A Critical Introduction to Fictionalism 9781472509529, 9781472512888, 9781474218702, 9781472506962

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A Critical Introduction to Fictionalism

BLOOMSBURY CRITICAL INTRODUCTIONS TO CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS Editorial Board: Bill Brewer, King’s College London, UK; Albert Casullo, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA; Thomas M. Crisp, Biola University, USA; Kit Fine, New York University, USA; Peter Simons, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland; Tuomas Tahko, University of Helsinki, Finland; Eric T Olson, University of Sheffield, UK Bloomsbury Critical Introductions to Contemporary Metaphysics introduces and advances the central topics within one of the most dynamic areas of contemporary philosophy. Each critical introduction provides a comprehensive survey to an important metaphysical subject or question. Covering the historical, methodological and practical contexts, it identifies and explores the major approaches, theories and debates. Capturing the changes to the ways the discipline is being studied, the emphasis placed on the historical background allows connections to be made between contemporary issues and the wider history of modern philosophy. Designed for use on contemporary metaphysics courses, these introductions are defined by clarity of argument and equipped with features to facilitate and encourage further study. The result is a series of essential introductions for upper-level undergraduates and postgraduates wishing to stay informed of the issues and arguments shaping twenty-first century metaphysics. Titles in the series include: A Critical Introduction to Causal Powers and Dispositions, Ruth Porter Groff A Critical Introduction to the Metaphysics of Modality, Andrea Borghini A Critical Introduction to the Metaphysics of Time, Benjamin L. Curtis and Jon Robson

A Critical Introduction to Fictionalism FREDERICK KROON, STUART BROCK AND JONATHAN MCKEOWN-GREEN

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Frederick Kroon, Stuart Brock and Jonathan McKeown-Green, 2019 Frederick Kroon, Stuart Brock and Jonathan McKeown-Green have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. Cover image © gettyimages All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:     HB: 978-1-4725-0952-9     PB: 978-1-4725-1288-8   ePDF: 978-1-4725-0696-2 eBook: 978-1-4725-1394-6 Series: Bloomsbury Critical Introductions to Contemporary Metaphysics Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Phillippa McKeown-Green

Contents Preface  viii

Introduction: Fictionalism and Metaphysics  1 1 Existence Examined  7 2 Supplementing Existence: Objectivity, Mind 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Independence and Realism  29 Relegating Existence: Prefixing, Prefacing, Reducing and Nonfactualism  55 From Fiction to Fictionalism  71 Fictionalism: A Confusing Past and a Divided Present  101 Fictionalism about Fiction  121 Fictionalism: Why, Where, How?  135 Objections to Fictionalism  169 Close Cousins  197

Notes  217 Extended Bibliography  225 Index  259

Preface I

n a guest post on Daily Nous on 8 May 2018, Eric Schwitzgebel examined ‘discussion arcs’ for philosophical jargon and proposed their use as a measure of what is of interest in philosophy and to philosophers over time. A discussion arc is ‘a curve displaying the relative frequency at which a term or phrase appears among the abstracts of philosophical articles’. Schwitzgebel’s analysis of the term ‘fictionalis*’ (covering ‘fictionalism(s)’ and ‘fictionalist(s)’) is striking. The term is used more commonly than other comparatively new terms such as ‘zombie’, ‘explanatory gap’ or ‘epistemic injustice’, and is used much more commonly than old favourites such as ‘grue’, ‘radical interpretation’, ‘twin earth’ or ‘the language of thought’. Even more striking, perhaps, is the fact that ‘fictionalis*’ is bucking a trend associated with other terms that show a remarkably consistent pattern of peaking about 15–20 years after a famous introduction event, after which use of the term drops off. In the case of ‘fictionalis*’, though, use of the term has doubled since 1980 – a defining year for fictionalism – and looks as though it may continue to rise. Schwitzgebel’s post confirmed our sense that the discussion of fictionalism has not abated over time and today it is one of the hottest topics in philosophy. Given this fact, it is surprising that there are so few monographs devoted to giving a critical overview of fictionalism. While there are excellent monographs devoted to fictionalism, most are devoted to a discussion of fictionalism about a specific domain and not to fictionalism tout court. Moreover, very few give a critical introduction to fictionalism as opposed to giving a vigorous (and usually rewarding) defence of an author’s own take on the topic. There are, however, two notable exceptions. Mark Kalderon’s edited collection Fictionalism in Metaphysics is a wonderful introduction to and evaluation of fictionalism. Its chief virtue is that it contains outstanding papers from some of the most important philosophers working on fictionalism at the time. After reading the papers in the volume, you get a vivid impression of the richness of the field and

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the different perspectives one might take working within it. But it is a collection of papers rather than a comprehensive survey and sustained critical introduction to the field. There is, as far as we know, only one monograph apart from this one that does that: R. M. Sainsbury’s Fiction and Fictionalism. But Sainsbury’s interests were rooted in the philosophy of language. He notes that the ‘origin of [his] book relates to the semantics of names’ and how fictional names could have meanings if they had no bearer. Sainsbury’s monograph is a companion to his Referents without Referents and is in part his attempt to resolve residual problems left unsolved in that earlier book. These observations motivated us to write this book. It seemed to us that there was a gap – perhaps a gaping hole – that needed to be filled in the literature. If fictionalism is such a hot topic, why is there no critical introduction to the topic that situates it squarely within a broader literature on the realism and anti-realism debate? We wrote this book because we are all deeply interested in philosophical debates about realism and metaphysics, and we are all sympathetic to the fictionalist stance (at least some variety of fictionalism in some domains) while feeling the pull of realist arguments. We tried to write it in such a way that it was not an opinionated introduction, and therefore not a vehicle for us to push our own viewpoints. That’s not an easy thing to do, though, and on occasion our own views inevitably have come to the fore. Nonetheless, because all of us adopt slightly different perspectives on the issues, that kept us honest. We also wanted to be ecumenical in our understanding of what fictionalism amounts to and tried consciously to ensure that as many philosophers as we could who took themselves to be fictionalists could find a place under our conceptual umbrella. And where we couldn’t, we tried to accommodate them in the final chapter on close cousins. All three of us have been friends for many years and would often talk about the book together. All three of us enjoyed working on the manuscript, but only two of us were working on the book at any given time. Fred and Jonathan were the original two authors. Fred and Stuart completed the project. It is with the greatest sadness that the two of us had to say goodbye to our dear friend Jonathan, who passed away peacefully on the 11th of February 2015. You can hear Jonathan’s voice in most of the chapters. We are so pleased to have

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finished the book and for it to see the light of day. Jonathan would have been pleased that it had. A number of people gave us very generous help as we prepared the manuscript. In 2016, we presented some of this material at the Jonathan McKeown-Green memorial conference at Auckland University. We are especially grateful for the comments and discussion there, which led to numerous improvements to some of the chapters. We are also enormously grateful to Bradley ArmourGarb for reading much of the penultimate version of the manuscript and giving us enormously helpful suggestions, suggestions which led to amendments to every single chapter. We are also thankful to John Brock, Chrissy van Hulst and Phillippa McKeown-Green for the editorial assistance they all gave us (in different ways) at the final stage; for the patience and advice given to us by the editorial team at Bloomsbury, most especially Andrew Wardell, Helen Saunders, Shamli Priya and for the very positive review from an anonymous referee for Bloomsbury. Finally, we are most grateful to our wives – Sherryl, Nalayini and Phillippa – for their unwavering forbearance and support as we worked on this manuscript over the last few years.

Introduction: Fictionalism and Metaphysics

So often people say things that, on reflection, they back away from. I might in an unguarded moment say any of the following: 1) The average person lives longer today than she did 100 years ago; 2) Someone is born every few minutes; or 3) The sun rose at 6:05 this morning. But when you point out to me that these claims imply, respectively, that there is a unique individual (i.e. the average person) who lives multiple lives, that there is a single individual who is born over and over again, and that the sun revolves around the earth, I am likely to repudiate these latter claims. What’s going on? You might conclude that I am either mad or bad. That is, you might conclude that I am either lying or muddleheaded. But neither attribution is charitable. If I am lying, I am doing a terrible job at it. I’m hardly deceiving you into believing something you didn’t already believe about an exotic individual who is reborn numerous times and I am unlikely to convince you that the sun moves in unexpected ways. If I am muddleheaded, why do I not immediately withdraw my commitment to the propositions expressed by statements (1)–(3) when you point out the entailment to me? Do I need psychotherapy?

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Steve Yablo (2017) notes that many problems in philosophy take this form. He calls them ‘hostage crises because they involve a (relatively) thin, innocent claim and a (relatively) weighty, debatable one; the first is hostage to the second in that the second must hold or the first fails’ (Yablo 2017: 115). If we want to avoid commitment to the weighty claim without withdrawing our commitment to the thin innocent claim, we have some explaining to do. Traditionally philosophers have tried to resolve hostage crises by noting that they arise only because we assume that utterances of statements (1)–(3) and the like are assertions, and that the statements are literal and to be taken at face value. The problem with denying that such claims should be taken literally or at face value is that the approach seems desperate. Statements (1)–(3), and others like them, do not look like metaphors or figures of speech, and they don’t look as though their meaning is hidden by their surface structure. The problem with denying that statements (1)–(3) are assertions is that the alternatives look silly. Are these claims prescriptions, commands, expressions of an emotion or questions of a sort? It certainly doesn’t seem like it! Moreover, even if a philosopher could tell a plausible story according to which they are, the statements would therefore not be truth apt – that is they would not have a truth-value – and so could not be embedded into other statements, using truth functional operators. But surely they can. It makes perfect sense to say: 1’) It’s not the case that the average person lives longer today than she did 100 years ago; 2’) If someone is born every few minutes, then we need more doctors; or 3’) The sun rose at 6:05 this morning and I was at work by 8:00. Fictionalism is a view that helps us resolve hostage crises. Fictionalists draw attention to the fact that there are other familiar contexts in which we say things without being taken to assert what we say – at least not if what we say is taken literally and at face value. By doing so, they hope to draw an analogy with our engagement with fiction and other forms of discourse. The analogy can be drawn in one of three ways.

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First way. When I read my children a story about three little pigs who live in houses of straw, sticks and bricks and a big bad wolf who takes pleasure in huffing and puffing to blow their respective houses in, my purpose is to entertain and delight. My aim is not to persuade my children that I believe what I say or that they should believe it either. And my children understand that as well as I do. In such circumstances, then, I am saying something meaningful but I am not asserting what I say, and consequently am not representing myself as believing such things. Instead, I am pretending to assert or, alternatively, telling a story – where this is a distinct kind of speech act. Second way. When I set my students a quiz on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, I might ask them a question such as: ‘Macbeth was told he would be king by three witches he met on the battlefield – true or false?’ Any student of English literature should know that the correct answer to this question is TRUE. The play opens with the witches agreeing to meet again – upon the heath to meet with Macbeth. In the third scene they meet with Macbeth and Banquo, and the third witch proclaims, ‘All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!’ It would not be appropriate in an English literature class to complain about being marked down for answering FALSE to the question on the grounds that there are no witches, so Macbeth could never have spoken with one. In this context, the question is clearly about the content of the play, not about the real world. When we engage with fiction in this way, we shouldn’t take what’s said at face value. Instead we should interpret the questions and claims made in some other way, for example as including a silent story operator of the form ‘according to such-and-such story’. Third way. Consider Emily Bronte’s poem ‘Love and Friendship’: Love is like the wild rose-briar, Friendship like the holly-tree – The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms But which will bloom most constantly? The wild-rose briar is sweet in the spring, Its summer blossoms scent the air; Yet wait till winter comes again And who will call the wild-briar fair? Then scorn the silly rose-wreath now

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And deck thee with the holly’s sheen, That when December blights thy brow He may still leave thy garland green. This poem is an extended simile (comparing love to the wild rose-briar and friendship to the holly-tree). Most poems, though, are less explicit in their comparison – using metaphors rather than similes. Metaphors and similes – the ‘bread and butter’ of poetry – are used to make interesting comparisons and to encourage the reader to conceive of something ‘in a new light’. The metaphors and similes used in poetry are a figurative form of language – not to be taken literally (love is not literally a wild rose-briar and friendship is not literally a holly-tree). Fictionalists, therefore, suggest that we extend the analogy with fiction in one of the three ways noted above to other contexts – contexts that give rise to hostage crises. When we make innocent claims that imply weighty debatable or problematic propositions, we can resist committing ourselves to the implications if our original utterance simply involved us telling a story, or saying something about the content of a story, or speaking figuratively. Of course, fictionalists will have to explain why we are speaking in this way. And the explanation should spell out what virtues are associated with engaging in a discourse. In the ordinary case of fiction, the point is to entertain, or to understand the content of the story, or to ‘see something in a new light’. Fictionalists about other domains, though, may want to specify the utility of the discourse in a different way. In what follows, we will explore varieties of fictionalism that exploit one of the first two analogies. (In the last chapter, however, we will discuss a position known as figuralism, which exploits the third analogy.) In short, as we understand it, fictionalism about a given domain is roughly the view that what’s said in that domain involves either the telling of a story or reference to a story. But the stories are special because of the kinds of stories they are, not because they describe the world accurately. Fictionalism is an extremely plausible and straightforward view, so it is surprising that it has only recently been articulated precisely and examined closely in the philosophical literature. Many have dated the first clear articulation of a fictionalist position to 1980. Consider the following:

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Modern fictionalism emerged in 1980 with the publication of Hartry Field’s Science Without Numbers and Bas van Fraassen’s The Scientific Image. (Kalderon 2005a: 1) One main source of fictionalism as discussed nowadays can be precisely dated to 1980, in which year were published two highly influential fictionalist theories: the constructive empiricism of Bas van Fraassen’s The Scientific Image and the mathematical fictionalism of Hartry Field’s Science Without Numbers. (Sainsbury 2010: 152) What we hope to make clear in the pages that follow, though, is that the philosophical pedigree is not as clear as all that. In our view there are much earlier historical precedents that have just as much right to claim the mantle of being (close to) the first fictionalists. Moreover, it is not clear to us that either van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism or Hartry Field’s views as expressed in his 1980 monograph are really forms of fictionalism – though they clearly bear some striking resemblance to contemporary fictionalist views. These matters will be explored in Chapter 5. But the point we want to make here is that even on the most ecumenical view of what counts as a fictionalist position, fictionalism is only a recent beast to emerge on the philosophical landscape. Our discussion will, in part, explore the evolution of the position. By situating the view into a broader history and context, we can appreciate why the view emerged when it did. More importantly, though, we want to make clear in the pages that follow why fictionalism is nowadays considered one of the most important positions to be considered in metaphysics. This should seem surprising. Metaphysics is the study of what exists and what it’s like. Fictionalism, on the other hand, is an interpretation of what we say and think (or, alternatively, of what we should say and think). Fictionalism and metaphysics, then, seem unrelated. To illustrate the point, consider the opening lines of Scott’s Ivanhoe: In that pleasant district of merry England which is watered by the river Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest, covering the greater part of the beautiful hills and valleys which lie between Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster.

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When I utter these lines, to either tell a story or inform you of the novel’s content, you should not take me as telling you anything about the world, about what towns and rivers exist in England, nor what they are like. I’m just telling you (about) a story, and I may or may not believe its content. So, if ordinary fictions don’t have much to say – or at least, don’t obviously have much to say – about what exists and what the world is like, why should we think that fictionalists would do so? That’s what we hope to explain in the pages that follow.

1 Existence Examined

S

cientists, philosophers, explorers, investigative reporters, speculative novelists and other curious types care about what reality is like, sometimes only certain parts of it, but sometimes reality as a whole. They ask questions about how various sorts of things interact and change, how much of this activity can be summarized or explained by general laws, where various sorts of things can be found, which features they have and so on. However, questions about what kinds of stuff exist and which objects exist can seem more central to the exploration of reality than those others. This might be because of a perennial tendency to construe the universe, not as a single complex field or network, but as composed of entities of various kinds. Perhaps this outlook encourages us to think that questions about what stuff there is are more basic than questions about which features are had by which stuff and how different things interact: first we list the things and kinds of which reality consists; only then can we investigate their natures and interactions. Contemporary physics problematizes this picture somewhat: it presents us with a four-dimensional manifold throughout which matter and energy are distributed (or, on some interpretations, with a kind of multidimensional fabric that is warped, curved or shaped in ways that we describe in terms of the effects of matter and energy). The equations that describe how matter and energy are distributed and how its distribution evolves arguably make no reference to entities or to kinds of stuff; physics, in its most general, pristine presentations talks about matter and energy, but not about entities and kinds. So although we conceive of the world in terms of entities and kinds,

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they might not belong in our most general, systematic, predictive and explanatory accounts of how things are. Yet relativistic physics can no more stop us from speculating about whether there are minds or yeti than it can stop us from asking where we left our wallets or what the time is. Even if there is something impoverished about conceiving of the world as containing objects of various kinds (and there might not be), an important task for metaphysics – perhaps its primary task – is to make sense of the ordinary ways in which we identify, re-identify, classify and manipulate things. Metaphysics must explain our allegiance to the objects and kinds of stuff we think and talk about, even if only to explain some or all of it away. Hence, we do ontology; we ask what there is. In this chapter, we muse about what it means to ask what there is. Here we will have nothing directly to say about fictionalism, although it is a familiar enough fact that squabbles and worries about ontology underlie much of what goes on under the name of ‘fictionalism’. Moreover, the reasons and motivations for adopting a fictionalist stance presuppose a Quinean view of ontology. In this chapter we look at, among other things, an alternative Carnapian way of thinking about ontological questions. In the first section of the chapter we explain why there is something tricky to muse about when we ask ontological questions and subsequent sections outline some of the standard answers to the tricky question. The main contrast that will emerge is between the idea that existence is demystified by quantification (so that everything exists) and the competing idea that existence is a feature had by some things and lacked by others. We will also consider scepticism about the intelligibility of the kinds of existence questions that philosophers ask.

