that thedefinite description for which “Apollo” is short-hand doesnot have a Russellian denotation since (6R)’s first conjunct,namely:

• (7) There isat least one sun-god

is false. Far from making(6) meaningless, the absence of a denotation in this Russellian sensewhen taken in conjunction with Russell’s eliminative strategyshows (6) to be false. Russell thought that his theory of definitedescriptions allowed him to show that all fictional names lackeddenotation in this way, and that sentences containing fictional nameswere therefore true or false rather than meaningless.

2.1.2 Metafictional sentences and “in the fiction” operators

Let us accept, for argument’s sake, that the adoption ofRussell’s theory of descriptions allows us to avoid ontologicalcommitment to such ‘bizarre’ entities as nonexistentfictional and mythological entities. (Although this is a widelyaccepted view, there is in fact reason to doubt it: David Kaplanargues that it is “one of [the] virtues” ofRussell’s theory that the theory is “essentially neutralwith respect to ontological commitment”, that it permitsdescriptions to denote nonexistent entities if there are such entities(Kaplan 2005: 975–6; cf. also Voltolini 2006: 139ff.). Even ifRussell’s theory is ontologically potent in this way, however,the theory as formulated faces a simple and seemingly devastatingobjection: many intuitively true sentences come out asfalseon their Russellian paraphrases. Consider sentence(6) again. If we use Russell’s theory to dispense with an entitylike Apollo, it follows that (6) is false, insofar as its Russellianparaphrase is false. This is widely acknowledged to becounterintuitive. Presented with (6), most would say that it isintuitively true, unlike, say:

• (8) Apollo isa rock-star.

As it turns out, the antirealist who follows Russell has an easy wayof circumventing this problem. She will point out that the reason why(6), but not (8), seems to be true is thatin the Greek myththings are exactly as (6) says. The impression that (6) is true canthen easily be accommodated by taking (6) to be elliptical for alonger sentence, namely:

• (6I)According to the Greek myth, Apollo is young.

Here the locution “according to the Greek myth” works asan intensional operator, whereas the sentence following that operator,which is nothing but (6) itself, has to be analyzed in Russellianfashion:

• (6IR)According to the Greek myth, there is a unique sun-god and he isyoung.

(A caveat. It would be more proper to say that it is ause of(6) that is taken to be elliptical for (6IR), rather than (6) itself. For(6) is a case of afictional sentence, namely a sentence thatcould easily occur in the body of a narrative (a myth, in this case).Such sentences have a use on which they have merely fictionaltruth-conditions, that is, truth-conditions from the stand-point ofthe narrative or work of fiction, and on this kind of use even theirtruth-values are merely fictional. Following Evans (1982), who hereborrows a Quinean terminology, we may call this theconnivinguse of such sentences: the use on which the utterer is engaged inpretense or make-believe. But there is another use of the samesentences—what Evans calls thenon-connivinguse—on which we take them to have real truth-conditions, hencereal truth-values: the kind of use on which we take(8), unlike (6), to express a real falsehood. A case in point would be anutterance of (8) in response to a request for information about Apolloin an exam on Greek mythology. We shall call sentences of the form(6I), even reshaped as (6IR),internal metafictional sentences,for they purport to say how things stand in, or according to, acertain fiction. They are meant as sentences that capture thenon-conniving use of fictional sentences like (6).)

Let us now go back to the amendment to Russellianism we wereconsidering. On the view being discussed, an expression like“according to the Greek myth” is,qua intensionaloperator, a circumstance-shifting operator, one that shifts thecircumstance of evaluation of the sentence following it. Suppose, forthe sake of argument, that a sentence of the form “According tostoryS,p” is true in the actual world if andonly if “p” is true at the closest possibleworlds to the actual world in whichS is true (cf. Lewis1978). Now, any sentence that this operator embeds has to be analyzedin Russellian terms if it contains a singular term. In that case, asentence like(6I) is true in the actual world if and only if(6), i.e.,(6R), is true at the closest possible worlds in which the Apollo-myth istrue. Insofar as (6R) is indeed true at such worlds, the singular termin question—“Apollo”, that is, “thesun-god”—has a (Russellian) denotation in those worlds,even though it lacks a denotation in the actual world. Hence, we againget the result Russell desired: the whole sentence is true althoughthe relevant singular term has no actual denotation but only apossible one. Thus, no commitment to fictional entities arises out ofthe truth of that sentence.

