ALBION COLLEGE
Fictional Entities
Following folk intuition without creation
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4/13/2012
Once upon a time, Amie Thomasson came up with the ultimate account of fictional entities! Of
course, the layperson’s intuition will have us know that authors legitimately create fictional
objects. Such objects couldn’t have existed before the creative deed, right? What else are
created by creative acts? Artifacts! It seems just right to count fictional entities among artifacts
and hold that they have the properties associated with artifacts, such as dependency on creative
acts. Unfortunately, Thomasson’s account of fictional entities is fiction itself. It neither follows
directly from our typical literary discourse nor makes sense when actually applied.
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Fictional Entities: Following folk intuition without creation
Talk about fictional objects in not at all uncommon in everyday discourse, so it is quite natural to
begin to wonder what, if anything, these fictional objects are. There are a number of routes to
take when starting the task of figuring out what fictional objects are, but the one I shall focus on
is the approach that consists of looking at literary practices and building our ontology around
those practices. Amie Thomasson has taken that particular route and has concluded that holding
fictional objects to be abstract artifacts fits our practices well. However, I fear that (a) her
ontology is not the only one that follows from consideration of literary practices, (b) she has not
properly analyzed literary practices, so her ontology need not follow, or (c) her ontology, as it
stands, is incoherent.
A fine place to begin would be to lay out Thomasson’s view and the considerations in
favor of such a view. Thomasson considers fictional objects artifacts, not unlike tables and
chairs, but of the abstract sort. Artifacts, as you will know, are created entities. One does not
speak of artifacts as having always existed. They had to be created at some time. Similarly, “we
do not describe authors as discovering their characters or selecting them from an ever-present set
of abstract, nonexistent, or possible objects. Instead, we describe authors as inventing their
characters, making them up, or creating them, so that before being written about by the author,
there is no fictional object.”1 This is all well and good, but while the creation of concrete
artifacts is easy enough to understand2, the creation of abstract artifacts may prove more difficult
to explain. Luckily, that is not the case at all. Abstract artifacts, like contracts and institutions,
can come into existence by means of illocutionary acts. If I vow to give my dog a bath, in doing
so I bring a new contract into existence. “Just as marriages, contracts, and promises may be
1
Thomasson pp 59-60
That is, if we ignore issues associated with pointing out the exact time when stone becomes statue, or other similar
situations.
2
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created through the performance of linguistic acts that represent them as existing, a fictional
character is created by being represented in a work of literature.”3
Another feature of artifacts is that they can cease to be. If my chair catches fire and turns
to ash, it ceases to be the artifact it once was. By parity of reason, we ought to be able to allow
in our ontology for abstract artifacts to cease existing. Talk of such an occurrence seems rare
enough, but that is because we have little reason to consider the sorts of fictional objects that
once were. A few examples, though, do point to some sort of ability of fictional objects to cease
being. Consider a writer who has come up with the most horrifying fictional character ever. He,
out of the goodness of his heart, burns all of the writings that feature that character and
subsequently poisons himself so that nothing of that character may remain in existence. It really
seems as though the fictional character was successfully removed from existence.
But this is surely not the only way for a fictional character to cease to be. Suppose that
the writer instead decided to burn all of his already-written (in ordinary language) manuscripts
and write the tale of the horrifying fictional character in a cryptic language known only to him.
Upon the writer’s death, the cryptic manuscript may still exist, but nobody can read it. It seems
in this case that the horrifying character no longer exists since no one can access its tale.
Though, if someone cracks the code of the cryptic manuscript, we may want to say that the
character exists again. But what, then, should we have said about the character’s ontological
status in the time between the writer’s death and the cracking of the code? I have a hunch that
Thomasson would have to say that the character existed the whole time (in question) since a
decipherable work on which its existence depends was in existence. Such a time of questionable
ontological status is exemplified by the more talked-about notion of ‘lost’ works. We often hold
out hope that missing manuscripts are lost rather than destroyed, and that we may find them
3
Thomasson p 64
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again. Characters dependent on such manuscripts would exist if the manuscripts existed and
could still potentially be read. That seems to apply to the cryptic manuscript case since the
manuscript had the potential to be read.