1.1 Asking what there is: Traps for naïve ontologists Is there a nose on your face? That seems easy to answer, but many existence questions are more taxing than this one seems. For example: Are there yeti? Is there a subatomic particle that is not an assemblage of yet smaller particles? Such items are unfamiliar, but

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fortunately, our community can say helpful things about what they would be like if there were any, what would count as evidence for their existence and how they would interact with other stuff. Are there coloured objects? Are there morally obligatory actions? Such items are familiar, but puzzling. If we think hard about the way light reflects off surfaces and affects our mental life, it becomes unclear whether objects themselves possess colours, or whether the fact that we attribute colours to objects actually says more about human perceptual apparatus than it does about the objects we perceive. And once we notice that a right action seems to be one that should be performed, we might wonder how prescriptions of this sort can be part of a description of the world. Are there properties? Are there numbers? These items seem familiar at first. We routinely speak not only of a black sheep and a right decision, but also of the blackness of the sheep, or the rightness of the decision and of blackness and what is right generally. If there are three black sheep, we think that three is the number of sheep there are and that it is prime. Yet properties and numbers are puzzling: they apparently lack locations in space-time and it is unclear whether they have causal powers. Apparently they are abstractions from concrete, physical things. Could they – do they – have an existence independently of the things that instantiate them? If not, do they exist at all? Does Hogwarts exist? Are there vampires? These items are familiar to fans, who customarily assume that they do not exist. Yet they too have puzzling aspects that incline some theorists to think again. For starters, we can state what appear to be facts about them: the school song at Hogwarts does not contain the word ‘virtually’; vampires fear garlic. We can have disputes about, for instance, the life cycle of a vampire and even about how vampires would repel zombies. Material from fiction can be used to resolve, or at least inform, these disputes, and sometimes they do get resolved. Also, fictional objects are apparently created, in some sense, by storytellers and one might think that a full account of reality requires a full account of what people create. A knowledgeable person traditionally knows not only her history and science, but also the contents of myths, plays and novels, ancient and modern. Perhaps, therefore, facts about what happens in fiction really are facts about entities in the real world, just like facts about any other human invention.

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Are there physical objects: animals, asteroids or atoms? Is there in fact a nose on your face? Having waded through the earlier cases, we might not be so sure anymore. Consider three sorts of denier. First, various people at various times have held that whenever we interact with what we take to be physical objects, we are interacting merely with the mental – perhaps with our ideas, perhaps with God’s ideas, perhaps with sense impressions, but certainly not with stuff that is underlyingly physical. The word ‘idealist’ is often applied to those who hold such a view. You could be an idealist, but also think that if there really were animals, noses and so on, these would have to be physical objects and that if there were physical objects, these would not be made from the mental. A subscriber to this package of positions would deny the existence of all the things we standardly regard as physical. Our second group of deniers regard all physical particles and objects as illusory artefacts of our perspective on reality. Reality, they say, is more accurately described by contemporary physics or something like it and such physics, properly understood, does not admit of particles or objects. This might be because the mathematics of quantum mechanics describes a world where quantum entanglement is ubiquitous – where inconsistency beckons if we try to square all of the experimental results with the hypothesis that there are objects. Or it might be because, as conjectured above, relativistic theory countenances only a manifold throughout which matter and energy are distributed. Our third denier, the rejectionist reductionist, rejects only composite physical objects, ones with physical parts, but these include everything physical except the most fundamental particles. A reductionist about the macro-physical thinks that ordinary physical items like animals and their noses are mere assemblages of much tinier physical items. Rejectionist reductionists note that, in general, one does not proclaim that there is a single object, every time one has an assemblage. If I push my garden rake up against my desk and stick a guitar on top of the desk, I do not claim to have a single object, unless something special – perhaps artistic – is going on. So the rejectionist reductionist sees no obvious reason for thinking that macro-physical objects, as we normally construe them, exist; they are mere assemblages.

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Our cursory glance at existence questions about various alleged kinds of stuff has uncovered disagreement: about whether relational properties (like being coloured) are truly properties of objects; about whether prescriptive, as well as descriptive, facts can bequeath properties to an object; about whether abstract things are less obviously real than concrete ones; about whether stuff that turns up only in fiction is included among the stuff that exists; about whether there are physical objects; about whether composites are less obviously real than their primitive components; and about how much weight our unreflective intuitions about what there is, as opposed to scientific theory, carry when we consider the evidence bearing on these issues. We didn’t even touch on such contentious individuals as God and the Loch Ness Monster. One might be prompted by these disagreements to wonder what is at stake when we ask which things exist and even to become a sceptic about the intelligibility of existence questions, or, at least, about the possibility that there is a single notion of existence-being-reality powering all of them. One might hanker after a philosophical analysis of existence or at least a test that only existents can pass. (Peter van Inwagen [1998] offers a careful discussion of these two projects, which he dubs metaontological.) In the next section, we summarize a famous attempt at addressing these worries and in subsequent sections, we note various ways of responding to it. This will serve as an introduction to contemporary views and ongoing enquiry about what we are asking when we ask what there is.

1.2 Quine on what there is In a 1948 article, ‘On What There Is’, Willard van Orman Quine presented the following position. By having a theory of what the world is like, each of us is committed to the existence of certain things. These are not always the same things, since different people endorse different theories and our theories change. Our theories of the world are the net result of our observation of, and interaction with, the world. They are implicit in our beliefs and partially made explicit when we make assertions.

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How do we isolate the ontological commitments that our theories impose on us? According to Quine, we must look to explicit statements of commitment like ‘There is a house in New Orleans’ or ‘There are dragons’, or to claims that entail such statements. More precisely, we must first regiment our theory by expressing it clearly and precisely in an appropriate artificial formal language and then recover the items to whose existence our theory commits us by looking at the analogues in that language of ordinary ‘there is … ’ and ‘there are … ’ statements. According to Quine, an appropriate formal language will be a first-order language of the sort one learns in an elementary logic course. It will contain predicate symbols, an identity predicate constant, individual variables, an existential and a universal quantifier to bind these variables and some truth functional connectives. (It might also contain individual constants, function symbols, a predicate constant representing set membership and other refinements.) The appropriate analogues in such a language of ordinary ‘there is … ’ and ‘there are … ’ statements are existentially quantified sentences of the form ‘∃x Φ(x)’, where Φ(x) is an open sentence containing ‘x’ in one or more unquantified positions. When discussing logic aloud, we often pronounce the existential quantifier ‘there is’, ‘there are’ or ‘there is at least one’, but unlike these English counterparts, its interpretation is rigorously defined. Regardless of what linguists may tell us about the meanings of ‘There is a dragon’ and ‘There are dragons’ in English, it is laid down that ‘∃x Φ(x)’ is true if and only if the open sentence Φ(x) is true of some (existing) item in the world. (Here we assume, with Quine, the objectual construal of the quantifiers.) Existentially quantified sentences are a way – the way – of saying in a first-order language that one of the objects to which our theory commits us exists. This is because the items over which the variables of a first-order language range, once that language has been given an interpretation, are the items about which the language can make claims – the items that one can ‘talk about’ by using the language. When we bind the individual variable ‘x’ with the existential quantifier and then write an open sentence that means, for instance, x is a coloured object, we have a formula like this: ‘∃x (Coloured-Object (x))’, which can be translated into English as: There exists at least one coloured object (among the things we can talk about).

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A representation of our theory of the world in a natural language is not such a reliable guide to its ontological commitments, because it is not obvious that the rules governing uses of expressions like ‘there is … ’ connect them so tightly with a class of objects. A striking illustration of this comes from claims that can be paraphrased so as to bypass any apparent commitment to the existence of things. People often complain that honesty is in short supply nowadays, or that honesty is hard to come by. They lament this, since honesty is a good thing, perhaps even the best policy. Not everybody who thinks these things expresses them verbally. Still, they seem to be thinking and maybe talking about honesty, especially, given Quine’s story, if they say something like: ‘There is honesty, but not nearly enough!’ If you deny the existence of properties, you need not be ashamed of this superficially existential form of words, says Quine. You deny the existence of honesty as such and a formal regimentation of your theory of the world allows you to translate every claim about honesty into a claim that is only about honest people. Maybe you are really saying: ‘There are honest people, but not nearly enough.’ If such a successful paraphrase is available, we can conceptually reduce honesty to honest people; that is, we can show simply by analysing our commitments that alleged ascriptions of the alleged property of honesty are just cases where we claim that there are honest people. Wherever a conceptual reduction is available, there would seem to be the option of claiming that the reduced posit, honesty, in this instance, does not exist. The conceptual reduction of honesty can probably be expressed in English, but if you want to explain away your apparent commitment to numbers, as many do, the formal apparatus of quantification and predicates might be useful to make the reduction precise. If, however, a conceptual reduction of some troublesome posit is not available, one must grudgingly accept that one is committed to its existence. If, for instance, one cannot find a way to show that thought and talk about Hamlet, Gandalf and other fictional characters is merely complex thought and talk about less contentious stuff, one is stuck with them. Similarly, when we say that some zoological species are cross-fertile we are committing ourselves to recognizing as entities the several

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species themselves, abstract though they are. We remain so committed at least until we devise some way of so paraphrasing the statement as to show that the seeming reference to species on the part of our bound variable was an avoidable manner of speaking. (Quine 1948: 13) To find the ontological commitments imposed by a theory, then, one first expresses it formally, paraphrasing away where appropriate. One then seeks the sentences beginning with an existential quantifier and looks for the bound variables that follow. An existentially quantified sentence of the theory that says there is something x that is F commits an endorser of the theory to the existence of Fs. So does any sentence that entails it. For instance, the sentence ‘Fn’ which we shall suppose translates into English as ‘Nigel is forlorn’, entails ‘∃x Fx’. If one endorses the former, one is thereby committed to the existence of forlorn things. (Quine supports classical logic, but one might prefer an alternative if one feels that classical consequence sometimes makes the wrong calls about which existential quantifications are entailed by which sentences. For example: classical logic tells us that an inconsistent theory entails every sentence, but one might deny that a theory that happens to be inconsistent commits me to the existence of everything of every kind.) Meanwhile, the denial of an existentially quantified sentence ‘∃x Fx’, or of anything entailed by it, commits us to the nonexistence of Fs. It says: it is not the case that there is something x such that x is F. (This circumvents the worry that, given a quantificational account of existence, denying the existence of something commits me to a contradiction of the form: there exist Fs that do not exist. There is no such problem, if a denial of existence is the negation of an existentially quantified sentence.) None of this tells us yet what there is. ‘We look to bound variables in connection with ontology’, writes Quine, ‘not in order to know what there is, but in order to know what a given remark or doctrine, ours or someone else’s, says there is’ (Quine 1948: 15). What there is could, though, be read off the bound variables of a theory that corresponds to reality. In seeking such a theory, lack of commitment to superfluous entities is prized, as are the predictive and explanatory power of the theory:

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Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physics: we adopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged. (Quine 1948: 16) Quine hints that there may be more than one theory that satisfies all the criteria for offering a full account of what reality is like. He compares one kind of idealism, the kind (usually called phenomenalism) according to which only agents’ experiences, or sense impressions, and maybe things built out of these, exist, with a physicalist ontology, according to which only physical objects, and maybe things built out of them, exist. If I endorse one and you endorse the other, our beliefs – for instance, about whether there are tables – differ; yet there may be no fact of the matter about who is right. Any aspect of reality that I can describe in terms of tables can be described by you in terms of actual or possible experiences as of tables and vice versa. (Quine expands on this in his later philosophy. See especially Quine 1969.) As we have seen already, this does not mean that just any ontology goes. Also, one may have to endorse some regrettable claims when working out what there is. Famously, Quine (1953) fears that mathematical objects like numbers and classes are indispensable to scientific explanation and that therefore a physicalist like himself should probably admit their existence, even though they are surely abstract and hence physicalistically embarrassing. Quine’s willingness to countenance some kind of ontological pluralism and his physicalistic proclivities are only of passing interest to us, but his contention that existential quantifiers encode ontological commitment is sometimes regarded as ontological orthodoxy. We will consider some alternatives to it.

1.3 Carnap and scepticism about the intelligibility of philosophical ontologizing At the time, Quine was in dialogue with Rudolph Carnap who shared, and indeed had inspired, much of Quine’s outlook. Carnap (1950)

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made much of the pluralist contention, implicit in Quine, that more than one theory can give an adequate account of reality. Unlike Quine, though, he maintained that philosophers talk nonsense when they ask the kinds of ontological questions that they characteristically ask: questions like, ‘Are there physical objects?’ and ‘Are there numbers?’ Quine would have regarded these as no different in kind from, though perhaps more general than, questions like, ‘Is there a dagger before me?’ and ‘Are there fifteen items in my shopping cart?’ For Carnap, the situation is more complicated. This is how Carnap sees the situation. A question can be asked intelligibly only if we presuppose a scientific framework for describing the world. Such a framework is a formal, or formalizable, language, like the ones Quine enlists to regiment theories about the world, with rigorous semantic rules that lay down the meanings of its expressions and the truth conditions for its sentences. In accordance with Carnap’s logical positivism, these rules are analytic statements – statements true in virtue of meaning alone – that unpack an expression’s meaning in terms of actual or possible experiences. For instance, in a physicalistic framework, the meaning and hence the truth conditions of a sentence like ‘There is a dagger before me’ or ‘There are physical objects’ are settled by the set of actual and possible experiences that would confirm or disconfirm it. If such experiences are had, the sentence in question must be true, since its truth condition is satisfied. Carnap says that only when semantic rules of this sort are presupposed can we give meanings to the words in existence questions. Suppose we assume a physicalistic framework. Since the rules that assign meanings to expressions in the physicalistic language ensure that certain experiences (banging into a forklift blade, eating a banana) would count as confirming that the sentence ‘There are physical objects’ is true, and, since such experiences are had, our ontological question is swiftly settled in the affirmative. If instead we assume a phenomenalistic framework, it might not be. After all, physical objects are often taken to exist independently of human mentation and hence to be ruled out by phenomenalism, which only countenances mind-internal experiences or sense impressions. So there is likely to be no experience that makes the sentence ‘There are physical objects’ true in a language fitted out to encode

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phenomenalist leanings, even assuming there is such a sentence according to that framework. In either framework the question of whether there are physical objects is empirical; its answer depends on what experiences of the world are available. Consider now the question of whether there are numbers. Like Quine, Carnap finds them indispensable for science, but he thinks that rather than merely admitting them into our ontology for that reason, we can show that true claims about them are trivially true according to a physicalistic framework because of rules for introducing sentences that quantify over them. In effect, these rules provide definitions of numbers in terms of the more respectable physical objects from which they are abstractions. Statements of the definitions are analytic, so the truth of ‘There are numbers’ follows trivially from that of ‘15 is a number’, which follows trivially from the truth of ‘15 is the number of items in my shopping cart’, whose truth follows trivially in its turn from that of ‘There are 15 items in my shopping cart’. Because these moves are trivial, we are not making any ontologically contentious claims when we say that there are particular numbers, or numbers in general. We are merely applying rules that give meanings to expressions, without consulting empirical facts. Although Quine rejects Carnap’s view that numbers are physicalistically innocuous, one might, at this stage, think he should not. It might seem that Carnap’s meta-ontological programme should suit Quine. It describes contrasting theoretical frameworks, corresponding to contrasting world views. Whether an existence question receives an affirmative answer or not is frameworkdependent. Questions about the existence of physical objects or numbers are, on this story, of the same sort as questions about the existence of daggers in front of me, just as we would expect from Quine’s story. Why does Carnap’s approach not meet with Quine’s approval? To begin to see why, notice that on Carnap’s account the most general existence questions are likely to be extremely easy to investigate, once we assume a framework. Determining whether there are physical objects, numbers, or properties, for example, turns out to be very straightforward. The answers to such questions are typically presuppositions of the framework. As we saw earlier, however, when philosophers ask existence questions they somehow seem difficult and puzzling. Furthermore, they are allegedly questions

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about what the world is like, not about which sentences are made true, given the way the world is, by the rules of a language. And they are not meant to be straightforward empirical questions, as the question of whether there are physical objects seems to be when considered from within a framework. So Quine can say that Carnap’s framework-internal existence questions are not the questions that philosophers ask when they wax ontological. Carnap agrees, but he has trouble in store for Quine when the focus shifts to framework-external issues. Suppose we assume neither a physicalistic, a phenomenalistic, nor any other framework, but nonetheless claim or deny that there are physical objects, or that there are numbers. Then, says Carnap, we say something meaningless, something that lacks cognitive significance. This is because, in the absence of a framework, no set of procedures is laid down for determining what would count as empirical evidence for or against these alleged propositions and no definitions are in place to ensure that they follow from, or are ruled out by, other true claims made within some framework. Outside all frameworks, that is, the standard logical positivist doctrine about the meaninglessness of metaphysical claims bites: claims about existence are as meaningless as claims about God or beauty, since there are no experiences that can confirm or disconfirm them. They can neither be believed nor disbelieved coherently. (Correlatively, and pace Quine, one individual can hold that there are physical objects while another denies it, without there being any disagreement. This can happen if they presuppose different conceptual schemes.) A philosopher can wonder intelligibly about the practical matter of which framework to adopt – which theory is most explanatory, parsimonious or the like. It is not, however, intelligible, outside of a Carnapian framework, to ask whether the entities whose existence is taken for granted within that framework exist. Quine (1951) had his revenge. He famously objected to Carnap that the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements cannot be maintained, because questions about the meanings of sentences and the facts about the world that make them true are always intertwined. Carnap cannot, therefore, insist on a hard and fast distinction between claims that are internal to a framework and pseudo-claims that are external to it: there are no strictly analytic

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rules that settle the meanings of expressions within a framework. A fortiori, Carnap cannot, according to Quine, introduce abstract entities via analytic truths into an austerely physicalistic or phenomenalistic ontology. Partly because of this volley from Quine and partly because of the vitality of rival programmes, logical positivism lost favour during the 1950s. It became less fashionable to insist that the meaningfulness of a claim was entirely a matter of the experiences that would support or undermine it. God, the beautiful and the existing were back on the agenda, scrutinized with renewed vigour by mainstream philosophers. To be sure, there are contemporary sceptics, for instance, Eli Hirsch (2011) and Amie Thomasson (2015), who, like Carnap and sometimes under his sway, doubt the intelligibility or the profundity of the ontological questions that philosophers routinely ask: about the existence of numbers, physical objects, fictionalia, possibilia and so on. But these questions also have plenty of enthusiastic contemporary scrutinisers.

