AN INFERENTIALIST ACCOUNT OF FICTIONAL NAMES

• Authors: Lee Byeong D.
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The goal of this paper is to present and defend an inferentialist account of the meaning of fictional names on the basis of Sellars-Brandom’s inferentialist semantics and a Brandomian anaphoric theory of reference. On this inferentialist account, the meaning of a fictional name is constituted by the relevant language norms which provide the correctness conditions for its use. In addition, the Brandomian anaphoric theory of reference allows us to understand reference in terms of anaphoric word-word relations, rather than substantial word-world relations. In this paper I argue that this inferentialist account has many important merits over its rival theories. One important merit is that it explains why we can use fictional names to make true statements, even if they lack bearers. As a consequence, this theory allows us to use fictional names without committing ourselves to an implausible ontology of fictional entities. Another important merit is that it provides a uniform semantic account of fictional names across different types of statements in which fictional names are involved.

Keywords

EN

FICTIONAL NAMES; INFERENTIALIST SEMANTICS; SELLARS; BRANDOM

• Publisher: Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Institute of Philosophy of Academy of Sciences of Czech Republic
• Journal: Organon F. medzinárodný časopis pre analytickú filozofiu
• Year: 2022
• Volume: 29
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 290 – 326

Contributors

author

Lee Byeong D.

• Sungkyunkwan University, Department of Philosophy, 25-2, Sungkyunkwan-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea

• https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7080-6702

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2022.29301