Abstract
In recent work, Stacie Friend has highlighted a problem of “co-identification” involving fictional names such as ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Odysseus’: the problem to explain judgments that different uses of these names are “about the same object”, on the assumption of irrealism about fictional characters, on which such expressions do not refer. For instance, intuitively when Nabokov argues with other critics that Gregor Samsa metamorphoses into a beetle rather than a cockroach, he takes himself to identify the same character that Kafka invented and that his opponents misconstrue. To deal with this issue, she contrasts a Kripke-inspired “name-centric” approach to dealing with the problem, pursued among others by Sainsbury, with an Evans-inspired “info-centric” approach, which she prefers. Part of the setting-the-stage picture is her rejection of descriptivist ways of dealing with her problem. In this paper, I outline the presuppositional, reference-fixing form of descriptivism I favor for the semantics of names, and I explain how it helps us deal with Friend's problem, which I take to concern primarily the semantic contribution of names to ascriptions of representational content to fictions, i.e., a particular case of indirect report; as I'll show, the result is a form of the “name-centric” sort of approach that Fried rejects, which can (I'll argue) be defended from her criticism.
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Acknowledgments
Financial support for my work was provided by the DGI, Spanish Government, research project FFI2013-47948-P and Consolider-Ingenio project CSD2009-00056; and through the award ICREA Academia for excellence in research, 2013, funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya. Versions of the paper were presented at the PERSP Workshop on Fiction, Barcelona; the Workshop on Fictional Objects, World Congress of Philosophy 2013, Athens; the London Aesthetics Forum, and at the LOGOS Seminar. Thanks to the participants for useful comments, and also to Stacie Friend, Kasia Jaszczolt, Manolo Martínez, Joseph Moore, Daniel Morgan and Richard Woodward. Thanks to Michael Maudsley for the grammatical revision.
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García-Carpintero, M. (2016). Pretend Reference and Coreference. In: Capone, A., Kiefer, F., Lo Piparo, F. (eds) Indirect Reports and Pragmatics. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21395-8_16
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