1.4 Existence as a property Many latter day ontologists have embraced some version of the Quinean view that existence is to be understood in terms of quantification.1 Others, however, counter that existence is a property or feature that some things have and others lack, rather than something trivially had by everything that we allude to when we accept existentially quantified claims. (On the face of it, this alternative view commits one, controversially, to the existence of properties, but it need not. If you endorse a property-style view of existence, but deny the existence of properties, you will presumably say that when you talk of properties, you are not committing yourself to the existence of anything beyond individual objects. Any object is the way it is and we may make this point by saying – and perhaps thinking – that any object has certain features, or properties, and lacks others. But this is just a manner of speaking, its attractions perhaps to be explained in terms of some kind of fictionalism about property-talk.)

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One way to argue that existence is not quantificational, but is rather a property had by some things and lacked by others, pays attention to the structure of what we say (and presumably believe). It fastens on sentences like: (S) Some of the characters in The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas, existed and some did not which bears an alluring structural resemblance to: (S*) Some of the characters in The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas, were French, and some were not. If (S*) ascribes a property to some objects and withholds it from others, should we not assume, until persuaded otherwise, that (S) does too? True: we may be persuaded otherwise. Bertrand Russell’s (1905, 1910/11) semantic insights and the development of transformational grammar have popularized the platitude that the structure a sentence manifests when uttered might diverge significantly from its semantic structure – the structure that reveals how its meaning is determined by the meanings of its components. Russell held that the structural similarity between ‘ The Pope pontificates’ and ‘The Pope exists’ is semantically deceptive. The former really does ascribe a feature (for Russell, this was along the lines of ‘There is exactly one thing that is a Pope, and he pontificates’), but the latter says something more like: ‘There exists exactly one thing that is a Pope’: no mention of him existing. Russell thought the same kind of quantificational analysis could be given of any claim of existence and nonexistence involving a name, since he thought that all names are simply short-hand for expressions of the form ‘the such-and-so’. So maybe, despite appearances, what looks like the ascribing or withholding of a property by (S) should indeed be explained quantificationally, as Quine would insist; maybe rigorous semantic analysis establishes this. As it happens, though, (S) is difficult to paraphrase in such a way that existential quantification takes over all the work of an existence predicate. If Russell is right, we can do it for ‘Cardinal Richelieu exists’ and ‘d’Artagnan does not exist’. But the more complicated (S) (S) talks of there being things that don’t exist, and so eludes such

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paraphrasing. This is a point in favour of the property-style analysis of existence and against the quantificational one. A second way to argue for this non-quantificational construal of existence accuses the Quinean of making existence too cheap. (See Hofweber 2000; Yablo 2000; Szabó 2001) If existence-ascribing locutions are quantificational, then merely by contending that Cambodian temples are worth visiting, that 2 is a prime, or that a dog bit me, I commit myself to the existence of at least one Cambodian temple, at least one prime, or at least one dog. In each case, my contention entails the existence claim, given Quine’s story. Yet we saw in section 1.1 that metaphysicians are baffled by questions about whether certain things (like properties, numbers and fictionalia) exist. That is why there is a lively industry that wrestles with matters ontological and meta-ontological. But even if you are not impressed by that industry, you might still dislike being told that when you claim that Harry Potter was sometimes an obnoxious teenager, you are thereby committed to believing in him, because your claim entails that he is to be quantified over. Surely your claim is consistent with doubts about the existence of fictional characters. Quine, of course, denies that ‘there is’ and ‘there are’ always reveal the quantificational commitments of our conceptual schemes: some such statements will be repudiated on reflection and others can be paraphrased so that they do not quantify over suspicious things. However, if I really think Harry was sometimes an obnoxious teenager, I might not be persuaded to deny this simply by being told that, according to somebody’s theory, my view commits me to Harry’s existence. And it has proved difficult, in practice, to develop techniques for paraphrasing apparently true claims about numbers, or fictional objects, so that they do not quantify over these things. This again puts pressure on the quantificational view and raises the possibility that only some of what we think and talk about exists. Kit Fine (2009) offers a rather complicated defence of the propertystyle account of existence. He thinks the kinds of questions that Carnap regarded as meaningless, about the existence of physical objects or of numbers, for instance, are in fact paradigms of legitimate ontic curiosity and are peculiarly the province of philosophers. Philosophers, presumably, have or must develop techniques for investigating these questions effectively. Fine also disagrees with

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Quine: the philosophically interesting claim that some thing exists, the kind of claim that Carnap mistakenly deemed unintelligible, is not mere existential quantification. The latter might, however, adequately capture what people ordinarily do when they say that there are temples in Cambodia, what teachers do when they say that there is an even prime number and what is happening when we say that a dog bit me entails that there is a dog. Each says something easily verified and obviously true, allegedly about what there is. But the obvious truth of these claims is not in tension, according to Fine, with genuine philosophical openness about whether a belief in the existence of temples, numbers, or dogs is sustainable.2 Fine thus defends a distinction between everyday pronouncements about what there is and philosophical speculation about what exists, assimilating only the former to quantification and only the latter to ontology. An affinity between Fine and Carnap is revealed by this distinction: they agree that what we do when we are sightseeing, teaching arithmetic or explaining our injuries is not philosophizing about what exists, even though Fine does not regard the former activities as presupposing a linguistic framework or the latter as meaningless. (David Chalmers defends a somewhat similar Carnapinspired distinction between ordinary and ontological existence claims in Chalmers 2009.) If, as the theorists discussed in this section maintain, existence is a feature that can be meaningfully and informatively attributed to or withheld from a thing – a feature whose ascription tells us something about the thing – two sorts of question loom. First, what is the nature of this property? Second, what is its relation to existential quantification? We will consider these questions in turn. First, then, assuming that existence is a property, what is it to exist or, in Fine’s preferred terminology, to be real? Can we say something illuminating about the nature of this property that will help us to decide whether coloured objects, colours themselves, numbers, fictional objects or physical objects are real? Fine is coy: ‘I myself do not see any way to define the concept of reality in essentially different terms; the metaphysical circle of ideas to which it belongs is one from which there appears to be no escape’ (2009: 175). A tradition of more substantial views about what the property of existence is dates back at least as far as Plato (Sophist 247d).

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Members of this family are variations on the idea that an existent is whatever has the power to cause some event or phenomenon, or the disposition to be caused by something else. This, of course, leaves open questions about what it means to be a cause (or an effect) and these will impact on questions about which things exist. If I obsess about fictional Hermione, is it accurate to describe her as causally involved in my obsession? If J. K. Rowling created fictional Hermione, is it accurate to describe Rowling as causally involved in her coming into existence? If the answer to either of these questions is ‘yes’, this would suggest that we should, on this view, include at least some merely fictional objects among existents. One disadvantage of causal views is that they seem to foreclose too early on the possibility that numbers and many other abstracta exist. Almost everybody agrees that mathematical objects are causally inert: even if the fact that there are six votes for Celia and only four for Delia are causally involved in our declaration that Celia wins, the received view is that the numbers 6 and 4 themselves are not. The same goes for sets, classes and merely possible things. Unless they buck this trend, supporters of a causal story about the property of existence are automatically committed to denying that numbers and the rest exist. Yet the question of whether they exist normally strikes philosophers as hard and not obviously settled merely by grasping the nature of existence. Graham Priest (2016), a recent proponent of a causal view, is happy to bite this bullet: he is happy if questions about the existence of numbers turn out to be more easily answered than the community expected, and not concerned that his causal view commits him to their nonexistence. There has been vigorous support in recent years for the view that the philosophically interesting question of what is real is not about what has causal powers and certainly not about what we quantify over, but about what is fundamental. On this account, the real things are those that explain the existence and nature of, or ground, all the other things. One can ask whether microphysical particles ground all other things, including numbers, possibilia and moral facts. If they do, the microphysical things concerned will be the real things. Note that Fine himself is a foremost proponent of the grounding programme in ontology (see, for example, Fine 2012), and in fact associates the word ‘real’ with the fundamental in Fine 2001. But this programme is

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not best construed as a story about what exists. Rather, it is a story about what ontologists should be focused on, one that competes with the view that serious and interesting ontological questions arise about whether, for instance, numbers, moral properties, or possibilia exist. According to the grounding theorist, we should not worry about those questions; instead, we should ask, what, if anything, grounds these things. Problems about the nature of existence do not arise on the quantificational account, which says in effect that existence is necessarily had by everything.3 Proponents of the property view may not see the absence of the problem as an advantage, of course. When I learn that Cardinal Richelieu existed but that d’Artagnan did not, they can say I learn something interesting about those things. In response, though, the proponent of the quantificational view can invoke a famous thought experiment. Imagine the perfect breakfast: it is tastier, easier on the digestive tract, more nutritious and more refreshing than any other meal. Now imagine that it really exists. Arguably, you are not imagining anything new when we add this alleged extra feature to your breakfast – you were already imagining that it existed; that is what it takes to imagine it. To bring this out, consider a variant: I tell you instead that the perfect breakfast you are already imagining exists and you believe me. Again, you seem not to have added any feature to your conception of the breakfast itself; you have merely come to believe that the world contains something you were imagining. This experiment suggests that what you learn when you discover that some particular thing exists is not that the thing has some feature. (Admittedly, Fine, in particular, may not be moved by this thought experiment; he might deny that my injunction to imagine that the breakfast exists has anything to do with the special property philosophers care about when they practise ontology. This, however, simply underlines the need for some elucidation of that property and this, to repeat, is not something that the quantification theorist needs to worry about.) That brings us to our second sort of looming question. If existence is a property, what is the relationship between it and socalled existential quantification? If we can entertain the proposition that Hogwarts does not exist, meaning thereby that Hogwarts lacks some property, this apparently entails that there is a thing that does

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not exist – a thing that lacks the property of existing. With existence as a property (call it E), it is easy to see how this could be rendered in the first-order quantificational idiom: ∃x¬Ex. (Of course, to make sense of this we better not think of ‘∃xΦ(x)’ as meaning there exists an x such that Φ(x) but in the more neutral terms used above: there is an x such that Φ(x), or something is such that Φ(x).) But can we quantify over nonexistent things? The very idea that there could be a nonexistent thing, let alone one we can think and talk about, is troubling for some. (We will expand on this worry in our discussion of the strangeness of fiction in section 4.1.) Others find solace in the fact that we readily imagine, conceive of, or at least represent in words, all manner of unlikely world-mates: samurai warriors under the bed, cities populated only by toys, undreamable dreams and the cardinal than which none is greater. Thought and talk that is apparently about these is alarmingly easy to engage in and arguably you do not have to believe that all of this purported stuff exists in order to explain that fact. If you avail yourself of a first-order language to reveal the logical structure of such thought and talk, you might want to be able to quantify over all these alleged things. It is not clear that doing so commits you to their existence – whatever that might mean. No account of the property view of existence is complete without a mention of probably the most radical such view, a view first defended by Alexius Meinong in Meinong (1904). Meinong was interested in the nature of propositional attitudes like belief, desire and hope. As we noted in the last subsection, we can think about all kinds of things or purported things, some of them impossible. I might believe that there are flying saucers, desire the breakfast than which none is greater or hope that there is a square circle. Meinong thought we needed to acknowledge that all of these are objects if we are to explain the structures of such thoughts. His is a property view, rather than a quantificational one, but he attributes different properties to different sorts of things. The concrete objects that we find in the real world (like Mount Everest) exist, says Meinong. Things that we can successfully abstract from configurations of concrete things – number, similarity and difference – merely subsist: such relationships could hold between things that do not exist, and this, says Meinong, means that we cannot attribute existence to them in their own right.

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Meinong held that these were the only modes of being, so that being as such encompassed existence, subsistence and nothing else. Where Meinong is concerned, we think it is no use fussing about his attachment to different modes of being. Some metaphysicians do think it their business to catalogue any such modes and plot the relationships among them, taking them to be entirely different concepts (different genera, each of which is a notion of existence in its own right). Presumably Heidegger was one such and Ryle gave voice to the view.4 But that is not Meinong. Contrary to many commentators, he thinks of (mere) subsistence as an important grade of being, although one that is less fundamental that existence (he certainly doesn’t think of it as the weak mode of being possessed by all nonexistent objects). We think Meinong is best interpreted as offering a distinction between the concrete (characterized as things in time) and the abstract (timeless beings), and then focusing on the truly pivotal distinction between what has being in any sense and what doesn’t have being. Given this approach, and contemporary sensibilities, continuing to reserve the word ‘exist’ for concrete entities is idiosyncratic and stipulative. In that spirit, we don’t see Meinong as someone who thinks of mathematical objects and other ideal objects as nonexistent. But he does think this of many other objects of interest to ontologists, including fictional, mythological objects and imaginary objects (even ones that are contradictory, such as the round square). These are all objects for him, and they all have the properties in terms of which they are characterized: though none exists, the golden mountain is golden, Zeus is a god on Mt Olympus, and the round square is both round and square.5 Despite a range of problems faced by Meinong’s own version of the view, neo-Meinongianism is now a thriving industry, largely because of the straightforward way it deals with the idea that so many of the objects we think and talk about don’t exist.

1.5 Fs exist: Yes? no? maybe? Is there the number two? Is there God? Is there a nose on your face? There probably is no Samurai under my bed and I can probably establish this conclusively if I muster the courage, but we have

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seen that these other questions are harder. We have encountered deep disagreement about what it would take to answer them and even about whether existence is the same thing as being or reality. Monists, like Quine, compete with pluralists, like Fine and Ryle, about whether there is only one notion here. Once we have fixed on a particular notion, some assimilate it to quantification; others take it to be a feature had by some things and lacked by others. Still, one might think, there are only two possible answers to this sort of question, once we have settled on which question we are asking: yes and no. Either there are numbers, or there are not. Either theism is true, or atheism is. On reflection, we may concede that a participant in these discussions can remain uncommitted to some degree and thereby adopt a third position. Your reasons for answering one way rather than another could be complicated, perhaps because of the issues raised above, but the three kinds of answer – affirmative, negative and non-committal – are easy to appreciate. Despite this, existence questions invite us to make distinctions that are not simply about whether things exist or not. How could this be? The two chapters that follow explore two reasons. The first, explored in Chapter 2, arises from the thought that some existing things are dependent for their existence on our mental life. The other, explored in Chapter 3, develops the worry that despite appearances, there are cases where existence questions are not the right questions to ask. It is in Chapter 3 that we first encounter the main ingredients of fictionalist responses to existence questions: about numbers, morals, science and more. Chapter 2 prepares the way, however, by reminding us about another tradition of responses to worrying questions about the existence of certain kinds of posits.

1.6 Further reading The introduction and first two parts (Chapters 1–8) of Berto and Plebania’s Ontology and Metaontology: A Contemporary Guide (2015) give a more in-depth treatment of the matters discussed in this chapter. Section 4 of their introduction deals in detail with the questions we raise in section 1.1 about how hard it is to understand existence questions.

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Soames (2009) summarizes the various moves in the debate we discuss in sections 1.2 and 1.3 between Quine and Carnap. The two volumes of Soames’s Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century (2003a, b) offer a history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy that presents the rise and fall of logical positivism, which is the background to Quine’s and Carnap’s contributions to ontology. For details on Quine’s argument for the indispensability of mathematics to a physicalistic theory of the world, see Decock (2012). Quine (1948), Carnap (1950) and Meinong (1904) are fairly easy reading. Fine (2009), which we use to motivate the property view, is a more difficult paper. Meinong’s Theory of Objects faced some daunting objections at the hands of Bertrand Russell (among other things, the view appeared to imply that the existent round square must exist). The most fully workedout version of Meinong’s own way of dealing with these objections invokes a distinction between two different kinds of properties; see Routley (1980), Parsons (1980), and Jacquette (2015). Others invoke two different modes of predication; see especially Zalta (1983, 1988). A more recent approach is the Modal Meinongianism of Graham Priest and Francesco Berto; see Priest (2016) and Berto (2012).

2 Supplementing Existence: Objectivity, Mind Independence and Realism

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s promised, this chapter explores the first of two reasons for thinking that answering questions about which things exist raises issues other than that of which things exist. The reason explored in this chapter is this. Many have denied that a thing’s existence automatically secures it a place in the roll call of real things. To earn such a place, they say, an object must exist objectively, or independently of our mental activity, or be suitably external to us. Michael Devitt, for instance, defends the following view about material objects: Realism. Tokens of most current common-sense and scientific physical types exist objectively and independently of the mental. (1997: 23) Philip Pettit says that a realist about any arena (the physical, the mathematical, or whatever) holds, among other things: The objectivist thesis. The objects posited exist and have their character fixed independently of the dispositions of participants in the discourse to assert and believe things about them. (1991: 590) What such supplementary requirements amount to, over and above existence, and whether there are several of them or just one are

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controversial matters. In sections 2.3 and 2.4 we tentatively propose an account of what is envisaged, but the reader is warned that there are many other accounts that we will not have space to discuss. Fortunately, we can provide clear illustrations of alleged minddependence, or, if you prefer, of lack of objectivity. (We will use those descriptors interchangeably; the literature yields no uniform way of distinguishing their contributions.) In each of the three illustrations below, there is disagreement about what it takes for the objects concerned to exist and, hence, about whether they exist; yet, there is widespread agreement that, whether or not they exist, they do not exist objectively. Section 2.5 relates this back to the idea that these things are therefore not real, a view known as anti-realism that we encountered at the start of the chapter. Worries about such a position will help to motivate the very different approach of Chapter 3. But this is not the only understanding of realism in the literature. Sections 2.6 and 2.7 briefly explore a number of other definitions. While tangential to our main discussion, the discussion is important since fictionalism is often touted as a new and distinctive version of antirealism. If we are to get clear about the status of fictionalism as an anti-realist position, it is important to get clear about what is meant in this context by ‘antirealism’.