Assuming Thomasson has all of the relevant literary practices laid out before us, is her
ontology the only one that is consistent with such practices? I have my doubts. My first target is
the notion that the creation of fictional objects by authors best explains why we find propositions
expressed by sentences like “George Washington was fond of Sherlock Holmes” false. Suppose
that the fictional character Sherlock Holmes existed long before Arthur Conan Doyle’s writings,
either abstractly or concretely (as in possible worlds). Can’t we tell a plausible story in which
Conan Doyle happens upon the existing Sherlock Holmes and begins entertaining possible
endeavors of the character? Conan Doyle would get the credit for stylistically telling about the
object of his discovery. We can still make sense of the intuition that George Washington was not
fond of Sherlock Holmes since the realm of possible fictional entities and plots concerning them
is so vast that it is extremely unlikely for Washington to have humored the possibility of Holmes
or his adventures without having them pointed out to him by Conan Doyle.4 We can now see yet
another way that we may attribute creativity to Conan Doyle: he took the time and had the
imagination to sift through possible plots and characters and ultimately settled on the plots and
characters that we know and love. It is not a stretch to think of authors as entertaining a lot of
“what if…”s (counterfactuals? modalities?) and settling on one of many possibilities rather than
pulling plots and characters from nowhere.
4
Actually, it would be impossible for Washington to even succeed in referring to the Sherlock Holmes referred to by
Conan Doyle. As argued for by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity, no definite description could get Washington
to successfully refer to Sherlock Holmes, and what allows us to refer to Sherlock Holmes (if we even do) is a history
of successful reference started by Conan Doyle. If Washington had been first to refer to Holmes and that reference
had stuck, we could say that Washington could be fond of Holmes.
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Of course, our issues with George Washington are not the only literary practices to
consider. What, if fictional objects exist eternally, could explain the apparent destruction of
fictional objects? The answer is quite simple. Generic plots of stories seem hard to destroy,
since any two people could happen upon the same definite description of events, but successful
reference to fictional characters (or fictional natural kinds, such as unicorns) could fail in the
event of the halt of a history of successful reference (see note 4). When I am dead and gone and
long forgotten (and documents bearing my name in reference to me cease to be), it seems that no
one could ever again succeed in referring to me by my name, ‘Fice T’, since that chain of
successful reference is broken. At that point, ‘Fice T’ need not, no, cannot refer to me since
‘Fice T’ is only contingently my name (a more obvious example is how uses of a common name,
like ‘John Smith’ cannot instantly succeed in referring to all past and present John Smiths).
Similarly, when the chain of reference to Sherlock Holmes is broken, later uses of the name
‘Sherlock Holmes’ cannot refer to Holmes.5 For all intents and purposes, the character is gone
(to us), though it may still exist as an entity to which we simply cannot refer.
Yet another issue that Thomasson interprets as suggestive of a creationist ontology of
fictional objects is that of certain time-sensitive artistic properties of works of fiction. To get an
idea of the problem, consider that “the same sequence of words appearing in Animal Farm could
have been written in 1905, but that literary work could not have had the property of being a satire
of the Stalinist state, a central property of Orwell’s tale.”6 Taking fictional objects to have
eternal existence has no negative bearing on this subject whatsoever, unless we count the novel
as a fictional object, and that seems quite unnecessary. We may still accept that novels can be
created while fictional objects are not. Orwell can be said to have considered the right sorts of
For similar discussion regarding Moses, see Kripke’s “Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities”, available in
Philosophical Troubles: Collected Papers Volume 1
6
Thomasson p 61
5
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possibilities that would allow him to write satirically of the Stalinist state, whatever that may
mean. The possible world of the story may have already existed, but Orwell deserves the credit
for calling our attention to such a world at a relevant point in history. If we take the novel to be
Orwell’s choice verbal depiction of a certain possible world, then there is no issue in saying that
Orwell created that particular entity at the time he did, but that does not mean that he created the
relevant fictional objects at the same time (or at all). To respond to all comments about the
contextual dependence of the artistic properties of literature in one go, I say that the author still
has much of the artistic power that we typically assume, but instead of creating fictional objects
he/she lets us in on some state of affairs that he/she has been entertaining. A satire might be a
satire in virtue of the analogies between the actual world and the fiction’s world. It hardly
matters that the world to which the author calls our attention has existed all along, since it would
have been largely ignored had the author not wrote of it. Storytelling as an art is not at all
belittled by this account since all of the author’s artistic intentions seem to be executable in terms
of telling about some world he/she has in mind. (In fact, we often appeal to the idea of the sort
of world the author has in mind.) In sum, it does not seem necessary to have fictional objects be
genuinely created by authors in order for our literary practices to make sense.
