How Ficta Follow Fiction: A Syncretistic Account of Fictional Entities

295 Pages·2006·2.314 MB·English

by  Alberto Voltolini (auth.)

Alberto Voltolini

105
PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES SERIES
How Ficta
Follow Fiction
A Syncretistic Account
of Fictional Entities
(cid:5)(cid:6)(cid:0)(cid:4)
HOW FICTA FOLLOW FICTION
Philosophical Studies Series
VOLUME105
Founded by Wilfrid S. Sellars and Keith Lehrer
Editor
Keith Lehrer,University of Arizona, Tucson
Associate Editor
Stewart Cohen, Arizona State University, Tempe
Board of Consulting Editors
Lynne Rudder Baker,University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Radu Bogdan, Tulane University, New Orleans
Marian David, University of Notre Dame
John M. Fischer, University of California at Riverside
Allan Gibbard, University of Michigan
Denise Meyerson, Macquarie University
François Recanati,Institut Jean-Nicod, EHESS, Paris
Stuart Silvers, Clemson University
Barry Smith, State University of New York at Buffalo
Nicholas D. Smith, Lewis & Clark College
Linda Zagzebski, University of Oklahoma
The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.
HOW FICTA FOLLOW
FICTION
A Syncretistic Account of
Fictional Entities
ALBERTO VOLTOLINI
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 10 1-4020-5146-8 (HB)
ISBN 13 978-1-4020-5146-3 (HB)
ISBN 10 1-4020-5147-6 (e-book)
ISBN 13 978-1-4020-5147-0 (e-book)
Published by Springer,
P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands.
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Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 2006 Springer
No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming,
recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the
exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered
and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.
To all my fictional friends who have kept me
company in writing this book
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xiii
Glossary xxi
Part I The Metaphysical Side
Chapter 1: The Committal Theories (I) 3
Chapter 2: The Committal Theories (II) 37
Chapter 3: The Syncretistic Theory 65
Chapter 4: Further Developments of the Syncretistic Theory 101
Part II The Semantic Side
Chapter 5: The Noncommittal Theories 127
Chapter 6: The Syncretistic Theory 187
Part III The Ontological Side
Chapter 7: An Ontological Argument in Favor of the
Existence of Fictional Entities 223
Bibliography 247
Index of Names 255
Index of Subjects 259
vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thirteen years ago, I published in Italian a book called Riferimento e
intenzionalità [Reference and Intentionality] (ETS, Pisa 1992), in which I
argued for a committal theory on intentional objects as possible entities.
Intendedtoliehalfwaybetweentheontologicalproliferationofentitiesàla
Meinong and the ontological sobriety defended by Russell from 1905
onwards,thistheoryrecognizedthatwebothrefertoandthinkaboutentities
thatdonotexistinsofarastheyareentitiesthatdonotactuallyexist;yetitalso
insistedthattheseentitiesmustbethingsthatpossiblyexist.Asaresult,par-
adoxicalandcontradictoryitems—inawordimpossibilia—wereruledoutof
intentionaliaaswellasoutoftheoverallinventoryofwhatthereis.
However, it suddenly occurred to me that prima facie our thoughts
“direct”themselvesnotonlyuponthingssuchasthepossibleunactualsonof
Elizabeth I and Philip II, but also upon creatures of imagination such as
HamletandOphelia,DesdemonaandOthello;thatis,uponfictionalobjects.
Sinceentitiesofthiskindmaywellappeartobecontradictoryorparadoxical
entities,itishardtorankthemamongpossibleentities.Nonetheless,itseems
to be a firm intuition that we think about them as much as about possible
unactual entities such as the actually nonexistent complex made up of this
jacketandthosetrousers.Soitappearedcleartomethatthetheoryofinten-
tionality I had originally developed should be somehow implemented in
ordertoaccountalsoforthefactthatwethinkaboutfictionalentities.YetIdid
notwantthisthinkingaboutfictionalentitiestoforcemetoacceptallkinds
ofwould-beitemsfromtheMeinongianjungle.