2.1 Three illustrations of mind dependence First, consider coloured objects: red ones, blue ones, red and blue ones and so on. Are there any such objects and, if so, what makes them coloured? (For the purposes of this illustration, we restrict our attention to the hues of medium-sized solid objects whose surfaces appear to be coloured.) The following points seem uncontentious. Any medium-sized solid physical object has a reflectance profile: its surfaces reflect light of different wavelengths to varying degrees. An object’s reflectance profile is determined by its chemical composition. The human visual system produces brain activity in response to reflectance profiles and thus we have colour experiences of a particular quality and judge an object to be of one colour, or combination of colours, rather than

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another. The quality of a colour experience depends not only on the reflectance profile of the perceived object, but also on lighting conditions. Our colour judgements are likewise sensitive to these: we may judge that an object is red, even if we experience it as looking more like a typical orange object, because we ‘correct’ for ‘deceptive’ features of our colour experience that are due to lighting conditions. Meanwhile, the objects that we judge to be of the same colour need not all present to us with precisely the same quality of colour experience: red objects (or even bright red objects, or even scarlet objects) do not all look as though they share precisely the same colour; colour experiences encode richness that downstream colour judgements do not. Moreover, much of the detail in a reflectance profile is already discarded in visual processing prior to the colour experience: our colour experiences cannot differ in quality anywhere near as much as the reflectance profiles of objects can vary in their detail. All of this means that we have a limited palette of colour concepts to inform our colour judgements, compared with the rich variety of possible reflectance profiles. Even allowing for the lack of detail, neither our colour experiences nor our subsequent colour judgements provide a thoroughly reliable map of the purely physical relationships among reflectance profiles. It is true that if two objects are judged red, the light that is characteristically reflected by them under normal conditions is of similar wavelengths and the same goes for yellow, green, blue and many other colours, so it might be thought that our colour experiences and hence our colour judgements track coarse-grained wavelength classifications. However, this is not true in general: the reflectance profiles of brown objects form no obvious grouping, as measured by purely physical standards. The upshot of all this is that although colour judgements capture something about real physical differences between objects, or real relationships between objects and light, classification in terms of colours is clearly projected onto objects by human observers. The fact that some objects are grouped together and distinguished from others on the basis of their colour is an artefact of the human visual system. Other species do not discard precisely the same information about reflectance profiles as we do, or classify objects visually according to the categories that we employ. If organisms with our kinds of eyes were not around, there would not be a practice of distinguishing

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objects by our kinds of colours. Many have argued that colour (along with taste, smell and other secondary qualities) differs from properties like mass, or height in this respect, because the latter are allegedly intrinsic to the objects that have them. It is in this sense that the former are mind-dependent, whereas the latter plausibly are not. Against this background, metaphysicians disagree about exactly what it is for an object to be a certain colour and indeed about whether there really are coloured objects. (Our list of prominent views is not exhaustive. See Brock and Mares 2007: 96 for a longer one.) Some (see, for instance, Lewis 1997) hold that an object is red just if its reflectance profile is one of those that, under normal conditions, inclines normal subjects to judge that the object is red. Such theorists accept that this way of classifying objects is foisted on the object by us, but, they say, that hardly prevents the objects we call red from being red, any more than my putting an elephant in a jumbo-sized lunch box stops it from being in a lunch box. The concept of redness is a way, our imperfect way, of tracking bona fide physical facts about reflectance profiles, and that is enough to ensure that objects really do bundle up into reflectance profile types that correspond to the colours. For the theorist who holds this view, there genuinely are red objects, lots of them! (Of course, whether there really are colours, such as red, is a different matter. Objects could be coloured without colours themselves existing. Colours can exist only if properties exist.) A second group of theorists (see, for instance, Johnston 1992) agrees that there are red objects and that our projection of the colours onto them does not undermine this contention. According to them, however, for an object to be red is simply for it to be disposed to incline normal human observers to judge, under suitable viewing conditions, that it is red. The ‘reflectance profile’ theorists described in the previous paragraph agree that a red object is so disposed and that this is why we have a concept of redness. But as we have seen, those first theorists go on to say that the redness of an object consists in its having a certain type of reflectance profile. Our second group of theorists, the dispositionalists, go on instead to say that the redness of the object consists in the disposition itself. Dispositionalists might be happy to say that red objects are so disposed because of their reflectance profiles, but they insist that it is the disposition, rather

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than its so-called categorical base, that constitutes their being red. Even so, both parties agree that red objects abound. A third group disagrees. (See, for instance, Boghossian and Velleman 1989.) They regard the imposition of the colour map on physical objects as merely a commentary on us, rather than a way to reveal aspects of the physical world. Physical objects can have many properties: they can be radioactive, liquid or magnetic. Maybe some of their properties, like fragility, are dispositional. But surely there are some facts about physical objects that do not consist in them having properties. My house key is sometimes in my pocket, but we should not (according to these folks) conclude that there is some property – that of sometimes being in my pocket – that my house key possesses. All we have here is a relational fact about my house key. Facts about colour are likewise relational facts. Physical surfaces reflect light. The way they do so is systematically, though erratically, tracked by our colour judgements, so those judgements do capture something about reflectance profiles. Still, we should not say that these judgements are about features of the objects. Despite the way we talk and think, there are no coloured objects. We have here a disagreement about what if anything the colours of objects are and it generates a disagreement about whether there are coloured objects at all. Attempts to show that one view is better than the others centre on questions about what counts as a property of an object, what we take ourselves to be doing when we ascribe colours to things and how best to explain the meanings and uses of colour vocabulary within a semantic theory for natural languages. Yet these theorists are in total agreement about the mechanisms of colour recognition and judgement. It is perhaps not surprising then that even though the first two groups believe that there are coloured objects, they are likely to agree with the third group that there is something less-than-objective, something dependent on us, about colour. Hence, many of them agree that merely settling whether something exists sometimes leaves unresolved the question of whether that thing makes a contribution to reality. We will consider two more examples of debates where disagreement about what something is like fuels disagreement about whether it exists, but where there is cross-party agreement that the purported thing somehow depends on us.

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What, if anything, is a nation? Its citizens manage, occupy, defend and exploit the resources of a geographical region over an extended period. Their lives accordingly exhibit a distinctive institutional structure. These facts somehow give rise to ascriptions of nationhood and nationality. Any facts there might be about what makes something a nation and what makes it the nation it is supervene on facts about people, institutional structures and regions: the essential properties of a nation could not be different without a difference in the properties of some of those other things. We can even make do without including institutional structures in the supervenience base, because institutions are surely created and maintained by mental activity and mental dispositions, even though we do not know the complete story of how this happens. (For more detail on supervenience, see section 2.4 below.) At any rate, because nations cannot be what they are without people being a certain way, we see again a dependence of something on people, though how similar the dependence of nations is to that of coloured objects is hard to ascertain. Note too that nations, if they exist, have vague boundaries in both time and space: there is no precise answer to questions about how much air space is part of Australia or when Austria became a nation. Those who believe that there are nations are likely to notice that many, perhaps most, macroscopic entities share these problems: it is hard to say when a mountain begins to exist, or where its spatial boundaries are. They will also stress that nations, like rocks and sofas, play fairly well-defined roles. Nations inspire devotion, cause and survive wars, export software and have hockey teams. Nation sceptics, meanwhile, may be wary of any purported nonphysical object whose properties supervene on those of a disparate collection of other things and whose boundaries in time and space are vague. They may be willing to admit that there are objects of this kind only under sufferance. They may suspect that thought and talk about nations is just a fancy way to keep track of patterns in human activity. They may be especially puzzled by strong manifestations of patriotism. New citizens are born and old ones die; migration changes the ethnic profile of a nation; styles of government and perhaps borders change over time; the character of life and industry, likewise. Is it even meaningful to pledge loyalty to, and take pride in, one’s

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nation, given that there need be nothing in the shifting population – their outstanding kindness to outsiders, say – that necessarily warrants pride (cf. Keller 2007)? In any case, a nation seems to be a very gerrymandered thing. One might conclude that it is nothing at all. (A friend of nations may retort that the same sort of worries apply to persons.) As with coloured objects, then, a debate about what it would take for something to be a thing of a certain kind has generated one about whether things of that kind exist. Now for our third illustration of an alleged object’s alleged dependence on us. As we saw in section 1.1, idealists think that the things we take to be physical (the rocks, the roosters, the rocket-launchers and the rest) are actually mental: they are aspects of one or more minds, or constructions out of non-physical mental objects or phenomena. It has its character determined entirely by our dispositions to entertain and express certain thoughts. So again we have a dependence of what we take to be physical on ourselves, or, at any rate, on the mental activity of minded creatures. Contrast this dependence with what we get if, contra idealism, there really are non-mental physical objects, including, for instance, trees that have never been and never will be observed by cognizing agents. The fact that these trees exist and the ways in which they contribute to reality seem not to depend on us, given this assumption. We will not explore arguments for or against idealism, though it is significant that it refuses to die, even in this hard-nosed physicalistic age. One reason for this might be the brute fact that our access to the world comes entirely through our own experience, together with the fairly intuitive contention that we cannot be absolutely sure that there is any world external to us; the world we experience could be entirely constituted by our experiences of it. Even people who do not believe idealism still regard its logical possibility as a way to motivate extreme scepticism and hence as part of the tool-kit for exploring the nature of knowledge. At any rate, what matters for us is that idealism does not settle the question of whether physical objects exist. An idealist certainly has the option of believing that they do. They will be mental, or artefacts of the mental, of course, and this may not be what we expected to learn when we began metaphysics, any more than we expected that ‘solid’ plywood planks

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would turn out to consist mostly of the gaps between particles, when we started doing physics – or industrialized carpentry. Still, the dependence of the physical on the mental does not stop the physical from existing. So one kind of idealist believes in physical objects; what her idealism adds, however, is that every physical object is a mental object, or an assemblage of such objects, or an artefact of mentation. A second kind of idealist agrees that purportedly physical objects exist, but denies that they are in fact physical, on the grounds that part of what it takes for something to be physical is that it is not constructed entirely from mental stuff. If idealism is true, all allegedly physical objects are so constructed. Hence, according to this second camp, there are no physical objects. Plywood planks, rocks, roosters and the rest exist, but they are not physical objects. In section 1.1, we met a third kind of idealist. She agrees with the second that a physical object cannot be constructed entirely from non-physical stuff. She thus agrees that the truth of idealism brings with it the nonexistence of physical objects. But she goes further: plywood planks, rocks and roosters must, by their very nature, be physical, she says. If idealism is true, all we have is the illusion that there are such objects, since there are no physical objects. Hence, given idealism, it is not just that all objects are non-physical; the objects that we take to be physical do not exist at all! As with the debates about coloured objects and nations, we note that theorists who agree on the basic metaphysics – in this case, idealism – can disagree about the nature of certain objects (in this case, all ‘ordinary’ objects like trees, hard drives and crayons) and consequently about what exists. In all three of our illustrations, though, the points of agreement are as striking as the points of disagreement when it comes to considering what reality is like. Two metaphysicians might disagree about whether colours or nations exist and two idealists might disagree about whether plywood planks exist. Yet all may agree that if they do exist, all these things are, in some way, dependent on the activities of people. Arguably this connection between those things and ourselves must be borne in mind when we consider whether and how those things contribute to what reality is like.

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2.2 Two reasons for considering mind-dependence Why might an existing thing’s dependence on our mental life, whatever that amounts to, vitiate its prospects for inclusion in an account of reality? Here are two suggestions. First, there is what we will call the imposition worry. If an object or kind of object only comes to exist and only continues to exist in virtue of how we regard it, or is only taken to be that object or an object of that kind because of our perspective on things, then the existence of the object or of objects of that kind may seem to result from mere projection, rather than detection; from invention, rather than discovery. Imagine exploring an alien landscape. You locate hills and rivers. You photograph and map the terrain. When colleagues retrace your steps, they find the rivers in slightly different places and some of the hills more pronounced than you found them. Prolonged study reveals that the landscape adjusts and reforms itself in response to the imprint on it of explorers like yourselves. Its topography varies in response to the explorers’ activity and their psychological reactions. You wonder now whether there is anything at all to this world beyond your own constructions. Even in less sceptical moods, you are sure that the geography is partly imposed by you. To the extent that coloured objects, nations and the posits of the idealist awaken similar suspicions, we may feel that they are not truly among the things that make up the world – even if they exist. Nations offer a particularly close parallel. We may not create a region’s physical features, but surely we create its political borders. Secondly, there is what we will call the reduction worry. If some object turns out to be nothing more than a composite of other objects arranged in a certain way, you may be attracted to the idea that the composite object is more like an upshot of reality than a contributor to it. Some believe that every fusion, aggregation or arrangement of objects is itself an object. They think that whenever you stack one brick on top of another, you have another distinct object. Others think that you just have two bricks, arranged one way rather than some other way. We do not have a word for such a construction and, if we

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did, that would probably be because this sort of stack plays a role in a human practice: maybe as a signal that you have finished your shift at the brick works. If there was a word and hence, a concept, of such a construction, more people might agree that there is a single object here. Yet the fact that every composite is merely an arrangement of other objects may incline even those who believe composites can be objects in their own right to regard them as second-class citizens – things whose recognition adds nothing to the description of reality. So long as we have an account of the world that enables us to describe individual bricks, the ways they can be arranged and the roles that can be played by various arrangements of them, a stack of two bricks, if it counts as a single object at all, adds nothing distinctive – and hence nothing at all – to a true account of reality. An idealist might hold this view regarding purported physical objects; a reflectance profile theorist might hold it about colours; many would hold it about nations. Worries about mind-dependence are, sometimes, at any rate, simply a special case of this reductionist worry – the case where the things to which the troublesome composite is reduced include our mental activity. Not everybody will share these worries. The imposition worry might unduly and irrevocably presuppose the view that vast regions of reality can be described by human observers whose activity can readily be disentangled from the activity in those regions. Reflection on quantum mechanics has undermined this principle, popularizing various riffs on the idea that we are part of any system that we observe. But even if there were regions where I can be a reporter without being a protagonist, why are they special? Why are the objects that furnish those regions ontologically privileged over objects whose nature is partly dependent on my interaction with them? Meanwhile, the reduction worry can be problematized by a thought experiment. If, as suggested, certain alleged things are merely upshots of the activities and dispositions of their components, those components in turn are presumably mere upshots of the activities and dispositions of their components – and so on. Now suppose it turns out that every purported object whatsoever, no matter how small, minimal or basic it seems, can be further broken down into smaller components, which in turn can be broken down into smaller components – and so on, ad infinitum. Then there will be no basic level of reality about which we could say that all other purported objects

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are mere upshots of it. This seems consistent with the possibility that there is indeed a reality – that there really are objects. This suggests, contra the reduction worrier’s assumption, that decomposability as such does not make an object less real than its components. At any level of reality – the social, the psychological, the macrophysical, the microphysical – we can identify objects. The two worries as we expressed them may thus be vulnerable to objections, but we think the tendency to relegate mind-dependent objects is likely to be traceable to some variant of at least one of them.

2.3 Conceptual response-dependence as a source of mind-dependence allegations Precisely what sorts of connection between objects and humans are prone to trigger one or both of the worries we have just discussed? What, when it comes down to it, does mind-dependence amount to in the literature on what is real? With much trepidation, we join the ranks of those who address this question. (We think that our account is illuminating, but we do not claim that it is the only illuminating account.) We suggest that two sorts of relation can, between them, account for the appeals to mind-dependence and objectivity in the literature. The first is conceptual response-dependence, an account of which can be developed from our earlier remarks about why the positing of coloured objects can seem problematic. The term ‘responsedependence’ was introduced by Mark Johnston (1989). The idea has been refined by a number of theorists since then, but in what follows, we stick to fairly uncontroversial claims about response-dependence. For any colour, say red, a biconditional of the following sort holds: an object is red if and only if it is disposed to elicit the judgement that it is red, from suitable subjects who are in suitable circumstances. Of course, it is difficult to say what a subject has to be like or what circumstances she has to occupy in order for her judgement that an object is red to guarantee that it is red. Some way to specify what qualifies as a normal, or perhaps an ideal, subject in normal, or

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perhaps ideal conditions is needed. Clearly, a suitable subject is not colour blind, but there is much more to say about her. Clearly some lighting conditions are unsuitable, but we need to say which ones. Without more research, we cannot say what makes a subject or a set of circumstances suitable. However, theorists who research this are confident that the work can, in principle, be done. If they are right, we can transform the above sketch into a biconditional statement that presents necessary and sufficient conditions for an object’s being red. The biconditional plays a special role here: in some sense, it settles what falls in the extension of the concept. The standard contemporary approach to explaining why, in the case of colour, such a biconditional explains how the extension of the concept is determined is responsedependence. It develops the insight that simply by reflecting on my ability to grasp and apply colour concepts, I can know that the biconditional for redness (whatever it is) holds. I can know, in virtue of my ability to make judgements about redness at all, that if I am a ‘normal’ observer in ‘normal’ circumstances, those judgements are reliable. (I can know this even if I am not sure what normality is.) In short, the biconditional for redness is knowable a priori: it is knowable solely on the basis of reflection on the concepts involved in it. In general, the concept of F-ness (where a necessary condition for something’s being a concept of F-ness is that its extension is the class of things that are F) is response-dependent when a biconditional of the following form is knowable a priori: a thing x is F if and only if x is disposed to produce response R in subjects S in conditions C. Our concept of REDNESS is response-dependent; in this case, the response G produced by suitable subjects under suitable conditions is the judgement that the object x is red.1 All our colour concepts are response-dependent. So are our other concepts of secondary qualities, including those of sweetness, smoothness and loudness. So too are our concepts of funniness, attractiveness and ugliness. Like others (e.g. Brock and Mares 2007: 42–45), we suggest that when all the objects of a certain kind form the extension of a response-dependent concept, the fact that they are objects of that kind is a mind-dependent fact, on at least some understandings of

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mind-dependence that we find in the literature. If ugly objects exist, their being ugly is dependent on our mental life in a way that might have ramifications for issues about which things make up reality. This, we claim, can be explained by the response-dependence of the concept of ugliness. Care is needed. Response-dependence, as defined here, applies to the concepts that are part of our mental states when we think about properties of objects and only indirectly to the properties themselves. It applies to our conception of what it is for something to be ugly and only indirectly to the feature of ugliness that some objects have and others lack. (On some accounts, properties themselves are responsedependent. We shall stick to the claim that certain concepts are response-dependent, leaving it open whether it is intelligible to say that the associated properties are.) To say that conceptual responsedependence explains the mind-dependence of certain properties is to say that classifications in terms of those properties are only interesting because we have response-dependent concepts that pick out those properties. This doesn’t, of course, rule out the possibility that some family of properties picked out by a response-dependent concept corresponds to a classification of objects that cuts reality along reality’s own joints. For example, it could turn out that a complete, final physics will tell us that the colours play a crucial role in fundamental physical processes and that these processes operate independently of us. We can imagine fundamental laws of nature that relate ordinary colour properties to other fundamental physical properties. In this situation, we should probably say either that it is a coincidence that we have concepts that we know a priori pick out these properties, or that our evolution (or our intelligent designer) endowed us with colour concepts precisely because these concepts track certain fundamental physical properties. This scenario is extraordinarily unlikely. It is far more probable that our sensitivity to colours says more about us and the way we navigate reality than it does about reality itself. Nevertheless, philosophers should notice that the response-dependence of a concept does not entail that the associated property is merely projected onto the world by us. In spite of this, we suspect that the response-dependence of our concepts of redness, sweetness, ugliness and so on explains why they are taken to be mind-dependent.

