FICTIONAL NAMES AND TRUTH

• Authors: Vallée Richard
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

By addressing fictional names head on, we risk going back to familiar, ordinary names intuitions and missing what is specific about them. The author proposes a different strategy. His view is grounded on fictional name sentence utterances and on indexed tokens of such sentences, where an index contains the fictional narrator and the time and location of the token. Using the framework of pluri-propositionalism (Perry 2012), the author argues that the semantic relation of reference – ‘x’ refers to y - where ‘x’ is a name, rather than the notion of an object, is central to the debate on fictional names. He also contends that fictional names do not enter into that relation. Tokens of fictional names are individuated with the fictional index of the sentence they originate from. This allows for dispensing with a referent. Indexed fictional name sentence tokens have semantically determined truth conditions, yet they are not truth assessed given facts. In this respect, they have cognitive significance only, and no official or referential content. Indexed fictional name token of sentences are accepted as true, but they are not true.

Keywords

EN

COGNITIVE SIGNIFICANCE; FICTION; NAMES; REFERENCE; TRUTH

• 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: 2018
• Volume: 25
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 74 – 99

Contributors

author

Vallée Richard

• Université de Moncton, Campus de Shippagan 218, Boul. J.-G.-Gauthier, Shippagan, NB, E8S-1X1, Canada