Asolutioncametomindin1994whenIpublishedapaper,“Fictaversus
Possibilia”(GrazerPhilosophischeStudien48,75–104).Inthatpaper,Idrew
a distinction between possible and fictional entities. But I included the fic-
tionalinthedomainofactualia,asentitiesthatactuallyexistalbeitinanon-
spatiotemporalway:thatis,asactualabstractentities.Moreover,Iconceived
ix
x Acknowledgments
of these abstracta as a peculiar kind of complex entity. I imagined that two
distinctfactorsledtotheiridentity:asetofproperties,thepropertiesmobi-
lizedintherelevantstory,andamake-believegame,thestorytellingprocess
inwhichonemakesbelievethatthereisanindividualhavingmoreorlessthe
propertieswhichfigureinthatset.
For a long while, this idea remained an undeveloped intuition.Yet more
andmorereadingoftheliteratureonthesubjectconvincedmethatthelogi-
calspaceofthepositionsonfictionalentitiesshouldalsocontainthearticu-
lated expansion of that original intuition.A conference I organized on this
subject in 2002 at the University of Eastern Piedmont atVercelli, Do Ficta
FollowFiction?,gavemetheopportunityofresumingmyoriginalthoughts
and comparing them with the opinions of some of the most well-known
expertsonthissubject.Ialsobenefitedgreatlyfrompresentingmyongoing
ideasinseveralseminarswithstudentsandintalksatconferencesheldinvar-
ious universities and institutions (the Jean-Nicod Institute in Paris and the
universities of Barcelona, Geneva, Messina, Padua, Palermo, Prague,
Sienna, andVercelli). Some preliminary results from all of this work have
already been published elsewhere (“How Fictional Works Are Related to
Fictional Entities”, in A.Voltolini (ed.), Do Ficta Follow Fiction?, special
issueofDialectica57(2003),225–238;“Synkretistickáontologiefiktivníck
jsoucen [A Syncretistic Theory of Fictional Beings]” in K. Císaˇr and
P. Kot´átko (eds), Text a dílo: prˇípad Menard, (cid:2)(cid:3)(cid:4)(cid:5)(cid:6)(cid:5)(cid:7)(cid:3)(cid:8)-Filosofia
Publications, Prague 2004, 223–247; “Names for Ficta, for Intentionalia,
and for Nothing”, in M.J. Frapolli (ed.), Saying, Meaning and Referring:
EssaysonFrançoisRecanati’sPhilosophyofLanguage,PalgraveMcmillan,
Houndmills 2006 (forthcoming)). However, all that material required thor-
oughre-elaboration,whichIhopeIhaveprovidedinwhatfollows.
I am very grateful to many people for the discussions I had with them on
this subject on many different occasions, academic and non. These
exchanges helped me to clarify my original intuitions. To name just a few,
let me thank Carola Barbero, Tilli Bertoni, Andrea Bonomi, Clotilde Calabi,
Roberto Casati, Gregory Currie, Michele Di Francesco, Petr Kot´átko, Paolo
Leonardi, Diego Marconi, Cristina Meini, Kevin Mulligan, Ernesto Napoli,
Gloria Origgi, Jerome Pelletier, François Recanati, Marco Santambrogio,
Barry C. Smith, Paul Tucker, Gabriele Usberti, Kendall Walton, and Edward
Zalta. Other people also read and commented on particular parts of the
manuscript as it was gradually being written; I learned a great deal from
them. In this respect, let me thank primarily Marta Campdelacreu, Eros
Corazza, Manuel Garcia-Carpintero, Andrea Iacona, Frederick Kroon,
Francesco Orilia, Stefano Predelli, Beppe Spolaore, Amie Thomasson,
Achille Varzi, as well as some anonymous referees of previous versions of
this book. I am also very grateful to Leigh S. Cauman, former managing
Acknowledgments xi
editor of the Journal of Philosophy, and to Paul J. Goodrick, lettore of
English at the Department of Language Sciences and Comparative Foreign
Literatures, University of Milan, for their having made thorough linguistic
revisions of a previous version and of the final version of the book respec-
tively. But my main acknowledgement goes to a close friend of mine, Marco
Nani, who not only read the whole manuscript and tirelessly discussed with
me all its different parts, but also came up with the idea of extracting a book
from my original intuitions, and encouraged and supported me in the devel-
opment of the enterprise. If this book has not remained a possible, or even a
fictional, entity, it owes a great deal to him.