Abstract
Starting from the main current views this essay considers whether entities (e.g. characters) in fiction should be viewed as abstract objects. I highlight some features of the historical concrete-abstract distinction, and, in particular, how entities in fiction are involved in our moral thinking. Here I call attention to an aspect of moral thinking orthogonal to that which currently divides moral realists and moral fictionalists and sketch an argument for fictional entities being in a specific sense concrete. Although the article does not, per se, call into question the approach to metaphysics according to which fictional characters are not like concrete objects, it exemplifies how a different perspective on the job of metaphysics (e.g. Cora Diamond’s realistic spirit) gives the problem of fictional entities a radically different shape.
The key to seeing the centrality of fiction in metaphysics lies in (…) recognizing the similarities between fictional objects and other entities.
A. Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics
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- 1.
Coetzee 1999.
- 2.
Diamond 2008.
- 3.
Diamond’s term has an intentionally archaic flavour.
- 4.
Lewis 1986.
- 5.
In reference to Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong (1853–1920), who was famous for his ontology. Meinong was a student of Franz Brentano (1838–1917).
- 6.
- 7.
If we chose to go this way, I believe Amie Thomasson is right in seeing Neo-Meinogianism as the main current alternative to artefactualism. For a current sophisticated combination of artefactualism and Neo-Meinongianism see Voltolini 2015. According to his syncretistic metaphysics ficta are hybrid entities individuated in terms of both a certain makebelieve narrative process and the set of properties that one such narration mobilizes.
- 8.
I am thankful to the anonymous reviewer who pointed out that nothing in the present article per se calls into question the approach to metaphysics according to which fictional characters are not like concrete objects. He/she is absolutely right: in order to do that I would have to go through Cora Diamond’s criticism of the whole enterprise of analytic metaphysics from the viewpoint of the realistic spirit and I will not do it in what follows (I try to do it e.g. in Miguens 2019, Uma leitura da filosofia contemporânea – Figuras e Movimentos, Lisboa, Edições 70, pp. 374–385, and Miguens 2011, Miguens 2017). The ambition of this article is much more limited: here I am simply exploring the consequences of such criticism in a conception of fictional characters. What’s more, this is not a central topic in Diamond. What is a central topic for her is the nature of moral thinking, and the importance of literature for ethical experience and imagination in the context of the realistic spirit. Given all these constraints, the article’s main points could be considered somehow distant from the central topic of the volume. Still, I find it relevant to exemplify how from a perspective on metaphysics different from mainstream analytic metaphysics the topic of fictional entities radically changes shape.
The anonymous reviewer also suggests that that it would be sufficient to say that Hamlet, or any other fictional entity, is abstract in one sense, the sense that concerns the analytic metaphysician, and that Hamlet is not abstract in another sense, the sense that concerns Cora Diamond, or just use different terms (e.g. there’s the abstract/concrete distinction, and there’s the flat character/round character distinction). That is certainly one possible way to go but it would miss my main point in this article which is to show that the problem of fictional entities, once one changes perspective regarding the job of the metaphysician, is not a self-contained problem in metaphysics anymore but a question relevant to moral thinking.
- 9.
Of course if one is a fictionalist regarding the nature of mathematical entities things go a very different way: a mathematical fictionalist such as Hartry Field, maintains that there are zero abstract entities. In such circumstances not even mathematical entities – the paradigm case in the discussion of abstract objects –, are taken to be existing abstract objects.
- 10.
For a recent and very thorough and useful discussion of such questions, see García-Carpintero 2016.
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- 12.
Diamond 2008: 56.
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Diamond 2008: 52.
- 14.
See Salis 2013.
- 15.
- 16.
As Dale Jacquette put it recently «Zalta’s logic is more a logic of Platonic and Fregean abstract entities than of Meinongian beingless intended objects, that are neither actual nor abstract but ontically homeless.» (Jacquette 2015: 253).
- 17.
Zalta 1983 (Preface: xi).
- 18.
Zalta’s commitments are very clear – we may take it that he thinks that in the twenty-first century we are all naturalists; at least this lies behind his conception of metaphysics. Yet need we be? Meinong himself did not at all share such inclination. One might say that opposing naturalistic and reductionistic inclinations philosophically lies at the heart of his Gegenstandtheorie.
- 19.
My central example of fictional entity in this article is Elizabeth Costello and I went through Cora Diamond’s view of her nature as a character. Now Diamond’s conception of how to do metaphysics is certainly very different from Zalta’s. Diamond’s term for her own conception of how to do metaphysics is ‘realistic spirit’. ‘Realistic’ is to be contrasted here with philosophical ‘realism’. It is closer to the use of the term outside philosophy. In Diamond’s words «We may tell someone to “be realistic” when he is maintaining something in the teeth of the facts, or refusing even to look at them. (...) We also speak of realism in connection with novels or stories: and here again we have in mind certain kinds of attention to reality: to detail and particularity. (...) A further characteristic of realistic fiction, which is relevant in the same sort of way, is that certain things do not happen in it. People do not go backwards in time, pots do not talk, elves do not do chores while shoemakers sleep, and holy men do not walk unaided over the surfaces of lakes or oceans. We all know that if God sells wine in an English village, we do not call the story realistic (...). There is a third characteristic of realism outside philosophy, related to both of the others, and this is the significance of consequences, of causation. A man wanting to bring about some social reform, will be said to be unrealistic if he does not attend to how politics works.» (Diamond 1991: 40). Philosophical realism is taken not to be ‘realistic’ in Diamond’s sense. Another important point of Diamond’s realistic spirit is the idea that the nature and contents of a list of what there is is not what matters most for metaphysics discussions.
- 20.
Rosen 2014.
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Locke 1959, IV, Vii, 9.
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Of course this is not the usual view of Frege. I am taking it from Charles Travis (Travis 2013).
- 23.
And then I would say: thinking about ourselves, in this world, the only world, following the directives of fiction. This is where the philosophy of language questions regarding fiction may be posed again.
- 24.
A further difficulty here is that the creation might be diffuse, involving many authors and acts of creations, as Thomasson admits (Thomasson 1999: 165, n. 3).
- 25.
I thank Concha Martínez for this observation.
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Miguens, S. (2020). What Is the Difference Between Hamlet and Me? Fiction, Metaphysics and the Nature of Our Moral Thinking. In: Falguera, J.L., Martínez-Vidal, C. (eds) Abstract Objects. Synthese Library, vol 422. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38242-1_12
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