Or rather, no such commitment arises from Russell’s theory onits own. If we assume Lewis’s modal realism, then saying as wedid that a description has a possible denotation entails anontological commitment to fictional objects aspossibilia.Normally, however, this intensionalist approach is taken in anantirealist sense (cf., e.g., Lamarque & Olsen 1994; Orenstein2003; Rorty 1982). For the Russellian, central to this antirealistunderstanding is the fact that a sentence like(6I) should be given ade dicto, not ade re, reading:what is said to be true in the fiction is a certaindictum orproposition, not the claim, about some given thing orresx, thatx has a certain property. On Russell’sway of understanding this distinction, the description “thesun-god” for which “Apollo” is short-hand should beinterpreted as having a secondary, not a primary, occurrence in thesentence, or, which is the same, the existential quantifier occurringin the Russellian paraphrase of the sentence should be assignednarrow, not wide, scope. (6I), that is, should be read as:“According to the Apollo-myth, there is exactly one sun-god, andhe is young” rather than as “There is a unique sun-god,and according to the myth he is young”. The reason for this isevident. If we adopt the wide-scope reading of the quantifier, thesentence turns out to be false, not true (given that there is nosun-god); and it is the truth of a sentence like (6I) that theRussellian aims to capture.

Suppose that the Russellian amendment works for fictional sentences ontheir non-conniving use. Intuitively, however, there are manysentences that talk of fictional characters even though they do notevenimplicitly mention stories. Let us call theseexternal metafictional sentences (some other commentatorstalk of “transfictive” or “critical”sentences).(4) and(5) above are typical examples. Clearly, (4) and (5) cannot be taken aselliptical for internal metafictional sentences such as:

• (4I)According to the Disney stories, Mickey Mouse is a pop cultureicon
• (5I)According toAnna Karenina, Anna Karenina is a fictionalcharacter.

For unlike(4) and(5), the latter sentences are simply false even on theirde dictoreading (a point already stressed by Lewis (1978: 38)): Mickey Mousehas the status of a pop culture icon in the actual world, not in theDisney stories; and according toAnna Karenina, Anna is awoman, not a fictional character. Many realists, especiallycreationists, have concluded that sentences of this kind really doestablish that we are committed to fictional characters. They arguethat even though fictional sentences on their non-conniving use can beparaphrased as internal metafictional sentences on theirdedicto reading and thus do not commit us to fictional characters,external metafictional sentences cannot be paraphrased in this way,and their truth really does commit us to fictional characters (see,for example, Schiffer 1996 and Thomasson 2003b).

One possible antirealist solution to this problem—although notone that Russellians themselves have promoted—is to invoke akind of fictionalism about fictional characters. On this strategy,sentences like (4) and (5) should be thought of as implicitly prefixedbyanother intensional “in the fiction” operator,so that even in this case the impression of reference to a fictionalentity would turn out to be baseless. In cases of this type, theoperator would appeal not to a story but rather to the realistpresumption that such an impression seems to support. The suggestion,then, is that external metafictional sentences are to be read asimplicitly prefixed by an operator like “according to thefiction of realism” or “according to the realist’shypothesis”:

• (4F)According to the realist’s hypothesis, Mickey Mouse is a popculture icon.
• (5F)According to the realist’s hypothesis, Anna Karenina is afictional character.

Once external metafictional sentences are read this way, any apparentcommitment to fictional entities seems to disappear, provided onceagain that the resulting complex sentences are readde dicto(for such a move, see Brock 2002, Phillips 2000).