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In certain cases, the response-dependence of a concept might suggest that we ought to be relativists about the class of objects delineated by that concept. What is funny, attractive or ugly according to the standards of your community may not be so according to the standards of mine. Perhaps your people find the back view of Mount Everest ugly, while mine do not, and maybe this is because your community and mine have different concepts of ugliness. Both communities would respond in the same kind of way to objects that they take to be ugly: perhaps with mild revulsion, perhaps simply with the judgement that the thing is ugly. So each community possesses a concept of ugliness, but the objects that are disposed to produce this response in normal members of your community, under normal conditions, would not be precisely the ones that are disposed to produce that response in normal members of my community, under normal conditions. If so, facts about what is ugly would only hold relative to communities. (Perhaps there are also concepts such that facts about them hold relative to individuals – that is, to communities of one.) Some have taken our concepts of rightness, wrongness, goodness and badness to be response-dependent (e.g. Johnston 1989); so conceptual response-dependence plays a prominent role in ethics. However, concepts like those of Being A PATHOGEN, Being SQUARE, Being CARBON-BASED and Being 50 METRES SHORTER THAN THE EIFFEL TOWER are not, on most accounts, response-dependent. There does not seem to be an a priori knowable biconditional of the type displayed above associated with any of them. This has been taken to explain why the properties apparently picked out by these concepts were historically regarded as primary rather than secondary. Certainly, many agree that whether it is useful or even accurate to classify objects by appealing to their (primary) properties has more to do with the internal structure or nature of the object than with its relationship to us. Some philosophers have, however, suggested that response-dependence should be extended to many concepts and associated properties that are normally regarded as primary. Some even preach global responsedependence (Pettit 1991), according to which any property that we ascribe to a thing is part of a template that we project onto the world, rather than an indication of something intrinsic to the object. Whether or not we extend it this far, conceptual responsedependence is one kind of connection between us and certain

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(alleged) objects that accounts for allegations of mind-dependence. It does so by unpacking the idea that we pay attention to certain apparent properties of objects because of the way we are, rather than because of the way they are independently of us. Interpretationism, as propounded by Donald Davidson, posits a kind of mind-dependence that is in the spirit of response-dependence. An interpretationist about a class of purported objects holds that in deciding whether those objects exist and what they are like, we must assume that people’s judgements on these matters are mostly correct. As Philip Pettit puts it, the entities referred to in any discourse about members of that class are ‘those entities which it is most flattering to the discourse to take as its referents: those entities such that participants can be held to say more true things about them than about anything else. On such a view it is a priori that participants are correct in a large number of their claims’ (1991: 593).2 We have also seen that conceptual response-dependence can motivate relativism about certain properties of objects. However, conceptual response-dependence does not subsume all of the ways in which certain properties, or types of object, can seem less than objective; at least, it will not subsume them to the satisfaction of all theorists. Nor is it the only source of relativism. We think that an appeal to supervenience theses takes up the slack.

2.4 Supervenient dependence as a source of mind-dependence allegations The facts or properties in one class supervene on those in another if and only if there cannot be any variation in the first class without variation in the second. All the facts about the nature of baldness supervene on facts about hair distribution. All the facts about the nature of heat, as we understand it from physics, supervene on facts about the energy of molecules. All the intrinsic properties of a collection supervene on the properties of its individual members. The totality of facts about the nature of nations supervenes on facts about geographical regions and individual people, including dispositions to be in particular mental states under particular conditions. Philosophers

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wonder whether moral (and other prescriptive) properties supervene on purely natural, or descriptive ones, whether the mental supervenes on the physical or (as an idealist might say) vice versa and whether the social supervenes on the mental. Maybe the supervenience base can be made smaller in some of the above illustrations, without falsifying the supervenience thesis. Surely all facts about what counts as a nation and what makes a particular nation the nation it is can vary without there being any variation in the dispositions of people to feel pain. So not all dispositions to be in particular mental states under particular conditions make a difference to what the essential facts about nations are. A smaller supervenience base suffices. Similarly, perhaps the variation in physical facts and properties that is consistent with idealism requires variation in only a fairly well-delineated subclass of mental phenomena, such as sense impressions and propositional attitudes. If S supervenes on a class B, S supervenes on any class of which B is a subclass. There are many different types of supervenience and, if we were interested in specific debates, such as the debate about whether the ethical supervenes on the natural, or the debate about whether the mental supervenes on the physical, we would need to distinguish them. We have talked here about supervenience theses that relate classes of facts and others that relate classes of properties. However, there can be other relata for supervenience theses, including objects, laws and states. We propose a second type of connection between us and objects that seems to account for some allegations of mind-dependence. The relevant connection holds when every supervenience base for the facts about the nature or character of an object or kind of object includes facts about human dispositions to form, maintain or express beliefs. We will call this connection supervenient dependence. Nations are superveniently dependent. Admittedly, not every fact about the nature or character of a nation or of nations generally would fail to hold if our dispositions to believe or think in certain ways were different: the whole of France could become submerged without any people being disposed to change their minds about anything. Yet we know that some facts about the intrinsic properties of nations would not hold if certain individuals, or a whole community, thought differently, and they would cease to hold if certain changes occurred in

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people’s dispositions to believe or to express beliefs. The fact that the boundaries of Indonesia are where they are, the fact that Reykjavik is the capital of Iceland and the fact that South Sudan is a nation are of this sort. As a community, we could decide to change these things and this would impact on what we are disposed to believe about boundaries, capital cities and nationhood. Also superveniently dependent, it would seem, are facts about the nature of marriage, money and mutiny. If an object x is a spouse, dollar or mutineer, there are at least some facts about what it is for x to be of that kind that would fail to hold if our dispositions to have certain beliefs or to act in ways that express relevant beliefs were different. We might unearth a shiny metal disc with unfamiliar markings and suppose that it is, or was, money. If we are right, some people are, or were, disposed to regard this object as exchangeable for certain goods or services, but not for others. If instead it is something other than money, or money of a different value, or a different community’s money, those people will be differently disposed. Like conceptual response-dependence, some cases of supervenient dependence invite a relativistic treatment of properties, types of object or classification systems. We might say that x is legal tender, relative to only some monetary systems. Though all monetary tokens supervene on similar classes of physical objects and mental dispositions, the details vary from one monetary system to another. (Plausibly, the relativity of legal tender to monetary systems could also be explained by conceptual response-dependence – by the tendencies of different communities to respond in the same sort of way to different monetary tokens. Even so, it can certainly be explained by supervenient dependence: objects of slightly different kinds – different coins or notes – are constructed from similar ingredients, but the ingredients differ slightly, from community to community.) Supervenient dependence explains a lot of what passes for mind-dependence or lack of objectivity, just as conceptual responsedependence does. And as with conceptual response-dependence, many theorists have claimed controversially that all kinds of objects are mind-dependent in ways that seem to be analysable as claims about supervenient dependence. Thomas Kuhn (1970) famously held that objects of particular theoretical kinds (electrons, genes, etc.) exist relative to scientific paradigms. Although he changed his mind

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later, and was not all that clear at the time, Kuhn apparently took a scientific paradigm to be a network of assumptions about what the physical world is like, how to devise and evaluate hypotheses, how to disseminate the results of experiments and so on.3 Phlogiston exists relative to one paradigm, said Kuhn; oxygen exists relative to a later paradigm. Given what paradigms are, this means that facts about whether oxygen or phlogiston exists and what they are like supervene on facts about mental dispositions. ‘Social constructivism’ is a catch-all term for views in this vicinity. It is used especially for views about classifications of objects or phenomena in terms of their gender, race, culture, sexual orientation or other powerful determiners of a person’s lot in life. For a social constructivist about some area of enquiry, the relevant classification is like the classification of monetary tokens. Gendered objects, as it might be, exist only relative to social practices whose supervenience base includes mental dispositions. Global supervenient dependence has been proposed in various forms. For an idealist, every fact about the nature of the purportedly physical world would only fail to hold if there were differences in facts about the ways people are disposed to believe and express beliefs. (An idealist may also hold that if there are physical objects, they are made out of mental things: ideas, sense data, minds or the like. This is not entailed by supervenient dependence, as we have formulated it; ours is a modal covariation claim about the relationship between physical objects and the way we cognize.) If you think that the physical world is all there is (or all there is other than the mental), you will think that idealism is a global supervenient dependence thesis. Kant’s treatment of what he called phenomena or the objects of our experience is a global supervenient dependence thesis. For Kant, the synthesizing power of the mind brings it about that all such objects (planks, tables, tadpoles, etc.) play causal roles, are spatially and temporally located and extended, obey the laws of physics and so on. Unlike idealists, he denies that the supervenience base for objects of our experience is exhausted by the mental. Rather, the totality of facts about the objects of our experience supervenes on facts about the mental together with facts about things as they are in themselves. How things are in themselves is unknowable by us, but their features

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interact with mentation to produce the things of our experience. (Neo-Kantians differ from Kant by allowing that there may be many ways for the human mind and independent reality to interact and create the world as we experience it.)

2.5 Views called ‘realism’ that have an ontological focus We are now in a position to distinguish questions of existence (or ontology) from questions about realism and reality. We saw in Chapter 1 that some writers equate what is real with what there is, or what has being, or what exists, where these do not necessarily mean quite the same thing. Then, in this chapter, we saw that according to many philosophers, some kind of mind-dependence undermines the reality of an existing object. Some of these latter philosophers support a view that is sometimes called ‘Realism’: a conjunction of an existence and a mind-independence claim. As we noted at the start of the chapter, Michael Devitt formulates and defends such a view about the objects of common-sense and current science, defining it as follows: ‘Tokens of most current common-sense and scientific physical types objectively exist independently of the mental’ (1997: 23). Many have felt that there is a more general, or more fundamental, idea underlying this kind of definition that could be better expressed. This is one way to account for the proliferation of positions with an ontological focus that are called ‘realism’. One alternative approach to defining realism replaces the existence component with something stronger: the claim that the items forming the subject-matter of a field do not merely exist objectively, but also have the very features we attribute to them – and not merely the essential ones. Realism, on such a construal, posits not merely the existence of items, but also many of the properties they contingently have and the relationships that hold among them. Edward Craig’s entry on realism and anti-realism in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy begins by outlining that approach. ‘The basic idea of realism is that the kinds of thing which exist, and what they are like, are independent of us and the way in which we find out about them’ (Craig 1998: 115. Emphasis added).

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As it happens, this apparently strengthened sort of realism can after all be presented as only making a claim about the mindindependent existence of something, so long as we are prepared to grant existence to facts. We take the objects whose mindindependent existence is endorsed by this kind of realism to include facts about what things are like. Hence, Brock and Mares (2007) defend the following definition: Realism about a particular domain is the conjunction of the following two theses: (i) there are facts or entities distinctive of that domain, and (ii) their existence and nature is in some important sense objective and mind-independent. (2007: 2) Note that such a reformulation is contentious, since facts are mysterious. Not everybody who thinks that common-sense and science mostly get things right is prepared to believe that there really are facts, even if they grant that there really are objects. So a claim about what things are like cannot be regarded uncontroversially as a claim about which things exist. We have now seen two types of view that have been labelled ‘realism’: one is about what exists and the other is also about what things are like. Both types are about what the world is like, but there are other views called ‘realism’ that are, at least in part, about something other than this.

2.6 Views called ‘realism’ that have an epistemological focus Suppose you are a realist, in the first of the senses outlined above, about planets. Your view is that they exist independently of human minds. This is a view about how things are, but it is related to a view about the capacities of my epistemic community. According to this related view, my community is in a good position to detect how matters stand in this field of enquiry and can be confident of its verdicts regarding what there is and what there is not. Second, there is an Insecurity thesis (Brock and Mares 2007: 6): our epistemic

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community must make contact with the world external to us in order to learn how things are in this field of enquiry and it is possible for us to be mistaken, even radically mistaken, about the way things are in that field (other writers call this Deference or Humility or Cosmocentricity or Modesty). Some writers prioritize epistemological concerns like these over the ontological ones about existence and objectivity. (See, for instance, Wright 1993: 1.) But not always. The Insecurity thesis has sometimes been included as an extra clause in definitions of realism that are at least partly ontological (see, for instance, Pettit 1991: 590 on the Cosmocentric Thesis). When this is done, we have an enriched definition of realism, one that highlights the possibility that our community is wrong about whether something exists, thereby strongly suggesting that we did not foist this thing on to the world and that we need to look outside ourselves for evidence for its existence. It thereby also suggests that the thing is not response- or supervenient-dependent, but is instead mind-independent. Whether Insecurity offers more than a mere heuristic and whether its inclusion in a definition would help us to be precise about what kinds of dependence are inconsistent with ontological realism are matters that we will not pursue. Arguably, Michael Dummett’s famous approach to the debates we are concerned with can be understood in purely epistemological terms. Dummett regards realism as a doctrine about the meanings of sentences, but he can be interpreted as treating it as a doctrine that develops the Insecurity thesis. Dummett’s realist accepts that truth transcends evidence; she might do this by accepting, say, a correspondence theory of truth. According to her, the truth of a truthbearer consists in there being some evidence-transcendent truth condition of it that reality meets. A sentence, for instance, is true just if (1) its meaning tells us that reality must be one of a certain number of ways for the sentence to be true and (2) reality is one of those ways. Every (meaningful) declarative sentence is either true or false, even though we may never know which it is. Dummett’s anti-realist, by contrast, accepts a verificationist account of truth. According to her, the truth of a truth-bearer consists in there being some verification condition of it that the sentence satisfies. Roughly speaking, a verification condition specifies a performable procedure,

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like the construction of a proof or the scrutiny of a body of empirical information, together with a result that would count as completing the procedure successfully. A sentence is true just if (1) its meaning is a class of verification conditions, each of which tells us that a certain procedure would have to yield a certain result in order for the sentence to be true and (2) following one of these procedures would indeed yield the appropriate result. If the completed search would not yield sufficient evidence, the sentence is false. Some sentences may be neither true nor false; this happens when the class of verification conditions constituting their meaning is empty. However, if a sentence is true or false, we are, in principle, capable of finding out which it is. The details of Dummett’s project are not our concern. Notice, though, that an evidence-transcendent truth theory (what Dummett calls ‘realism’) is Insecure while a verificationist one (Dummett’s anti-realism) is not. An evidence-transcendent theorist believes that there could be truths that we are never in a position to know, because they are made true by factors beyond our control and perhaps sometimes beyond our ken. The verificationist insists that truth and falsehood are possible only when they could, in principle, be uncovered by our endeavours. This is why Dummett’s story looks epistemological. However, because he takes the issue to be one about meaning, he has tended to describe the difference in terms of the principle of excluded middle. By holding that truth transcends evidence, Dummett’s realist endorses this principle, which says of every sentence that either it is true or its negation is true. His antirealist, by allowing that some meaningful sentences lack a verification condition, allows that for some meaningful sentences, neither they nor their negations are true.

2.7 Other views called ‘realism’ Some definers of realism draw on the concerns to be surveyed in the next chapter about what our practices of thinking, talking and acting commit us to. For some, the principal contention of a realist about some entities is that these practices commit us, rightly or wrongly, to their existence. On this construal of realism, the question of whether

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the entities do exist is secondary. John Bigelow adopts this view about scientific posits: The state of the art in quantum mechanics and relativity theory is such as to make it very rational to harbour a considerable degree of skepticism about whether things are as the theories seem to say they are. […] A real antirealist is not someone who would be a realist about quarks and so on, if only the evidence were a little stronger. Rather, the real antirealist is someone for whom the very question of whether or not such things exist simply does not arise. The real realist, in contrast, is someone for whom, on the contrary, the question cannot be avoided. (1994: 7) Bas van Fraassen, also writing on science, uses ‘realism’ to label a view that is primarily about the aim of a particular practice and that does not commit its proponents to any claim about the existence or independence of particular objects or facts: on this view, ‘Science aims to give us, in its theories, a literally true story of what the world is like; and acceptance of a scientific theory involves the belief that it is true’ (1980: 8). Van Fraassen himself rejects this in favour of the view that science aims at the construction of empirically adequate theories, a view we discuss further in the next chapter. We will not express, and do not need to have, a view about how the word ‘realism’ should be used. (For more on this question, see Devitt 1997 and Brock and Mares 2007.) What matters for our project is that ‘realism’ is in fact used in many ways and that there are taxonomic tools for distinguishing those ways from one another. Views in the debates that will concern us are typically tagged as either realist or anti-realist and fictionalism is usually numbered among the anti-realisms. It is thus vital for us to know what realism, the main opposition movement, looks like and to recognize the similarities and the diversity that we find among views that are classed as realist or as anti-realist.

