Abstract
In the early 1950s Waismann wrote two essays entitled ‘Fiction’ and ‘A Note on Existence’. These were subsequently published in his Philosophical Papers (Reidel, 1977). In these papers he makes various claims concerning fictional objects. The topic of the paper was ground-breaking at the time. The point of the present paper is to discuss what he say about matters. It argues that the core claims of each paper are mistaken, though a number of Waismann’s arguments make points that were subsequently to be made more famous by others writing on the philosophy of language.
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Notes
- 1.
The first essay was written in November 1950; the second in July 1952. Both were published for the first time in Waismann (1977), pp. 104–121 and 122–135, respectively. All page references are to this, unless otherwise noted. All italics in quotations are original.
- 2.
See, e.g., Kroon and Voltolini (2011).
- 3.
Priest (1997).
- 4.
Such as Napoleon in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Caesar in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, or Turing in Tyldum’s film The Imitation Game.
- 5.
For a much fuller account of the whole matter, see Priest (2016).
- 6.
There is something slightly odd about Waismann citing this strategy. It can apply only when the sentence in question deploys a proper name. Yet, one of Waismann’s own examples is ‘Centaurs are four-legged’, which contains no such names. And assuming that this means ‘all (normal) centaurs have four legs’, Russellian logic tells us that this is true, since there are no centaurs.
- 7.
See Priest (2016), 12.4.
- 8.
There is no closing bracket in Waismann’s text. I have corrected what is obviously a typo by inserting it where it seems to make most sense.
- 9.
Waismann, it would seem, agrees. In Ulysses (pp. 114f.) ‘Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, fictitious characters, are placed in a real setting, that of Dublin, as it stood on June 16th, 1904.’ The narrative of the episodes, thoughts and dialogues, all of them imaginary, is everywhere interwoven with references to actual things—the town and its local landmarks, the people of Dublin (who are called by their real names), political incidents of Ireland of the time, and so on. The story is saturated with allusions of this sort.
- 10.
Geach and Black (1970), p. 62.
- 11.
I note that there is nothing in the account of 2.1 that requires someone to reject the principle of excluded middle—certainly not the fact that fictions are incomplete, as I noted there. As far as the account goes, there is no reason why objects—even non-existent ones—must be incomplete (that is satisfy neither P not \(\lnot P\), for some P). Of course, though, the account is compatible with there being such objects. Thus, one might think that some of the predicates in the language are vague, and that if P is such a predicate, and a is an object in its border-area, a is incomplete. That, however, is a wholly different matter.
- 12.
‘[T]he kind of truth a statement has varies with the kind of statement it is’ (p. 120). ‘[T]he term “true” acquires a multiplicity of meanings’ (p. 120). Waismann’s account is, then, a fore-runner of pluralist theories of truth made popular much more recently by Wright, Kölbel, and others. See Pedersen (2013) for references and discussion.
- 13.
Of course, this is glossing over a huge problem. What exactly makes something true in a fiction? There is more to what holds in a work of fiction that what is written in its pages (plus what what follows from these). Unstated assumptions (which?) are imported from the real world. And of course, there may be less as well. As already noted, some of the explicit content may be lies.
- 14.
One might note here similarities to both Carnap’s (1950) theory of linguistic frameworks, and Wittgenstein’s (1953) notion of language games. I note that a few paragraphs later, Waismann says, slightly oddly, ‘It is in this way— detached from reality, unconnected with any method of checking, in short, free—that bits of [fictional] narrative must be regarded’ (p. 120). I assume that he means that one may freely create a work of fiction with no regard to the facts. There are, of course, criteria for something being true in the Holmes stories, as Waismann himself has emphasised.
- 15.
For a more general discussion of the problems with truth pluralism, see Pedesen (2013).
- 16.
Of course, if one is a dialetheist, and so subscribes to a paraconsistent logic, this will not be a violation of logic. But whatever one takes the correct logic to be, it seems to me, one could write a story the internal logic of which was different from that, allowing for things to happen which are impossible by the lights of the true logic.
- 17.
The notation is Waismann’s, though I have taken the liberty of reorienting Waismann’s horizontal arrow, which risks suggesting that the pointing is to the next word in the sentence.
- 18.
Hale (2007), p. 107.
- 19.
- 20.
It is discussed further in Priest (2016), Chapter 11.
- 21.
Not to mention the fact that causation cannot be applied to abstract—and for a platonist, existent—objects such as numbers, where reference clearly can be secured.
- 22.
For a critique of the view that causal connection is either necessary or sufficient for reference-fixing, with the outlines of a different account, and a nod in the direction of non-existent objects, see Jeshion (2002).
- 23.
Earlier in the essay (p. 124), he expresses ‘this\(\downarrow \) exists’ as ‘\((\exists x).(x\) is this\(\downarrow \) )’. He does not endorse the view explicitly in that passage, but nowhere does he criticize it or suggest an alternative.
- 24.
Grice (1975).
- 25.
For full details, see Davis (2014).
- 26.
See Nelson (2012) for a review and discussion.
- 27.
On which, see Priest (2016), 18.3.2 and 18.3.4.
- 28.
For more on the whole matter, see Priest (2016), especially Chapter 18.
- 29.
It can be found in Priest (2016).
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Priest, G. (2019). Waismann on Fiction and Its Objects. In: Makovec, D., Shapiro, S. (eds) Friedrich Waismann. History of Analytic Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25008-9_14
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