2.1.3 The descriptivist problem for theories of fictional names

The appeal to intensional “in the fiction” operators is awell-known strategy for dealing with the apparent truth of statementslike(6), and because it is available to Russell this may seem like good newsfor Russell’s antirealism, especially given the way the strategymight be extended to external meta-fictional statements like(4) and(5). But such an amended version of Russellianism faces a problem alreadyfaced by the unamended version of Russell’s view. If such aRussellianism is to provide the correct analysis of sentences like(6), one has to assume that proper names are synonymous with definitedescriptions. This is because the strategy used in arriving at asentence like (6IR) involves replacing a proper name(“Apollo”) with an equivalent definite description(“the sun-god”). But there are well-known, and widelyaccepted, arguments against such a descriptivist view of proper names(Donnellan 1972, Kripke 1972 [1980], 2013). In particular,descriptions of the sort that speakers or communities standardlyassociate with a name might simply fail to fit what the name reallyrefers to (in the actual world and relative to other possible worlds).One response to this objection as far as fictional names like“Apollo”, “Holmes”, etc., are concerned is toreject descriptivism about ordinary names but endorse it for fictionalnames (see, for example, Currie 1990: 158–162). On the surface,however, this looks like an unpromising move: for one thing, it ispossible to attempt to engage in conversation about Apollo, believinghe is real, before coming to the realization that he is merely amythological figure, a possibility that is hard to explain if ordinarynames and fictional names have entirely different sorts ofmeanings.

This descriptivist problem presents itself as a potential challenge toany antirealist view that endorses ade dicto reading ofsentences like(6I) and(4F) /(5F). For how else, if not in terms of some kind of descriptivist view ofnames like Russell’s, are we to understand suchdedicto readings? If names are instead taken to be directlyreferential—that is, if they are taken to be terms that do notsecure their reference by means of descriptive meanings—thereseems to be no room left for ade dicto as opposed to ade re reading of such sentences, and, consequently, no roomfor the thought that sentences containing (allegedly) empty names like“Apollo” even have truth-conditions.

A particularly stark form of this dilemma is faced by what is perhapsthe most widely accepted post-Kripkean alternative to descriptivism,namely Millianism, which holds that what a name contributessemantically to the propositions expressed through the use ofsentences containing the name is just the name’s referent. Thecombination of Millianism and the antirealist view that fictionalnames like “Apollo” lack reference (and so make nocontribution to the expression of propositions) appears to imply thatsentences like(6I) don’t express any proposition, let alone true propositions.There is now a lively industry devoted to finding Millianism-friendlysolutions to this quandary. Some Millians argue that what we see asmeaningful and even true concerns what is implicated rather thansemantically expressed by such sentences (e.g., Taylor 2000). Othersappeal to gappy or unfilled propositions. These are proposition-likeentities expressed by sentences containing empty names that can failto be true because of the gaps (see Braun 1993, 2005; Adams et al.1997). Both Braun and Adams et al. argue that such gappinessdoesn’t prevent internal metafictional sentences such as“In the Holmes stories, Holmes is a detective” fromexpressing truths. But they disagree about external metafictionalsentences like “Holmes is a fictional character”, withAdams et al. insisting that these too can be true despite the namesbeing non-referring, and Braun (2005) arguing that such statementscall for a creationist position on which the names in such sentencesrefer to genuine, created fictional entities.

Millians are not the only ones to have grappled with the implicationsthat the Kripke-Donnellan attack on descriptivism has for thesemantics of fictional names. Michael Devitt, for example, anotherearly critic of descriptivism, has used the problem of fictional andother empty names to argue against Millianism and in favor of hisversion of a causal-historical theory of reference (cf. Devitt 1989).And Mark Sainsbury argues in Sainsbury 2005 that names, includingfictional names, have singular but non-descriptive meanings that canbe specified in a Davidson-style truth theory whose background logicis a Negative Free Logic (that is, a logic that counts simple oratomic sentences containing empty names as false). Given the roleassigned to Negative Free Logic, it is scarcely surprising that thegreatest challenge for such a framework is again the problem ofexternal metafictional sentences such as(4):

• (4) Mickey Mouse is apop culture icon.

