Recent content by ficino

So if we talk about Hamlet, or if other characters in the play talk about Hamlet, or if Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern talk about Hamlet, Hamlet is a or the referent of their utterances. A problem for which fictional discourse provides test cases is the problem, whether a genuine...

Hello doubtingt, yes, a fictional character is different from an abstract category. That's part of what makes the problem a good test case for theories about meaning and reference. We can formulate a "definite description" in Russell's sense about a fictional character: e.g. the prince of...

And therefore, GOD IS!! I finally get it!!

Hello Kharakov, Perspicuo and DBT, hope to cycle around to your side of the thread later. @Togo: This doesn't do more than add a few pebbles to our exchange above, but I note that Alyosius P. Martinich both denies that fictional objects "exist" and makes a distinction between existing objects...

Sorry I haven't gotten back to more of what you wrote previously, Togo. Right now I'm trying to get speech act theory down, so must postpone a return to the problem, whether existence is a predicate. Later, f

In "On Denoting," Russell distinguishes between subsisting, or being, and existing. He doesn't deny subsistence to Meinongian objects, but he does deny existence to them. This distinction might help clear up some of the puzzles.

Thanks for your rich reply, Togo. Will come back to do it justice later. I agree that context is crucial. It may be that we have to allow existence, understood in a non-standard sense, as a predicate to fictional objects... must think more about this. Since Russell worked from a mimetic...

I thought metaphysics was the branch of philosophy that tries to describe non-spatio-temporal objects.

Hello Togo, I think we're agreed that context matters in evaluating what authors do with sentences. Here are two tries at refuting the notion that existence is a predicate of individuals. See what you think. I will use the example of the fictional character, Anna Karenina. I assume there...

I'm sorry, my error. I was confusing your posts with those of Togo. I'm losing track already of what's been said in this thread - must reread!

I think I get it - you mean existence is a necessary predicate of things in the world, not a contingent predicate? If so, I take it that the scope of "necessary" is the if-then relation: if it's an object or event in the world, then necessarily it exists. I think this account will mess up...

I think we may be basically saying the same thing, but do you want to stick with "not a ...property, but a ...quality"? I would think property and quality are synonyms or virtually so.

Hi Togo, I'm excited about getting back to your longer post. Just for now, in reply to this: My revised response to your 3. relies on speech-act theory about fictional discourse, a la John Searle. I haven't worked out yet whether I subscribe to it, but there is a lot that I find attractive...

It would have been better if, instead of the above, I had written: "These are all just pretend referents, and if we treat the author's utterances about them as statements, they are false. But since we all agree that fiction suspends real-world reference, the author's utterances about the...

As I understand it, in predicate logic that goes back to Russell, it's a quantifier. In an existence claim, you are attributing certain properties to members of a set, and the existential quantifier marks that set as having at least one member. So taking "the present king of France is bald,"...