Now, let us suppose that fictional characters are in fact abstract entities, as Thomasson
holds. In what contexts could we actually speak truly about such entities? Sure, we can say
something along the lines of “Sherlock Holmes exists” and thereby express a true proposition,
but it seems as though statements you might find in the relevant fictions that tell of Sherlock
Holmes residing in London, or of Sherlock Holmes solving a mystery, could not possibly be true.
This is because abstract entities are not the sorts of things that can reside in space-time or
perform tasks. As put by Takashi Yagisawa, “this way of thinking of fictional individuals seems
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to have the consequence that any finished fictional story is a massively false story about existent
individuals.”7 What good is positing the existence of essentially useless entities? They hardly
solve the problem of apparent reference to nonexistents in fiction since truth values will be so out
of whack. This is a pretty huge oversight for Thomasson. The telling of the story itself is an
extremely important part of literary practices, so how could Thomasson have ignored it while
focusing on her ontology while all along she has claimed to be shaping her ontology around
literary practices? I may never know the answer to that question, though it may be that there is
no problem at all. If she is implicitly treating the storytelling as mere pretense, then it makes
sense that there is no need to make the story assert literal truths. But if the storytelling is
pretense, then why bother issuing in ontological commitment? Another option is that she is
willing to allow abstract artifacts to instantiate properties that we ordinarily only attribute to
concrete beings. If that is the case, I cannot help but call her account incoherent.
The notion I appealed to earlier that suggests that eternally existing entities are consistent
with the very same literary considerations that led Thomasson to posit creationism of fictional
entities has the added benefit of working with this new consideration as well. First, however, I
will have to finally pick between eternally-existent abstract or eternally-existent concrete entities.
Obviously, the abstract entities will fall in the same traps that Thomasson’s entities fell in, so I
have to go with the concrete entities. Concrete entities can instantiate physical properties, reside
in locations, perform tasks, etc. Still, this notion seems to fall short when we try to assert that
Sherlock Holmes lived in London. Here, we must refer to the earlier-mentioned concept of
authors considering possible worlds and telling the story of one such possible world. Holmes
may not have lived actual London, but he may have lived in a possible London, and that is what
matters. This may lead us to wonder when we are and are not talking about the actual world, but
7
Yagisawa 2001 p 161
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that is pretty clear. We usually talk about the actual world and probably would agree to affix an
“in the actual world…” to the beginning of assertions, should we be asked. The difference here
is that the implicit qualifier would be “in the world of such-and-such fiction…” instead. This
seems intuitive and is consistent with the intentions of our literary discourse.
Thomasson’s admittedly creative account of the ontology of fictional objects not only
fails to be the unique account to follow from considerations based on our intuitions on literary
discourse, it fails to match up with other important considerations that ought to be taken into
account. An account of the entertaining of preexisting concrete possible worlds fares better than
Thomasson’s account of the creation of abstract artifacts, when all is said and done. Such an
account about possible worlds matches up in an interesting way with many of our literary
practices and also lends itself nicely to a potentially useful way of assessing truth in fiction.8
8
See David Lewis’s early and influential account of truth in fiction.
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References
Kripke, S. (1972) Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Kripke, S. (2011) “Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities.” in Philosophical Troubles: Collected
Papers Volume 1. Oxford University Press.
Lewis, D. K. (1978) “Truth in Fiction”, American Philosophical Quarterly 15, pp. 37–46.
Thomasson, A. L. (1999) “If We Postulated Fictional Objects What Would They Be?” In J.
Kim, D. Z. Korman, E. Sosa (eds.), Metaphysics: An Anthology, 2nd. (2012) Blackwell.
Yagisawa, T. (2001) “Against Creationism in Fiction.” Noûs 35: pp. 153–172.