The latter has the appearance of an atomic sentence and so should,implausibly, count as false on such a logic. In (2009) and (2011),Sainsbury uses the idea of presupposition- / acceptance-relative truthto deal with such problems, an idea that is related to ideas found inthe popular pretense-theoretic approach to fictional names. That isthe approach we turn to next.

2.1.4 Pretense Theory

For the antirealist, the semantics of names presents an importanthurdle to attempts to accommodate the truth of internal and externalmetafictional sentences featuring fictional names. Such difficultieshave suggested the need to look in a completely different direction.As we saw before, it is important to acknowledge the role of pretensein fictional talk and writing. A fictional sentence has a connivinguse when it is uttered within the context of a certain pretenseinvolving the telling of a story. Call such a context afictional context. Note that a sentence considered as utteredin such a context does in a sense carry ontological commitments: itcarriespretend ontological commitments. For within thecontext of the relevant pretense, the singular terms involved do referto things. For instance, to utter(6) in the context of telling the Greek myth is to utter a sentence inwhich, from the perspective of the relevant pretense, the name“Apollo” refers to a god. Consequently, the sentence hasfictional truth-conditions in that context (the sentence istrue in the world of that context just if the entity referred to as“Apollo” in that context is young in that world) and hasalso afictional truth-value (considered as uttered in thatcontext, the sentence is true, for in the world of thatcontext—the world of the Greek myth—there is a god,Apollo, who is indeed young).Outside that context,however—that is, in areal context where there is nopretense that the Greek myth is fact—a name like“Apollo” refers to nothing. No endorsement ofdescriptivism is here required. Quite simply, if the singular terms inquestion are directly referential (currently the most popular view ofnames), then a sentence containing afictional proper namewill have no real truth-conditions, hence no real truth-value, sinceany such term is really empty. Take the case of “Apollo”,which on this view has no referent when uttered in a real,non-fictional context of utterance. Assuming it is a directlyreferential term, it makes no truth-conditional contribution tosentences that contain it. Hence, when uttered in a real context (6)will have no truth-conditions, hence no truth-value. (The kernel ofthis proposal is in Walton 1990; see Recanati 2000 and Everett 2013for refinements.)

So far, so good. Remember, however, that the intuition that a sentencelike(6) is really, not just fictionally, true—hence, that it has real,not just fictional, truth-conditions—is a powerful one. How cana pretense antirealist account for this intuition?

As a first attempt, a pretense antirealist may try to combine thevirtues of the pretense account with the virtues of the intensionalistapproach. That is, she may first stick to the idea that on itsnon-conniving use a sentence like (6) has to be taken as ellipticalfor an internal metafictional sentence like(6I). But she may also insist that the “according to the story”operator should be taken as acontext-shifting operator, notsimply (like the familiar intensional operator “It is necessarythat”) as a circumstance-shifting operator. That is, she mayinsist that it is an operator that shifts not only the circumstancesof evaluation of the sentence it embeds, but also the context relevantfor the interpretation of such sentence—typically, the contextof its utterance. More precisely, if we take a fictional sentence“p” on its non-conniving use as elliptical for“According to the storyS,p”, then“p” so understood is true in the actual world ifand only if “p”, taken as uttered in the contextof the storyS (that is, a fictional context), is true in theworld of that context.

The antirealist merits of this account are clear. It allows a propername like “Apollo” to be both genuinely empty, carrying nocommitment to any fictional entity, but also genuinelynon-descriptive. The embedded sentence containing the name ((6), say)is understood as being uttered in a fictional context, and in thatcontext the name directly refers to an individual, the individualexisting in the world of the relevant pretense. Since this referenceoccurs only in that fictional context, not in a real context, the namereally does remain empty. (This proposal can be traced back to Walton1990; see also Adams et al. 1997.)

Despite these virtues, the suggestion faces a well-known criticism.Kaplan calls such context-shifting operators ‘monsters’,and claims that “none can be expressed in English (withoutsneaking in a quotation device)” (1989a: 511). In the case ofindexicals, for example, “no operator can control … theindexicals within its scope, because they will simply leap out of itsscope to the front of the operator” (1989a: 510). To see howthis worry applies to a fictional sentence containing an indexical,consider the famous first line of Proust’sIn Search of LostTime:

• (9) For a longtime I used to go to bed early.

