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Chapter 9 - Fictional Characters and Fictional Reference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2025

Manuel García-Carpintero
Affiliation:
Universitat de Barcelona
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Summary

Fictional discourse is, primarily, discourse that is used to produce literary fictions; but there is also the ‘metafictional’ discourse used to talk about fictions, i.e., to report their contents or other features. On a traditional view articulated by Searle, primary fictional discourse doesn’t have any specific semantics; sentences there just have the semantics that they would have in their standard uses. Fiction-makers convey their fictions by pretending to use sentences in their standard ways without doing so, and without giving them a specific, dedicated representational point with a semantics of its own. This Mere Pretense view is less popular nowadays than it used to be. A question the now more popular alternative Dedicated Representation view raises is: What is the contribution of intuitively empty names to such a dedicated semantics? Many supporters of the traditional Mere Pretense view, including Searle, argue that, in the metafictional uses to which they grant a semantics, apparently empty names are not in fact empty; rather, they each refer to some more or less exotic entity. Some of those who grant a dedicated semantics to primary fictional discourse, like Salmon and others, extend this realist view to it. This chapter aims to uphold considerations that have already been raised by irrealists against these proposals, by highlighting their counterintuitive features and explaining in our theoretical setting why they are bad.

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Chapter
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Truth and Reference in the Making of Fiction
A View on Fictionality
, pp. 182 - 196
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2026

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