2.8 Summing up We have pursued at length the contention that an affirmative answer to an existence question might not yet be an affirmative answer to

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the question that often prompts it. We said that if your interest in the existence of some object or kind of object is really an interest in what reality is like, some hold that you need to supplement your enquiry into its existence with one about its dependence on our mental life. We saw that the two enquiries are sometimes hard to separate. In the case of something like an electron, many will want to say that electrons are, by their very nature, not mental, so electrons could not exist mind-dependently. Still there are other cases, like that of the colours, where merely granting a thing’s existence leaves open questions about its relationship to the mind in ways that might have a bearing on the question of what reality is like. We gave some thought to the under-explored question of why so many people think that mind-dependence vitiates a thing’s contribution to reality. Then we described two kinds of relation that can hold between ourselves and objects (conceptual responsedependence and supervenient dependence) in order to provide an underpinning for philosophical discussions about objectivity or minddependence.4 Arguably, they are independent – one can hold without the other5 – so that we need both kinds of connection to cover all of the cases where mind-dependence and objectivity are alleged. In the final sections, we noted the conflicting ways in which the word ‘realism’ is used by different writers. Our sample suggests little agreement, even about what is meant to be at stake in the debates that are allegedly about realism. In the next chapter, we focus on a quite different reason for being underwhelmed by mere existence questions, one that does not go away even after we have decided on a satisfactory sorting mechanism that sorts things into the mind-independent and the mind-dependent. In fact, once the sorting has been done this further reason becomes all the more salient. For suppose you agree that some, perhaps many, objects are mind-dependent but that there is something particularly troubling about the ontological status of such things – you doubt that such things can have genuine existence. (Perhaps, like Jody Azzouni, you think the dividing line between what exists and what doesn’t exist coincides with the dividing line between the mind-independent and the mind-dependent; see Azzouni 2010.) But suppose you are also aware that in advocating this view you will have to face the wrath and/or ridicule of those who think that what

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exists coincides with what there is. You know that you might even be accused of being a closet Meinongian. In that case Chapter 3 might be of some help.

2.9 Further reading Chapter 5 of Brock and Mares’s Realism and Anti-Realism (2007) is a lucid introduction to the metaphysics of colour, which was one of our key illustrations of mind-dependence in section 2.1. The literature on realism contains many worthwhile attempts to explain what mind-dependence is. These differ, to various extents, from our discussion in sections 2.3 and 2.4. Especially worth consulting on this topic are Devitt’s Realism and Truth (2nd ed., 1997), pp. 14–16 and Chapter 13; Pettit (1991); Kukla’s Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Science (2000), Chapter 3; and Brock and Mares (2007), Chapter 3. For good discussions of different sorts of supervenience, the concept we introduced in section 2.4, see Kim (1990), Horgan (1993), and McLaughlin and Bennett’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry ‘Supervenience’ (2018). For a book-length treatment of response-dependence and its position in the realism/anti-realism debate, see Norris’s Truth Matters: Realism, Anti-Realism and Response Dependence 2002. Brock and Mares (2007) is a comprehensive primer on various forms of realism and antirealism. It discusses them both in general and in relation to specific debates. Brock and Mares (2007), Chapter 5 gives an overview of Dummett’s work, which we discussed in 4.3. Devitt (1997), Chapter 14, offers sustained criticism of Dummett’s approach. Devitt argues that ontic matters should be given a higher priority in these debates than epistemic or semantic concerns.

3 Relegating Existence: Prefixing, Prefacing, Reducing and Nonfactualism

I

n some areas of enquiry where questions about what exists or what is real are asked, many theorists take up positions according to which such questions miss the point, or at any rate, presuppose something that is not obviously true. Unlike some of the theorists we encountered in Chapter 1, these theorists are quite willing to grant that there is no interesting distinction between what exists and what there is, or at any rate think that this is not the point at issue. They think something else is going wrong. Suppose I ponder whether there are electrons. On the face of it, this is a fine thing to ponder. Scientists predict phenomena, often successfully, by appealing to the activity of electrons. We are taught that electrons have negative charge and orbit atomic nuclei. If they are physical objects like the macroscopic things we commonly bump into, they are tiny in comparison and cannot be identified by us without assuming lots of theory. If they are not just tiny physical objects, what else might they be? It seems entirely sensible to ask this question and, indeed, to ask whether there are electrons at all. But perhaps it is not. Some would urge that we should not in general assume that everything that looks like a judgement about the nature of some object really is such a judgement. There are other

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options and, if one of these is appropriate, the question of whether electrons exist does not arise. The other options may appear farfetched on first acquaintance, but bear with them. They all have their supporters – though not always as applied to electrons – and they are the soil from which fictionalist views are harvested. In this chapter, we consider what we take to be the four standard alternatives to assuming that there is an existence question to ponder.

3.1 Elliptical or prefixing views Look again. When scientists accurately predict chemical reactions by invoking electrons, they redescribe those phenomena with the concepts of atomic theory. Electrons are posits of that theory, and the theory is highly successful. Clearly, questions arise about how it succeeds, but scientific practice does not immediately yield the claim that there are electrons; it yields only the claim that electrons are posited by a successful theory. When regular folk suppose, judge, recall or assert that electrons have negative charge, they may appear to be claiming something about electrons, something that could be true only if they existed. However, given that electrons are first and foremost posits of a successful theory, an alternative is to claim that we are in fact entertaining the proposition that according to atomic theory electrons have negative charge. This may entail or presuppose that according to atomic theory electrons exist, but it does not entail or presuppose that electrons exist. One strategy, then, for avoiding having to ask existence questions about some topic is to conjecture that what appear to be beliefs, judgements, assertions or sentences about topic-related objects are merely beliefs, judgements, assertions or sentences about how some objects are according to a certain account. When we reflect on a claim with this character or express it in a sentence, we may miss the fact that we are making the more complex claim; we may thus express ourselves elliptically. We may say ‘electrons exist’, when we mean: ‘according to atomic theory, electrons exist’. Some might even argue that a representation of the semantic structure of the sentence ‘electrons exist’ includes a propositional operator that we interpret

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as: ‘According to atomic theory’. Others may be content to argue that the sentence has a more transparent semantic profile but is typically used to convey a proposition of the more complex kind. The sort of view according to which claims that are apparently about objects turn out to be elliptical claims about theories is sometimes called a ‘prefixing’ view because it says that we generate the proposition that is really entertained by prefixing an ‘according to the account’ operator to the proposition that merely appears to be entertained. Such a view, which explains apparent existence questions away, may not seem very promising when applied to electrons. The best explanation for the success of atomic theory is plausibly the literal truth of its claims and these bring with them the existence of electrons. But before ruling on that matter, one should consider whether prefixing is plausible in other arenas. Suppose I am on a game show and I have to pick the unique true claim out of a bunch in order to win a chance to win an electric car. I declare that Robinson Crusoe was alone on an island for more than twenty years. I thereby pick the true claim, but am I thereby committed to the claim that Robinson Crusoe exists? If he does not, how could he have been on an island, even for a second? Yet many will insist that he is a made-up person, not an existing thing. Those who insist that Robinson Crusoe does not exist might consider prefixing as an explanation of how I make a true declaration. I might then be interpreted as having contended that in the novel Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe was alone on an island for more than twenty years. Maybe this presupposes that in the novel Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe exists, but that does not commit anybody to the claim that Robinson Crusoe exists. Suppose now that, having answered that question correctly, I am poised to win the car. I must now select another true statement from among some false ones. I declare that there is a prime number between 8 and 12. Some philosophers deny that numbers exist. They admit that we can perform useful tricks by acting as though they do, but they are perturbed by the strangeness of numbers: numbers do not seem to be physical or mental objects; they do not seem to cause anything. Number sceptics must, though, agree that I won the car; I picked the right claim. How can this be, if numbers do not exist? Again, maybe, prefixing to the rescue. We interpret me as

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contending and believing that according to the theory of arithmetic there is a prime number between 8 and 12. This does not commit me to the existence of such a number. Questions about the existence of fictional objects and of numbers really are controversial, but prefixing let us side-step the question of whether they exist. More precisely, it is one account of how we merely appear to be committed to their existence and how we make true claims. The account does not raise any issue whatsoever about whether there are such things. It is therefore consistent with a denial of their existence. Questions about the existence of electrons too are philosophically controversial. Atomic theory is predictively successful, but predictive success can be had without truth. Maybe prefixing is worth considering here after all. There are, we should remember, some impressive arguments for scepticism about the existence of current theoretical posits; probably the best-known are the pessimistic meta-induction from the history of science (see, for instance, Laudan 1981) and the argument that the truth-value of a theory is underdetermined by all possible observations (see van Fraassen 1980). Actually, there are problems with the prefixing strategy in all three areas: fiction, arithmetic and scientific theory; we will come to these in later chapters. At present, we are surveying strategies for avoiding existence questions and those who are moved by problems with prefixing in the areas we have considered may be especially keen to move on to the next strategy.

3.2 Prefacing and the norms governing practices With what is sometimes called the prefacing option for explaining away troublesome existence problems, we revert to taking beliefs, judgements, assertions, sentences and other apparent truth-bearers in the affected area to be what they seem to be. Given a prefacing account of, say, theoretical scientific entities, the apparent claim that electrons have negative charge, or the apparent claim that electrons exist, is not elliptical for some other claim about what goes on in a

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theory; it is either true or false, so it is what it seems to be. Well, kind of. The catch is that according to this strategy, when somebody makes such a claim, there is typically a background of assumptions or norms in play that blunts or deflects its impact. Interpreters of my thought and talk must realize that there is an assumption in play: perhaps I am only pretending, or hypothesizing, that electrons exist. One should not, then, evaluate my thought or talk simply by asking whether what I say is true. Pretending provides a good illustration. Suppose I pretend that I believe that Santa Claus exists. This might be accomplished by telling Virginia that there is a Santa Claus. It is not the same as believing that I am pretending that Santa Claus exists (though I may do that too) and, when I address Virginia, I do not assert that I am pretending that Santa Claus exists. Rather, I pretend to believe and pretend to assert that Santa Claus exists. So there is no ‘I am pretending that’ prefix ensuring that I believe and assert something about my pretence, rather than about Santa. Instead the belief and the assertion are about Santa if they are about anything, but there is a background set of assumptions about what I am doing. It says: I am not believing and asserting, I am pretending to. It has been suggested that in order to contrast this view with prefixing, we imagine the background information about the norms written in a document. In our illustration this preface would read: ‘Let’s pretend’. The distinction between prefixes and prefaces is due to David Lewis, who writes: There are prefixes or prefaces (explicit or implicit) that rob all that comes after of assertoric force. They disown or cancel what follows, no matter what that may be. The difference is that [w] hen the assertoric force of what follows is cancelled by a prefix, straightaway some other assertion takes place … Not so for prefaces. (Lewis 2005: 315) The pretence version of the preface view is sometimes put forward in opposition to the prefix story to explain how we apparently think and talk about the creatures and events of fiction.1 We can do it by pretending to talk or think about them. This applies to both the authors of fiction and their readers. Jane Austen writes: ‘Mr Bennet was so

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odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three and twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character’ (Chapter 1, Pride and Prejudice). Austen was not aiming to report that someone had some property. Assuming a pretence account, she was merely pretending that there was someone, a Mr Bennett, who had this property. When a reader later avers: ‘Mrs Bennett didn’t understand Mr Bennett, even after more than two decades of marriage’, the reader is pretending too; she aims her pretence to conform to the pretence first set out by Austen. The pretence view can easily be applied to other areas. Concern about how difficult it is to establish the existence of unobservable theoretical scientific posits can be addressed in this way. Because appeals to electrons and genes promote systematic and unified models of phenomena and because they successfully predict hitherto unexpected phenomena, we can usefully pretend that there are electrons and genes. Officially, this side-steps the question of whether they exist. The same approach can be applied to numbers. There are different background assumptions, ones that supply standards other than truth and other than pretence, against which to measure the success of a proposition. These too may be construed as prefaces, in Lewis’s contrived sense. For instance, Bas van Fraassen (1980, 1989) defends a view about the aim and nature of science called constructive empiricism. According to him, science does not aim merely at accurate prediction, but neither does it aim at an accurate description of the world. The latter goal is beyond our reach because, argues van Fraassen, we never have any empirical evidence that would allow us to make defensible claims about the unobservable. Instead, science aims to produce empirically adequate theories: theories that accurately describe the way the world observably is. If a theory correctly describes everything about the observable world, it has met the aim of science, even if it fails to describe correctly the nature and properties of particles that are too small for us to observe directly or aspects of reality that are of a kind that we cannot conceive. If van Fraassen is right, when science is practised, it is as though our practice has been prefaced with: ‘We are doing science, guys!’ This preface installs empirical adequacy as the appropriate standard

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of success for claims within its scope, even though every claim whatsoever is by nature either true or false. The situation here is analogous to pretence without being pretence. Just as I can play a game (Settlers of Catan) in which I pretend that I can build a city out of three rocks and some wheat, whether or not I believe I can, so I can engage in a certain practice (science) which lets me legitimately assert that there are electrons, whether or not I believe there are. Constructive empiricism, with its invocation of empirical adequacy, is thus another kind of prefacing view. Like views that appeal to pretence, it seeks to explain how we can talk and think meaningfully about ontologically controversial objects without committing anybody to belief in their existence. Apart from pretend-truth and empirical adequacy, there are other alternatives to truth that can power a preface view. One might ask about a proposition whether we should respond to it as if it were true, or whether it is true relative to certain presuppositions (Yablo 2006), or whether we should take it to be true for the sake of argument, or whether it is true if we ignore certain existential implications of it (Eklund 2005). And since not everybody assumes that truthaccording-to-a-story is to be assimilated to pretend truth, we might regard truth-according-to-a-story as yet another available yardstick. (Clearly, not everybody will think that all of these options are distinct from one another.) Sometimes it is said of prefacing views that they let us accept propositions without believing them and quasi-assert them without asserting them. (See Brock and Mares 2007: 29–30.) We accept a proposition, it is said, if (or to the extent that) we regard it as meeting whatever standard is set by the norms governing the practice to which it contributes. If I ask you what you did over the weekend, I will accept your response insofar as I believe it – insofar as I take it to be true.2 If we are trying to recall the contents of the novel (rather than, say, maritime history) and I ask you to remind me how long Robinson Crusoe lived alone, I will – assuming a pretence view of fiction – accept your answer insofar as I take it to be true in the relevant pretence. If we are engaged in science (rather than, say, recreational cosmological speculation) and I ask you which subatomic particles contribute mass to a body, your response is acceptable (according to van Fraassen) if it is empirically adequate. In each case, different norms allegedly

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determine what count as ‘legitimate resources for justification … within the context of a certain inquiry’ (Rosen 2005: 15). Accepting a claim involves justifiably acting on it, using it in one’s theorizing, drawing conclusions, acting on those and so on, in accordance with the norms of the practice. (Compare Cohen 1989: 368.) Typically, this kind of commitment will show up in the way one communicates and expresses oneself when engaged in the practice. Thus, one may act as if asserting or assenting to, a proposition; one quasi-asserts (and perhaps quasi-assents to) it. Gideon Rosen usefully distinguishes mere, from ideal, acceptability: A claim may be acceptable for certain purposes, or given our limited state of information, or to a limited degree without being, as we shall say, ideally acceptable. To say that S is ideally acceptable is to say that given the aims and interests of the inquiry, it wants for nothing. An acceptable claim satisfies every desideratum that the enterprise imposes on claims that are to be put forward as resources for justification. … Everyone agrees that a false claim can be acceptable for certain purposes. The [prefacer’s] distinctive claim is that a false claim can be ideally acceptable. (2005: 16) Kalderon (2005a: 2) makes a similar distinction between tentative and full acceptance. One may tentatively accept a claim C of Newtonian mechanics, say, on the grounds that it is a good approximation to the truth and approximate truth is all that is required for the purposes at hand. So the norm for tentative acceptance is not truth. But accepting C in this tentative way is compatible with not acting on C or not using it in one’s theorizing in other contexts, say when doing high-energy physics. Full acceptance is not subject to such variation. Here we have our first substantial hint of what is involved in a fictionalist approach to a region of discourse. Prefixing and prefacing are the most common fictionalist strategies. The quick way to see why they are fictionalist is to notice firstly that both have been proposed as ways of explaining our apparent endorsement of claims about fictional stuff, and secondly, that when they are applied to other arenas, like arithmetic and science, there is thus a strong analogy between the treatment of those other areas and a common treatment of fiction. Chapter 4 explores the nature of fictionalism in detail and

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will reveal that the situation is more complicated. Nevertheless, it is worth noting now that we will be seeing a great deal of both prefixing and prefacing later on. Meanwhile, we are going to discuss two more general strategies for avoiding, or relegating, existence questions. But first we return briefly to the plight of the philosopher mentioned in the previous chapter. Convinced that certain things are mind-dependent and that mind-dependent things lack full existence, she worries that she might be seen as a fellow traveller with Meinongians. The strategies we have discussed may offer her a way out. She might insist that for her the idea that there are mind-dependent objects constitutes a kind of useful fiction, with claims about such objects only assessable as true or false from the perspective of this fiction. Alternatively, she might insist that her declarations about such objects should be seen as governed by a preface: Let’s do as if there exist mind-dependent objects. Adopting either strategy might allow her to keep faith with the view that in reality there exist no mind-dependent objects.