Within the fictional context mobilized by Proust’s telling hisstory, the first person pronoun “I” refers to the personnarrating the events that constitute the imaginary world ofProust’sRecherche—an individual who exists onlyin that world, not the actual world. Now, suppose we want to capturethe sense in which (9) is really true by reporting that the claimexpressed by (9) is true according toIn Search of Lost Time.On the above pretense-intensionalist approach, we might formulate thissuggestion as:

• (9PI)According toIn Search of Lost Time, for a long time I usedto go to bed early.

However, this equivalence clearly does not work. Assuming that you arethe person who utters (9PI), the sentence says that you used to go tobed early for a long time in the imaginary world of Proust’sRecherche. But this is false, since you are not an inhabitantof this world.

It may be possible to obviate Kaplan’s problem in some way, forinstance by claiming that the context-shift affects the wholesentence, not just the embedded one (Recanati 2000); but then one hasto show how such sentences may nonetheless have real truth-conditions,and not merely fictional ones. Or the problem may turn out to berestricted to the case of embedded indexicals, or even certain typesof indexicals. Predelli, for example, has argued that there areexamples of discourse about fiction using modal and temporalindexicals that are best analyzed in terms of such context-shiftingKaplanesque ‘monsters’ (Predelli 2008).

Be that as it may, one might try to simplify the pretense-theoreticalproposal by reversing the order of explanation. Rather than taking thefictional sentence on its non-conniving use as elliptical for aninternal metafictional sentence, we might take the internalmetafictional sentence to be really true just when the fictionalsentence (on its non-conniving use) is really true. We might, that is,follow Walton in treating the fictional sentence as“primary”; cf. 1990: 401–2). It is in factrelatively easy to discern the sense in which the fictional sentenceon its non-conniving use is really true. It is really true just incase there is a pretense of a certain kind relative to which thesentence on its conniving use is fictionally true. In short, thefictional sentence is really true on its non-conniving use if and onlyif it is fictionally true (for this formulation, see Crimmins 1998:2–8). (Walton’s 1990 own formulation of the point isweaker, for it gives the proposal apragmatic twist: by beingfictionally true, a sentence may be taken to assert, or toconvey, a real truth. See also Everett 2013.)

One advantage of such an antirealist move is that it can be used forboth fictional sentences and external metafictional sentences. ForWalton, what distinguishes the two cases is simply the kind ofpretense that makes the relevant sentence fictionally true. In theformer case, the game of make-believe that the relevant fictionalcontext singles out is anauthorized one; that is, it is agame authorized by what serves as a prop in that game (in the case ofa literary game of make-believe, the text written or narrated by thestoryteller); the prop dictates how things go in the world of thatgame. In the latter case, the relevant game of make-believe is anunofficial, albeit standard, one (1990: 417); in this case,there may be no constraints—none, at least, provided by theprop—that dictate how things stand in the world of that game(cf. Walton 1990: 51, 406, 409).

Take (6) again. In order for (6) to be fictionally true, and hence forit to be really true on its non-conniving use, the world of the Greekmyth must contain a god (Apollo) who is young. This is a consequenceof the fact that this is the way the myth is told. The myth-tellingfunctions as a prop constraining how the “Apollo” game ofmake-believe has to be played; a person who makes believe that Apollois a rock-star is not playing the game correctly, or is perhapsplaying another game. But now consider(4). In order for an utterance of (4) to be fictionally true, hence for itto be really true on its non-conniving use, it must allude to a gamein which there is a fictional character named “MickeyMouse” who has the special property ofbeing a pop cultureicon—a ‘Meinongian’ pretense, as Recanati(2000) calls it. Now, such a game is not constrained by any text;there is no Mickey Mouse story that describes Mickey Mouse in theseterms. The game in question is instead one where facts about theimportant place occupied in popular culture by the Mickey Mousestories are what make it fictionally true in the game that MickeyMouse has the special property ofbeing a pop culture icon.To that extent the game is an unofficial one.

