Abstract
In many places in his works Frege co mes to speak of fiction. Sometimes he appeals to it to get the background against which to draw the semantic boundaries of his logical investigations. Sometimes he gives examples from fiction to clarify some specific relations between his semantic concepts. It is worth analyzing Frege’s remarks on fiction in order to see if they contain insights that let us elaborate a Fregean definition of fictional discourse. It is shown that they not just negatively say what fictional discourse is not, but also do indicate what it is. Furthermore, it is important to distinguish between semantic and pragmatic features of Frege’s view of fiction. The pragmatic ones, it is argued, anticipate some basic insights of a speech-act theoretical approach to fictional discourse. In addition the paper explores what Frege would tell us about the ontological status of fictional objects if the truth conditions of statements about them are taken into consideration in a Fregean manner.
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Notes
- 1.
The first volume of Frege’s Nachgelassene Schriften was published a year later, and his Wissenschaftlicher Breifwechsel in 1976 (cf. the English translations in Frege 1979 and 1980).
- 2.
(2) is especially intriguing, because according to modern logical analysis, (2) seemingly expresses an existential statement: “∃x (x is a fictional detective ∧ ∀y (y is a real detective → x is more famous than y))”.
- 3.
Following the traditional distinction between the content and the extension of a concept, Husserl is inclined to think that what a general term (Gemeinname) refers to is a set of objects in a similar way that a singular term refers to one definite object . Frege (1891/1980, 63) objects that a general term—unlike an empty singular term —can have a scientific use even when no object falls under the concept it denotes (when the respective set is empty). Let us take “a satellite of Venus” as an example : the sentence “Venus has no satellites” (“There is no thing that is a satellite of Venus”) does not only have a sense but also states a truth. We do not refer to sets by predicates (“… is a satellite of Venus”) but by abstract singular terms : “the set of Venus’s satellites”. The reference of a predicate is a function that maps objects (references of singular terms ) to truth-values (references of sentences). Frege calls that function “concept”. That is why the concept is not the sense but the reference of a predicate . The sense is the perspective in which the concept is given. For example , the predicates “… is red”, “… has the colour with the longest wave length” and “… has the colour of blood” have different senses yet identical reference .
- 4.
In a footnote Frege (1897/1979, 130) explicitly excludes in this regard the cases in which a pseudo-proper name occurs in indirect speech (in intensional contexts ). As we shall see later, that will carry significance in the account of the truth of sentences about fictional works and characters.
- 5.
At any rate, Frege restricts the notion of knowledge to the notion of truth (true thought): “When someone comes to know something it is his recognizing a thought to be true” (Frege 1924/1979, 266), “we cannot recognize a property of a thing without at the same time finding the thought this thing has this property to be true” (Frege 1918/1984, 354). Probably, Frege would not have denied that a work of fiction as a whole (by way of a fictional story) can convey certain ‘experience ’ (a position supported by Gabriel 1983/1991), but, as it seems, he would not have called such individual experience “knowledge ”.
- 6.
Indeed, the example is used as early as in SB in a footnote where Frege (1892a/1984, 163) speaks of “signs intended to have only sense” and defines as such signs the words of an actor on stage and even the actor himself and his acts.
- 7.
Although it may seem that while the actor on the stage first and foremost speaks dirctly, the narrator has to use indirect speech, it is, nonetheless, quite possible for an actor to report somebody’s words as well as for a narrator to speak about himself (or to let a fictional character tell the story instead of him). The distinction between simple statements and indirect speech is not really relevant here, but whether the words spoken or written should be taken seriously or not.
- 8.
Cf. also the metalinguistic way in which Frege (1892a/1984, 168) says that Kepler did (not) exist.
- 9.
Künne (151 ff.) suggests replacing the metalinguistic “¬∃x (‘Odysseus’ designates x)”, where “Odysseus” is mentioned, by the narrative operator and rendering the thought as: “¬∃x (N 1 : Odysseus = x)”, where “Odysseus” is used.
- 10.
Church (1951, 111) calls this type of concepts “individual concepts”, giving the following examples : “I am thinking of Pegasus”, “Ponce de Leon searched for the fountain of youth” and “Barbara Villiers was less chaste than Diana”. These sentences contain the singular terms “Pegasus”, “the fountain of youth” and “Diana”, that, according to him, designate individual concepts.
- 11.
The fact that Frege was a contemporary to Schliemann’s discovery is worth noting. We can suppose that the examples with the name “Odysseus” or the sentence “Priam’s palace was wooden” in the Begriffsschrift (§ 2) were topical for him and his readers.
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Polimenov, T. (2018). Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects of Frege’s Approach to Fictional Discourse. In: Bengtsson, G., Säätelä, S., Pichler, A. (eds) New Essays on Frege. Nordic Wittgenstein Studies, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71186-7_8
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