3.3 Non-committing conceptual reductionism While discussing Quine’s paraphrases in section 1.2, we mentioned the people who regret the paucity of honesty. A non-committing conceptual reductionist about honesty denies that we should interpret these people as thinking or talking about honesty; they should rather be interpreted as thinking or talking only about something more familiar, like honest people. Honest people are more familiar because they are clearly objects; arguably, they are physical objects and if so, we can and do observe them. Honesty, on the other hand, is surely not physical. If it is anything, it is a universal, something instantiated by objects and therefore maybe it is only a property and not even an object. If you take the world to consist entirely of objects (physical or otherwise) and if you think universals are not objects, you will think that honesty does not exist. You might then be glad to hear about non-committing conceptual reductionism about honesty, since it denies that the question of whether honesty exists arises. To think

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the question arises is to think that our discourse, our thought, or our activity commits us to believing in something called ‘honesty’ or forces us to consider whether we do. But if claims about honesty are instead claims about honest people, couched in language that obscures this fact, we can avoid the question. It is easy to get started on a non-committing conceptual reduction for honesty, or of other universals. When I apparently judge that honesty is in short supply, I am presumably really judging that there are very few honest people. It might not be so easy to see what the reductive ‘paraphrase’ is in the case of an apparent commitment to the alleged proposition that honesty is one of the cardinal virtues. Still, there is a research programme here. Being a non-committing conceptual reductionist about something does not yet make you a sceptic or unbeliever regarding that thing. Like the other views we discuss in this chapter, it is not a view about what exists, but rather about what we are doing when we think, talk and act. I might believe that universals, including honesty, exist, but contend that I and everybody else can think and talk about honesty without the issue of honesty’s existence arising. Also, not all supporters of a conceptual reduction need regard it as noncommitting. A variant of the view we have just examined says that there really is such a thing as honesty and that our normal thought and talk commits us to believing this, but that all facts about honesty reduce to facts about more familiar items, like honest people. This credulous, committed, kind of conceptual reduction offers an account of what honesty is, rather than an account of why the question of whether it exists and what it is like need not be faced. Only the noncommitting kind of conceptual reduction counts as a way of avoiding existence questions. Historically, non-committing conceptual reductionism about universals, conjoined with the denial that universals exist, has been called ‘nominalism’, and this term is now widely used for the view that there are no abstract objects or, if this is different, the view that there are only concrete ones. In contemporary debates about mathematics, this view, combined with the conviction that mathematical objects would need to be abstract, is sometimes called ‘constructive nominalism’. It was made popular in the middle of the twentieth century when Nelson Goodman and W. V. Quine (1947)

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attempted to paraphrase all sentences that quantify over numbers, classes and other elements of mathematical theory into sentences that do not. The constructive nominalist thinks that ordinary practices like counting, multiplying, epidemiology, physics and the teaching of arithmetic do not commit us to the existence of these. So we avoid existence questions, but because there is no attempt to capture something like the pre-existing Platonistic meaning of mathematical statements in the ensuing equivalences (such statements are regarded as contentless), constructive nominalism is scarcely a conceptual reduction. Nor is it some kind of fictionalism since it holds that the formulas of Platonistic mathematics are merely ‘convenient computational aids’ (Goodman and Quine 1947: 122), not statements to engage with through the use of a prefix or preface.

3.4 Nonfactualism We are outlining four standard strategies for avoiding questions about whether things exist. They involve investigating the contexts in which we appear to judge, claim or presuppose that a controversial thing exists. For the prefixer, my apparent assertion or judgement that Hermione is clever should be construed as the assertion or judgement that, in the Harry Potter stories, Hermione is clever. For the prefacer, the assertion or judgement is about what it seems to be about, but interpreters of my thought and talk should realize that I am operating against a background assumption: maybe I am only pretending (or acting as if) to assert or judge that Hermione is clever. For the noncommitting conceptual reductionist, my assertion or judgement, when properly analysed, turns out not to be about anything called ‘Hermione’; perhaps it is about sense impressions, or other mental states. All three options allow that what seems to be a truth-bearer really is a truth-bearer. Nonfactualism, our fourth strategy, analyses what appear to be truth-bearers as non-truth-bearers. Metaethicists have proposed several nonfactualist views. I might buy flowers for my boss because, as it seems to me, I judge that buying flowers for my boss is the right action to perform in the circumstances. If you asked me why I did it, I might say: ‘It was the right thing to do’, and I might take myself to be asserting thereby that

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buying flowers for my boss was the right thing to do. Metaethical nonfactualists deny that I have any such belief and they deny that I so assert when I utter this sentence. What I do instead depends on the flavour of nonfactualism on display. Fortunately, we can read rough characterizations of each standard flavour of metaethical nonfactualism off the names of the flavours. The prescriptivist holds that in apparently asserting, I prescribe the behaviour of buying flowers in these circumstances; it is as though I am putting it on a ‘to do’ list. Rather than having a moral belief, maybe I have an intention, an entry on my ‘to do list’. The expressivist thinks my apparent assertion that buying flowers for my boss is the right thing to do is an endorsement of the behaviour of buying flowers for my boss. Maybe it expresses a state of mind that consists in my disposition to endorse that behaviour. An emotivist thinks that my apparent assertion is an expression of how I feel about buying flowers for my boss; evidently, I have some positive emotion towards it. There will be no corresponding belief, of course; only the state of mind that consists in me feeling this way. These nonfactualist metaethical positions are traditionally presented as views about the semantics of declarative sentences that appear to ascribe moral properties. What makes the views nonfactualist is that according to them, these sentences are only superficially declarative. Thorough semantic analysis reveals that they are not truth apt. (Of course, there are truth apt sentences in the neighbourhood, like: ‘Buying flowers for my boss is on my “to do” list’, and ‘I feel warm and fuzzy about buying flowers for my boss’, but neither of these can be synonymous with ‘Buying flowers for my boss is the right thing to do’, according to the nonfactualist. One of the former sentences may be true if the latter is appropriate, but the latter simply lacks a truth-value, as a matter of its semantics.) For any metaethical nonfactualist, then, the question of whether there is such a thing as a right action (or as the property of rightness) does not arise, because we never attribute such a property, whether in thought, discourse or other behaviour. On the occasions when we seem to be saying or thinking that some action is right (or wrong), we are in fact merely entertaining or expressing some attitude or feeling towards that action. Nonfactualism has also been applied to the apparent ascription of aesthetic properties (like beautiful) and colours.

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3.5 Descriptive versus prescriptive construals of the above four views We have canvassed four positions according to which there are areas of enquiry, discourse or other intentional activity where appearances can systematically mislead. The surface grammar of a sentence or the phenomenology of a mental state may lead us to think that we are ascribing a certain property to something or committing ourselves to the existence of something. But maybe in certain cases, we should think instead that something else is happening. The prefixer holds that apparent commitments to the truth of certain propositions should be seen as genuine commitments to different propositions. The latter are only elliptically encoded by the surface appearances of our thoughts or actions. The real judgements are about what happens according to some theory or story. The prefacer regards apparent commitments to the truth of propositions as genuine commitments to some feature of those same propositions other than their truth. The non-committing conceptual reductionist regards propositions that appear to be about one kind of thing as propositions that are really about something else. When we analyse them, it turns out that they do not quantify over the entities that made them seem troublesome. The nonfactualist regards certain purported propositions as not truth-evaluable items at all. Something that looks superficially like a declarative sentence might really be an imperative or an exhortation. Something that feels to us like a belief might really be an intention or an emotion. We have presented these as four views about what our practices of thinking, uttering, interpreting and acting are and how these sometimes differ from how they seem. Properly construed, these views say, existence questions about certain topics do not arise. If, when we say genocide is wrong, we are really commenting on the contents of a theory (prefixing), committing ourselves to something other than the truth of the proposition (prefacing), merely talking in an opaque way about ordinary, nonmoral, properties (non-committing conceptual reductionism), or expressing our feelings about genocide (nonfactualism in the form of emotivism), then nothing in our activity invites us to wonder whether there really are right actions. Thus presented, these four views are descriptive. In a different

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terminology, they are hermeneutic, because they seek to interpret our practices and identify underlying norms or structural processes at work in them. However, there are variants of these views that are about what our practices of thinking, uttering, interpreting and acting should be; they are about how we ought to think and behave. According to these prescriptive variants, we should construe the relevant practice in a way that does not commit us to the existence of its posits. The descriptive and prescriptive variants of a view are independent. You might contend both that an analysis of our practices establishes that prefacing is the true account of how we operate with respect to morality and that this is how we should operate, in order to reap the benefits of participating in moral deliberation without the costs of commitment to stuff that might not exist. This would make you both a descriptive and a prescriptive prefacer about morality. You might instead contend that morality is, as a matter of our current practice, an arena in which existence questions do arise, but that we should reconstrue our practice so that they do not. For instance, suppose you believe that when I say genocide is wrong, I am indeed trying to attribute a property to instances of genocide, but, according to you, there is no such property – no right or wrong. For you, an existence question has arisen and you have answered it firmly in the negative. Still, you might believe that it is useful for the community to operate as though there were such things as right and wrong action, perhaps because this promotes decisions, actions or community relationships that are optimal in some non-moral sense. You might counsel us to adopt a pretence form of the prefacing view: we should pretend that genocide is wrong. And when we say that it is wrong, we should, officially, be interpreted as pretending to assert that it is wrong, just as we might when we say that Hermione is clever. This would make you a prescriptive, but not a descriptive, prefacer about morality. Such prescriptive-but-not-descriptive views have also been called revolutionary; if you are a revolutionary prefacer about morality, you think that we should think and act differently from the way we do. For another example of a revolutionary view: suppose you think that our unsuccessful attempts to ascribe rightness and wrongness to actions are effective ways for us (individually or as a community) to

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express feelings about those actions. You might counsel us to adopt the emotivist form of nonfactualism: we should officially regard the claim that genocide is wrong as nothing more than an expression of emotion. As these illustrations suggest, we can expect revolutionary views to be accompanied by scepticism about an existence claim, rather than by the insistence that there is no coherent existence claim to address. Also, we should not expect these revolutionaries to take to the streets, demanding that we reform our construals of what we say, think and do. Although they are revisionists, their position can be summarized satisfactorily as one about the status quo. With respect to the topic they are pondering (ethical properties, mathematical objects, possible worlds, or whatever) they think that (1) our thought and talk commits us to a belief in certain objects, or at least to the possibility that there are such objects. They believe, though, that (2) there are no such objects. Still, they also believe that (3) it is appropriate for us to think and talk the way we do on this topic. Just why it is appropriate depends on which of the four views outlined earlier in this chapter is the one they hold. We will usually not allude to revolutionary views as such in later chapters, because they are merely the conjunction of prescriptivism (the view that we ought to adopt one of the four strategies) with the denial of descriptivism (the view that one of the four strategies describes the way we currently think and talk). Our purposes are better served if we remember that descriptivism and prescriptivism about an arena are logically independent.3 The theorists who get called ‘fictionalists’ are to be found among subscribers to the first two kinds of views we have surveyed in this chapter. We think non-committing conceptual reductionism should be excluded. For one thing, it assigns no role of any kind to fiction. Even more fundamentally, as a view about conceptual reduction it challenges the view that the apparent meaning of a target sentence is its real meaning: ‘Honesty is in short supply’ turns out to be analysable as ‘There are very few honest people’ and so as having a quantificational meaning or content. Fictionalists, by contrast, treat sentences from the target discourse as having a standard facevalue reading – as containing genuine singular terms that purport to name genuine objects, say (a person, in the case of ‘Holmes was a detective’; a number, in the case of a sentence like ‘2 is an even

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prime’), but they claim that, even so, existence should be relegated. Still, non-committing conceptual reductionism does at least take its target sentences as having familiar roles: what seem to be truth-bearers really are truth-bearers. Nonfactualism, on the other hand, denies even this. Fictionalism as a result holds no truck with nonfactualism either. We have now introduced some of the main elements of fictionalist views. In Chapter 4, we provide a closer study and a clearer attempt at a definition, followed by a chapter that looks at some of the pre-history of fictionalism and some of the major divisions within fictionalism.

3.6 Further reading Sections ‘Elliptical or prefixing views’ and ‘Prefacing and the norms governing practices’ distinguished prefixing from prefacing. This distinction is drawn, using that terminology, in Lewis 2005. For a defence of prefixing about fiction, see Lewis’s ‘Truth in Fiction’ (1978). Field’s Realism, Mathematics & Modality (1989: 3) defends prefixing about mathematics. Van Fraassen’s The Scientific Image (1980) defends a preface view about science known as constructive empiricism. Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990) is a seminal work that defends a pretence prefacing approach to our talk of fictional objects. Joyce (2005) defends the pretence form of prefacing about morality. For a fuller list of views that invoke prefixing or prefacing, see Chapter 7 below. For the classic attempt at nominalizing mathematics, mentioned briefly in section 3.1, see Goodman and Quine (1947). For a more recent attempt that is now regarded, a little confusingly, as a harbinger of fictionalism, see Field (1980). (We will discuss Field’s work more fully in Chapter 7.) In section 3.4, we distinguished several sorts of nonfactualism about the moral. For prescriptivism, see Hare (1952). For a contemporary, nuanced version of expressivism see Gibbard (1990). For emotivism, see Stevenson (1950).

4 From Fiction to Fictionalism

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fictionalist about some region of discourse holds roughly the following view: the received story about what goes on in the discourse is just that, a story; its significance for our lives derives primarily from the value it has by virtue of being the kind of story it is, rather than from the possibility that it accurately describes the way things are. We stress again that this is rough, but the bunch of views about various arenas that have been called fictionalist, either by their proponents or by commentators, forms only a loose family, and there are many different characterizations of fictionalism out there. It is consequently hard to be both precise and pithy, but in this chapter, we will try. (One caveat. There is one prominent kind of fictionalism – fictionalism about models – that we are deliberately leaving to the side since it is motivated by issues to do with methodology rather than ontology.) These roughly correspond to what it means for something to be a story, but not just a story. According to the first condition, our interaction with the discourse is, or should be, similar in significant respects to our interaction with a fiction: a story, a role-play, a private fantasy or the like. According to the second condition, claims made within the discourse are nonetheless able to make a serious contribution to certain ends served by the discourse, one that is sufficiently weighty to warrant engaging with the discourse. We will explain and distinguish these conditions, thereby characterizing

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fictionalism fairly precisely, even if not pithily. Importantly, this characterization allows us to see why certain views about an area of discourse are sometimes characterized as fictionalist even though they don’t satisfy both conditions. The first two sections of the chapter consider some puzzles about fiction itself, since the first condition on being fictionalist appeals to analogies with fiction. Armed with lessons from fiction, we prepare the ground for our two conditions on fictionalism in section 4.3 and formulate them in section 4.4.

4.1 The strangeness of fiction Most of the family resemblances among fictionalist theses are shared with standard solutions to the problem of accounting for thought and talk about fictional objects. So although fiction is the subject of a later chapter, a preliminary discussion of it is appropriate here. Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 historical novel The Day of the Jackal is still read avidly and onlookers typically will not find this perplexing. Any top-class thriller has a decent shelf life. This one inspired a classic movie and taps into the public’s enduring fascination with the reallife, successful, assassination plot against American president John Kennedy in 1963. Yet in some ways it is perplexing that the book, or indeed any work of fiction, is read avidly. Much of what it describes is not part of the way the world really is, or was, objectively. According to the story, the title character was employed in 1962 by French dissidents to assassinate the French president, Charles de Gaulle, and died in the attempt. But the title character does not belong to history. Is it defensible for us to recount this story and recommend it to others? Those who insist that Lee Harvey Oswald had an accomplice when he assassinated Kennedy are typically speculating about world history, but the official pronouncement is that there was no accomplice, no John Harvey Smith with extra guns. If you are content with that ruling, you probably refrain from entertaining and retelling the accomplice stories, unless you are engaged in the history of history. By contrast, those who assert that the Jackal was employed by French dissidents are typically not hypothesizing about world

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history. The official pronouncement is that there was no (historical) Jackal to be engaged. Yet even if you are content with this ruling, you might regard Forsyth’s story as a great read and take it to bed. Philosophers are intrigued by this contrast. It reminds us that fiction can strike people as valuable or significant in ways that mere falsehood does not. Philosophers wonder whether people are justified in so regarding it. If they are, what is peculiarly valuable or significant about fiction? Can this value or significance reasonably attach to it even if much of it is false and is not aimed at truth, or can we only justify enthusiasm for fiction when it aims to be true in some sense – maybe as a comment on the human condition? These questions raise another – the one that will occupy us throughout this section and the next: Are claims that occur only in stories literally false anyway? We have been proceeding as though they are; yet people often act as though they believe them to be literally true, asserting that the Jackal was an assassin as readily as they assert that Lee Harvey Oswald was. Attempts to explain this conduct expose a nest of vipers. Each of the three sentences below, if uttered sincerely under normal conditions, apparently ascribes a property, indeed the same property, to an individual. Each of them is probably also intended to convey the content of beliefs that the speaker has and undertakes to quicken in the hearer. (1) Lee Harvey Oswald was an assassin. (2) The Jackal was an assassin. (3) John Harvey Smith was an assassin. Assuming normal circumstances of utterance, (1) attributes a property to somebody who actually existed, while (2) and (3) apparently do not and since this would seem to be what all three are supposed to do, (2) and (3) arguably fail in some respect. For this reason, some would say that (2) and (3) are false; others go so far as to deem them meaningless and, although that verdict is controversial, it is important for us to understand why some people reach it. The expressions ‘the Jackal’ and ‘John Harvey Smith’, unlike ‘Lee Harvey Oswald’, seem designed not to refer to any object and

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thus seem to be empty or vacuous names as a matter of linguistic meaning. There are complexities that effect these particular expressions and we should sweep these out of the way, but that is fairly easy to do. Syntactically, ‘The Jackal’ looks like a definite description rather than a name. Still, it functions semantically as a name here, rather like ‘The Glorious Revolution’ or ‘The Holy Roman Empire’ does; in Forsyth’s novel, it was the title character’s code name. A definite description is an expression of the form ‘the F’ that purportedly denotes a unique item. Examples include: ‘the oldest caterpillar’, ‘the log in the eye of the walrus’ and ‘the author of the longest novel’. ‘The Jackal’ has the same form, but cannot be interpreted the way an ordinary definite description is. As for ‘John Harvey Smith’, we introduced it ourselves in an earlier paragraph as a dummy singular term. Arguably, calling it a name is not consistent with the somewhat obscure semantic role it played when it occurred back then. However, we can imagine somebody misunderstanding our discussion of the nonexistent accomplice and uttering (3) on the assumption that we were describing a real co-assassin. This hypothetical speaker utters a sentence in which ‘John Harvey Smith’ functions as a name – a name that apparently has no referent. All in all, it is reasonable to regard both ‘The Jackal’ and ‘John Harvey Smith’ as names, or at least as functioning like names, and empty names at that.1 This creates a problem: it calls into question the meaningfulness of every sentence containing one of these names, because when you go looking for meanings for components of the sentence in order to compute the meaning of the whole, you find a gap, rather than an object, corresponding to the offending name. This makes the name itself meaningless if the only way for a name to be meaningful is for it to be non-empty – for there to be an existing object that is its referent. We will assume this controversial condition for a while, since it has many supporters, as has the idea that such sentences express gappy propositions.2 We will feed in three more sentences that introduce a related problem. Because there are many conspiracy theories surrounding Kennedy’s death, we can imagine a confused somebody uttering: (1’) Lee Harvey Oswald does not exist