On this account, then, external metafictional sentences enjoy nospecial status; in particular, they don’t provide us with areason for assuming the existence of fictional entities. Our finalexample returns us to Pirandello’sSix Characters in Searchof an Author. Consider an utterance of:

• (10) TheFather is a fictional character.

On the one hand, this is an external metafictional sentence of thevery same kind as (5), a sentence that the speaker uses to describethe metaphysical status of one of the protagonists ofPirandello’s work. On the other hand, (10) may also be taken asa fictional sentence, since Pirandello’s play is characterizedby the fact that its protagonists are not ordinary concreteindividuals but fictional characters. In such a case, the sentence hastwo distinct non-conniving uses. On its use as a fictional sentence itis allegedly equivalent to:

• (10′)According toSix Characters in Search of an Author, theFather is a fictional character.

In this case,(10) is really true in so far as it is fictionally true relative to a gameauthorized by the workSix Characters in Search of an Author.In the other case, it is really true in so far as it is fictionallytrue relative to an unofficial game in which some entities count as‘real people’ and some as ‘fictionalcharacters’, with the Father correctly singled out as one of thelatter because ‘he’ originated in a work of fiction.

Walton’s pretense-based version of antirealism has been veryinfluential (for a development of the view, see Everett 2013), but ithas also attracted a great deal of criticism. Some have doubted that asentence’s fictional truth on its conniving use can ground asense in which it is really true on its non-conniving use (cf.Voltolini 2006), a move that is crucial to his antirealism. Othershave doubted that Walton’s appeal to unofficial games ofmake-believe can yield appropriate antirealist paraphrases formetafictional sentences in general, perhaps because these critics denythat such sentences involve either explicit or implicit appeals topretense (Thomasson 1999, van Inwagen 2003).

2.1.5 Quantificational arguments for realism

Of course, to show thatsome antirealist paraphrases offictional sentences do not work does not mean thatno suchparaphrases will work. Perhaps it is always possible to find newparaphrases that do not raise any of the problems hitherto pointedout, whether such paraphrases are based on a new version of thepretense-theoretic approach or on some other approach. To take thispoint into account, some realists have pursued a differentlinguistically-based strategy. To be, as Quine said, is to be thevalue of a variable (Quine 1948). Hence if we can locate existentiallyquantified discourse involving quantification over fictionalentities—either directly, as external metafictional sentencesthat can themselves be used as premises to derive other metafictionalsentences, or indirectly, as a result of a valid inference fromexternal metafictional sentences—then it seems that suchontological commitment is unavoidable. In this connection, considerthe sentence:

• (11) There isa fictional character who, for every novel, either appears in thatnovel or is a model for a character who does.

Not only can such a sentence be inferred from, say:

• (12) SanchoPanza is a model for at least one character in every novel, apart fromthe novelDon Quixote, in which he himselfappears,

but it also legitimizes an inference to:

• (13) If nocharacter appears in every novel, then some character is modelled onanother character

(cf. van Inwagen 2000: 243–4).

Now, it is certainly true that insisting on the need to preserve thevalidity of the above inferences in any account of externalmetafictional sentences is a good antidote to the antirealist‘paraphrase’ strategy. For there is no guarantee thatvalidity is preserved once the above sentences are paraphrased (say,in a pretense-theoretic mannerà la Walton). Thissuggests that such antirealist paraphrases may not capture the meaningof the original sentences, leaving the field to realist construals ofsuch sentences (cf. again van Inwagen (ibid.); forWalton’s response, see Walton 1990: 416ff.).

Still, this may not be enough to show that antirealism should berejected. For while existential sentences like (11) that quantify overfictional characters are common enough, there are other existentialclaims with the same logical features as (11) that philosophers arefar less likely to take as evidence of realism. Thus consider:

• (14) Whilethere is an imaginary emperor who Nathan Salmon imagined took overFrance, there certainly is no imaginary emperor who Nathan Salmonimagined took over Canada.

This sentence is suggested by Nathan Salmon’s account ofallegedly empty names in Salmon 1998. Salmon suggests that whilefictional names in general stand for abstract created fictionalentities, certain other terms are thoroughly non-referring or empty.In this connection, he contemplates the possibility of there being anarmed fanatic who has just taken over the government of France bydeclaring himself emperor, and then stipulates that the name“Nappy” is to refer to whoever is the present emperor ofFrance if there is such a person (as there would be if thisimaginative scenario were actual), and to nothing if thereisn’t. Such a name, he thinks, is clearly empty. Note, however,that in Salmon’s imaginative scenario,

• (15) Nappy isa French emperor

is true, but that there is no similar scenario involving a presentemperor of Canada. A sentence like(14) is a natural way of recording this fact. But now we face a problem.As Caplan (2004) points out, taking(11) as an evidence for the genuine existence of what van Inwagen callscreatures of fiction suggests that we should, by parity ofreasoning, take (14) as evidence for the genuine existence ofsuigeneris creatures of the imagination. Or, to put the point theother way round, if we don’t think that linguistically-basedreasons such as the availability of an (apparently) true quantifiedsentence like (14) commit us to bizarre entities like Nappy, we shouldnot think that such reasons commit us to fictional entities either.For variants of the problem and complications, see Kroon (2011, 2013,2015).

Note that we do not even need quantificational locutions to see theproblem. If one thinks that the truth of the external metafictionalsentence (5) commits us to the existence of a fictional character,Anna Karenina, then it is hard to resist the thought that the truth ofthe non-quantified sentence:

• (16) Thatlittle green man is just a trick of the light

uttered by someone who wants to describe the mistake made by thosearound him who think that they see a little green man, similarlycommits us to the existence of a certain creature of the imagination,one who has the property ofbeing a trick of the light (cf.Kroon 1996: 186). Many would resist such an easy road to realism aboutcreatures of the imagination.

2.2 Ontological Arguments for and Against Realism

The problems that one thus encounters in trying to letsemantic-linguistic arguments ground a commitment to fictional objectsgive one reason to think that there is no semantical shortcutavailable to the realist. That is to say, if a realist wants to claimthat ourprima facie commitment to fictional entities isjustified, she has to provide a genuine ontological argument to thateffect.

In her 1999 book, Thomasson tried to provide just such an argument.Her argument claims that we cannot reject fictional objects if weadmit fictional works: given that fictional objects and fictionalworks belong to the same genus of entities (the genus of created,artifactual objects) it would be false parsimony to accept the one andreject the other.

This argument has several problems. For one thing, it postulates anidentity of kind between fictional works and fictional entities thatis far from intuitively clear. As Thomasson herself seems to admit(1999: 65), fictional works are syntactical-semantic entities, unlikefictional entities. But there is a similar argument that does not relyon a parallelism between fictional works and fictional characters, buton the fact that the identity conditions of the fictional works referto fictional characters. In brief: if we admit a certain kind ofentity, we cannot but admit all the other kinds of entities thatfigure in the identity conditions of such an entity; we admitfictional works; so we cannot but also admit fictional objects becausethey figure in the identity conditions of fictional works (cf.Voltolini 2003, 2006).

If the antirealist wants to challenge the realist on directlyontological grounds, she has to discredit such arguments, and, betterstill, provide an argument for the conclusion that therecannot be any fictional entities. Curiously enough, Russell,who is usually remembered for having originated the‘paraphrase’ strategy for eliminating apparent referenceto nonexistent entities (see 2.11 above), also usednon-linguistically-based ontological arguments against admitting suchentities. In fact, there is good reason to believe that he took hismain argument against Meinong to be that Meinongian entitiesare apt to violate the law of noncontradiction (cf. Russell(1905a,b)). In his (2005) and (2013), Everett reprises and extendsRussell’s ontological criticisms so that they become a critiqueof fictional entities in particular. He provides a number of argumentsthat are intended to show that, first, such entities may violate somebasic logical laws—not only the law of noncontradiction, butalso the symmetry of identity—and, second, they may beproblematically indeterminate with respect to both their existence andidentity. These arguments are based on odd but intelligible stories inwhich, for example, one individual is both identical to and distinctfrom another, or in which it is indeterminate whether a certainindividual exists. The link to fictional characters is providedthrough certain bridging principles (more refined versions of suchprinciples are provided in his 2013):

(P1) If the world of a story concerns a creaturea, and ifa is not a real thing, thena is a fictionalcharacter.

(P2) If a story concernsa andb, and ifaandb are not real things, thena andb areidentical in the world of the story if and only if the fictionalcharacter ofa is identical to the fictional character ofb.

Everett’s critique is interesting and innovative, and (given theworries expressed about language-focused arguments) in some ways amodel of how an antirealist should really pursue the battle againstwhat she believes are ontological illusions. But, not surprisingly,the debate has not ended there. Although at least one influential(erstwhile) realist has conceded the power of Everett’sargument, proposing an antirealist notion of assumption-relative truth(Howell 2011, 2015) in place of the realist absolute notion hechampioned earlier (Howell 1979), some other realists think thatEverett underestimates the conceptual resources available to them.

Take, for example, the case that seems to have exercised creationiststhe most — the argument for indeterminate identity — andconsider an example like the following made-up nursery rhyme (fromSchnieder & von Solodkoff 2009: 139):

Bah-Tale:

There once was a man called Bahrooh

There once was a man called Bahraah

But nothing determined if Bahraah was Bahrooh

Or if they were actually two.

Given that “Bahraah” and “Bahrooh” arefictional names, it follows from (P1) and (P2) that it isindeterminate whether the fictional character Bahrooh is identical tothe fictional character Bahraah, contrary to philosophical consensusthat indeterminate identity is incoherent (see especially Evans 1980and the ensuing literature).

Philosophers of fiction have not been slow to respond to thisargument. Few have been willing to accept fiction-generated onticindeterminacy (Thomasson 2011 and Paganini 2023 are among theexceptions). Schnieder & von Solodkoff (2009) suggest that (P2)itself is to blame, and that there is a better default principle ofidentity that lets story-relative ontic indeterminacy suffice fordeterminate ontic distinctness. Such a variation on (P2) would blockBah-Tale from implying ontic indeterminacy, although some, siding withEverett, think the variation isad hoc (Caplan & Muller2014). Others challenge the role played by principles of identity. Lee(2022), for example, argues that the identity of fictional charactersis (usually) to be settled by appeal to authorial intentions ratherthan principles of identity, and that this is enough to disarm allegedexamples of ontic determinacy. But even if we stress the importance ofprinciples of identity, what such principles show may not be all thatclear. One popular line of argument holds that Everett-style casesonly generate semantic, not ontic, indeterminacy (Thomasson 2011,Cameron 2013, Woodward 2017). Some even think that an appeal to moreor less familiar neo-Meinongian distinctions between i) predicativeand propositional negation and ii) modes of predication(alternatively, kinds of property) is enough to block the inference toontic indeterminacy (Voltolini 2010). Of course, antirealists takesuch distinctions to be poorly understood and part of what makesrealism an unattractive option in the first place (they may also beunusable in complex fiction-involving sentences; see again Everett2013; for a reply, cf. Voltolini 2015b)). Hence even if such rebuttalsare successful on their own terms, this is not likely to settle therealism-antirealism debate.

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• Alexius Meinong’s Theory of Objects, inOntology. A Resource Guide for Philosophers, by RaulCorazzon.
• The Theory of Abstract Objects, by Edward N. Zalta, Metaphysics Research Lab, StanfordUniversity.

Related Entries

abstract objects |existence |fiction |fictionalism |Meinong, Alexius |nonexistent objects |possible objects

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Gideon Rosen for useful comments on an earlier draft ofthis entry and to Luke Manning for his remarks on the previous versionof this entry. We are especially grateful to Paul Oppenheimer for hisunstinting help and support.