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and being corrected. This suggests that (1’) is meaningful and false. It also suggests that (1’) is potentially informative: it might have been true and the fact that it is not is worth pointing out in our imagined scenario. Meanwhile, it is easy to imagine: (2’) The Jackal does not exist being asserted helpfully in a clarificatory chat about which characters in Forsyth’s novel are historical and which are merely fictional. In this context, (2’) would seem to be meaningful, true and informative. And if somebody was confused by our earlier discussion of accomplices and particularly by our use of the expression ‘John Harvey Smith’, an obliging interlocutor might explain that: (3’) John Harvey Smith does not exist. So (3’) too seems meaningful, true and potentially informative. Of course, (2’) and (3’) apparently contain empty names, so although they seem meaningful and true, we have just met a worry about how they could be either. That worry is exacerbated by another feature of these two sentences, one they share with (1’): each seems to attribute nonexistence to an individual. We saw in section 1.3 that this, the property view of existence, is controversial, but has its supporters. Let us assume something like this property view for now and observe the carnage it wreaks. Arguably, any statement that attributes nonexistence to an individual is either meaningful but false, or meaningless and, so lacking in truth-value, and arguably, therefore, no such statement can be informative. This would overturn our pronouncements above about these sentences. Here is why. A statement attributing nonexistence will be meaningful, but false, if there is an individual for the sentence to be about, as in (1’). Since Lee Harvey Oswald exists, there is somebody for (1’) to be about and it is meaningful, but he fails to have the property of not existing and that makes (1’) false. This was indeed our verdict on (1’). Meanwhile, if we buy the worry about empty names, a statement attributing nonexistence will be meaningless if there is no individual (no bearer of ‘The Jackal’ or of ‘John Harvey Smith’, for instance) to be talked or thought about. In

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this respect, it is like any other sentence involving an empty name. This reasoning delivers the verdict that no statement attributing nonexistence is true. Something has gone wrong somewhere, because although they contain empty names and attribute nonexistence, we have seen that (2’) and (3’) appear to be true. And not only true but informative. There are huge literatures on empty names and existential claims. We provided a glimpse of the latter in Chapter 1 and will revisit this literature shortly, but consider now the former: the semantic writings about the meanings of words. Within this debate, the question of whether there is a problem of empty names is highly contentious. Some participants agree with the assumption we used to generate the problem: they think empty names are meaningless (see Salmon 1986; Soames 2002), and then proceed to offer various solutions to the problem. But not everybody in this field regards sentences containing empty names as meaningless. We saw in section 1.2 that for Quine, a name can be meaningful and contribute meaning to a sentence even if it lacks a bearer. There have been several proposals about how this could be, and we will mention the Fregean and Russellian ones. Some, inspired by Gottlob Frege (1892a), think that we are wrong to construe names as mere labels. Instead, the primary component of a name’s meaning is a way of conceiving of something, usually called its sense. Sometimes, two names, such as ‘Snoop Dogg’ and ‘Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr’, have different senses – perhaps because they summon up different properties of an object – despite referring to the same individual. Sometimes a name, like ‘John Harvey Smith’, has a sense but no reference. According to Frege, the sense of a name determines its referent, if it has one, and a name is meaningful so long as it has a sense. So the problem of empty names does not arise for Frege: ‘John Harvey Smith’ can be meaningful, even if John Harvey Smith does not exist, because the name can still be associated with a way of thinking about some potential individual. By contrast, Bertrand Russell (1910/11) argued that a name is merely an abbreviation, or substitute, for one or more definite descriptions; the meaning of a name is that of the associated definite description(s). For instance, the semantics of the empty name ‘John Harvey Smith’ might be revealed by associating that

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name with the description: ‘The man who helped out with the assassination of John Kennedy’. Russell had earlier argued, in 1905, that semantically a definite description is not a single linguistic unit; rather, it gets dismantled in the semantic structure of any sentence to which it contributes. On analysis, according to Russell’s account, the sentence: The man who helped out with the assassination of John Kennedy was an assassin turns out to have the structure: There is at least one, and at most one, man who helped out with the assassination of John Kennedy, and that man was an assassin. According to common wisdom, this is false, since nobody helped out with that assassination, but there is no reason, according to Russell, for regarding it as meaningless. In particular, no element of it refers to a nonexistent thing; rather, the sentence is existentially quantified (as we see from the phrase ‘there is at least one … ’). Now since we are assuming that ‘John Harvey Smith’ stands in semantically for ‘the man who helped out with the assassination of John Kennedy’, the sentence: (3) John Harvey Smith was an assassin also comes out false but meaningful on Russell’s analysis and this will strike many as the right result intuitively. So Russell, like Frege, avoids the problem of empty names. This semantic debate about the content of empty names also offers competing assessments of the problem of negative existentials if we supplement its wranglings with some from debates about the nature of existence. In generating this problem, we assumed a property view of existence (or nonexistence), but we saw in Chapter 1 that this view has many detractors. In particular, it is opposed by the quantificational account of existence. Many, in line with Quine (1948) and inspired by the Russellian (1905) theory of descriptions that we have just discussed, take the nature of existence to be revealed semantically, not by a predicate, but by existential quantification. They

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deny that when I apparently attribute existence or nonexistence to an object, I attribute a property to that object. Instead, I am saying that there is, or it is not the case that there is, a unique thing that has that property. For example, to say that: The man who helped out with the assassination of John Kennedy does not exist is to say that: It is not the case that (there is exactly one man who helped out with the assassination of John Kennedy.) This sentence is true, meaningful and potentially informative. If we also adopt Russell’s 1910/11 view that names stand in for definite descriptions, together with our earlier specific hypothesis about which description is associated with ‘John Harvey Smith’, it follows that: (3’) John Harvey Smith does not exist is likewise true, meaningful and informative. Hence, Russell’s view about the semantics of names and descriptions combines with a quantificational account of the nature of existence to give us one way of avoiding the problem of negative existentials. The several views about semantics and ontology we have canvassed here, along with others, have been contorted and combined in sundry ways. They have been applied, more or less convincingly, to the contents of thoughts as well as the contents of sentences. None of the resulting packages of views has carried the day, so one cannot ignore puzzles about empty names, existential statements or the corresponding thoughts. One cannot blithely assume that these problems have been solved to one’s satisfaction. They form a menacing backdrop to what follows. Now, before turning our attention to the nature of fictionalism, we must attend to another matter about the status of our sentences, one that is more vital to our current topic and returns us to the contrast between idle talk about nonexistent accomplices (as in (3)) and immersion in fiction (as in (2)). It is time to focus explicitly on the

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truth-values of what is apparently said by the three sentences we initially exhibited. (1) says something true: Lee Oswald was an assassin. If (3) says anything at all, it is either false or lacks a truth-value. ‘John Harvey Smith’ is a do-it-yourself expression purloined by us to make a point about accomplice theories; it does not signify anything or anybody, let alone any assassin. (2) is more complicated, because unlike ‘John Harvey Smith’ ‘The Jackal’ is the name of a character from a rich and intricate fiction. Debates in the theory of meaning notwithstanding, we may be happy to assert, judge or believe that the Jackal does not exist, just as we are happy to hold that John Harvey Smith does not, but in the former case, we might also be happy to go on and ascribe properties to our apparently nonexistent subject. We might say of the Jackal that he was an assassin, or that he was (spoiler alert!) grudgingly admired by the police detective who pursued and ultimately dispatched him. If we do, we may well be regarded as having spoken truly. Certainly, if we volunteered this information in a quiz, we would be closer to winning the car. Not so, if we said of the Jackal that he was a befuddled drunk throughout the whole of 1963 and that he constantly leaked details of the operation to the press. So even though ‘The Jackal’ is an empty name and even if the Jackal does not exist, it might be argued that there are many things that we can truly assert or believe about him and others that we can falsely assert or believe about him, on the basis of the information that makes up the plot of Forsyth’s novel. The same can reasonably be contended of any ahistorical character or object from any moderately rich body of fiction, but not of all nonexistent purported objects. It can be said about Oedipus, who killed his Father, but not Joe Bloggs, who is not anybody. This is the strangeness of fiction – which sets it apart from mere nonexistent fare.

4.2 Strategies for strangeness In the case of (supposed) objects of fiction, then, there is a temptation to regard some ascriptions of properties to them as true

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and others as false, even when we are happy to say that they do not exist. It has been argued that we should not succumb too readily to temptation. Some insist that none of these claims about the Jackal, or Oedipus, or Hamlet, or Robinson Crusoe, are true. They are just like the corresponding claims made about the nonexistent. Even the ones that seem true are not really. Richard Joyce takes this view: If pressed in the appropriately serious way ‘You don’t really believe that there was once a goblin who liked jam, do you?’ then I will ‘step out’ of the fiction and deny those very propositions that a moment ago I was apparently affirming. (Joyce 2005: 291) But if it is not true that the Jackal was an assassin, how is it that saying he was handy for helping us to win cars? And how does this claim differ from the claim that the Jackal was a befuddled drunk? The two standard options here correspond to the options that are most commonly embraced by fictionalists about morality, modality, mathematics and more. They are prefixing and prefacing. We introduced them as general strategies for avoiding existence questions in sections 3.1 and 3.2 respectively. They have certainly been used by investigators of fiction to avoid existence questions. According to the prefixer about fictional objects, we need not claim that there are true ascriptions of properties to fictional objects, or to anything else nonexistent. There are, however, true claims of the form: In the fiction F, object o has property P. In some of these claims, object o is fictional, as in: In the novel The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth, the Jackal was an assassin and In the novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe was alone on an island for more than twenty years.

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In other true claims of this form, object o uncontroversially exists, as in: In the novel The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth, General Charles de Gaulle survives an assassination attempt in 1963. There are also false claims of this form, such as: In The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, Jiminy Cricket is Pinocchio’s conscience and In the novel The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth, the Jackal does not exist. Those we deem false because in these cases it is not a truth in the fiction F that property P is possessed by object o. Thus, there are sentences that concern stories and what is in them that can be believed, doubted, asserted or denied, truly or not, depending on whether there is such a story and whether, according to it, things are the way the sentences present them as being. Sometimes, when we consider such a sentence, we delete, suppress, ignore or forget about the prefix. This is easier to envisage in language than it is in thought. We may say, ‘The Jackal was an assassin’ in order to assert that this is so in Forsyth’s novel. Context may be required to determine whether one is making a prefixed, or an unprefixed, claim and what the prefix is. In a conversation about European political history, an utterance of ‘The Jackal tried to assassinate De Gaulle’ might best be understood as a misguided attempt to say something true about the way things really are by a speaker who mistook the novel for a history. At a book club symposium, an uttered token of this same sentence might best be understood as abbreviating a true prefixed sentence about what the novel contains. This prefixing approach to claims about the contents of a fiction says that understanding such claims does not require us to consider whether fictional objects really exist. The question does not arise, because we are not committing ourselves to their existence when we accept the claims understood as suitably prefixed. The same is true of the prefacing approach. We have just seen that, for the prefixer, a

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claim put forward for consideration that is apparently about a fictional object is likely in fact to be merely a claim about what happens in a story. By contrast, for the prefacer, the claim put forward really is about the object. But where the prefixer asks whether the claim put forward (the one about the story) is true, the prefacer asks whether the claim put forward (this time, the one about the fictional object) satisfies some norm other than truth. As we saw in section 3.2, a common prefacing approach, especially to fiction, is to take that norm to be truth in a pretence. The prefacer then asks: if we are pretending that things are as depicted in the novel, is The Jackal an assassin? The antecedent of that conditional functions, according to people for whom the label resonates, as a preface; it tells us which norm to apply when we evaluate the sentence. According to the pretence or make-believe account of our engagement with fiction (especially as developed in Walton 1990), speakers engage in pretend-assertion when uttering sentences that purport to be about fictional objects; they pretend that they are expressing beliefs rather than actually expressing beliefs. Correspondingly, if you endorse some claim about a fictional object (perhaps by drawing some conclusion from the thought that the Jackal was an assassin), yours is a pretend or make-believe endorsement. Just what this involves depends on which account of pretence should be adopted. Walton, in fact, suggests (1990: 406– 411) that a speaker can respond appropriately to fiction – and hence, pretend in the sense Walton has in mind – without consciously choosing to make-believe. Each of the following sentences is true, according to a different pretence. The Jackal drove to the railway station at Tulle in a Renault Caravelle. Robinson Crusoe was alone on an island for more than twenty years. And the following sentence is false, according to yet another pretence: Jiminy Cricket is Pinocchio’s conscience though it is true according to still another, namely Disney’s.

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We are ready for a limited comparison of these two strategies. One advantage of prefacing over prefixing is that it more obviously avoids the problem of empty names in the semantics of natural language and its counterpart problem for the structure of thoughts. A prefixer thinks that I can avoid worrying about whether Pinocchio exists when I make claims about his exploits, because I am only talking about what is true according to the story. Certainly, according to the story, there is an individual called ‘Pinocchio’, but this does not explain how I, in the real world, can use a name to say something meaningful about that individual. A use of a sentence like ‘Pinocchio’s nose grew longer’ is about something that happens in a story. The story itself exists as part of the real world, but since it is fictional many of the events it chronicles and the items involved in them do not, so the word ‘Pinocchio’ does not seem to refer to anything in the real world. It seems to be empty. How then, according to the prefixer, does the sentence (let alone any thought it expresses) get to have content? This is not a hopeless predicament for the prefixer, because the literature on empty names is rife with subtleties and there is pressure to resolve this problem quite independently of prefixing. For instance, the very same problem arises for beliefs about nonexistent things and our reports of them. But the problem does not even arise for the prefacer, who contends that when we utter sentences like ‘Pinocchio’s nose grew longer’, we merely pretend to talk about an individual. Hence, we merely pretend to refer with the name ‘Pinocchio’: we pretend that there is an individual and that the correct theory of how the reference of names is determined ensures that the name ‘Pinocchio’ is borne by that individual. Just as we often import real physics into our pretences without fanfare, pretending that certain (pretend) objects obey standard laws of nature, so we import the real theory of reference (whatever that is) into our pretences, pretending that certain names refer to (pretend) objects. (See Kripke 2013 on this point.) On a primitive scorecard, then we might award one point to the prefacer. On the other hand, prefacing raises metaphysical issues that prefixing avoids. For a prefixer, when we apparently believe, doubt, assert or deny a claim that purports to be about fictional objects, there certainly is a claim that we are believing, doubting, asserting or denying. It is not the same one, to be sure; rather it is a proposition

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that we entertain or express elliptically by leaving off a prefix. But there is no mystery for the prefixer about the attitudes we have towards propositions or the way we evaluate them. Prefacing, however, requires a theory about what we are doing when we appear to entertain and evaluate propositions that appear to be about fictional objects. Truth is not the yardstick. We have discussed the hypothesis that engaging with fiction involves buying into a pretence, or makebelief. When I watch the Muppet Movie, or read about Harry Potter, I pretend or make-believe that the world of the fiction is part of the way things are. Some propositions are true according to that pretence and others are not. This raises the question of whether this truly is how we engage with fiction; maybe there is some better hypothesis than the pretence one. It also raises questions about what sorts of mental state I am in when, for instance, I apparently endorse the claim that Kermit is on a road trip to Hollywood. Is it a belief? If not, how is it similar to, and how is it different from, a belief? Like the obstacles for the prefixer that we just noted, there is promising research into these and the latter one arises for metaphysicians (and perhaps psychologists) anyway. Whether or not recounting or apprehending part or all of a story counts as pretending, we often do pretend, when engaged in playground games, live action role play, acting and perhaps lying. So we need an account of pretenders’ mental states at some point. Still, these problems immediately arise if you buy into prefacing about claims involving fictional objects and they do not arise if you are a prefixer. That makes it 1 all, on our pretend scorecard. Here is a second, perhaps more serious, problem for the prefixer. Suppose I tell my young nephew that Santa delivers gifts to children everywhere on Christmas Eve. When he protests that surely this cannot be done without travelling at incredible speed and negotiating time zones, I might admit that Santa does not really do this. I might even say that my earlier claim was actually false. If I go this far, prefixing has difficulty explaining how I can do so coherently. A prefixer presumably thinks that my first remark was elliptical for something like: ‘According to the standard description of Santa’s exploits, he delivers gifts to children everywhere on Christmas Eve’. If I say this, I do so truly, even if my nephew mistakes it for something non-elliptical and false; so I should not claim later that I said something

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false. (Joyce 2005: 292, makes this point.) According to the prefixer, then, I misspeak, when I contend that I spoke falsely earlier. It is only the unprefixed part of the sentence that is false. The prefacer, meanwhile, has no problem explaining my remarks. The prefacer thinks that my first contribution was subject to some standard of evaluation other than truth – perhaps, pretend truth. According to the prefacer, I am correct when I later explain that I spoke falsely. This then puts the prefacer ahead by two points to one. But enough of this coarse-grained comparison. Some claims that appear to commit one to the existence of a fictional object cannot easily be accommodated by either prefixing or prefacing. Consider: (4) Robinson Crusoe is more famous than any real castaway. (5) Even today, young readers admire Robinson Crusoe. These are often called meta-fictional claims, to distinguish them from the object-fictional claims we have analysed up till now. An object-fictional claim is a claim that, when taken at face value, without regard to any backgrounded prefix or preface, can be said to be true or false (or neither) in the relevant work of fiction, a status that depends only on the content of the fiction supplemented with whatever information is needed to help to fill out the details of the ‘fictional world’ described by the fiction.3 By contrast, a metafictional claim is one that appears to involve a fictional object, but whose truth-value depends at least in part on how things are outside a fiction. Prefixing and prefacing seem like contenders for describing the thought and discourse that can be captured by object-fictional claims; both can explain how we get inside a story to contemplate the events within. But the thinker or utterer of a meta-fictional claim seems to be looking at the story from the outside, and neither strategy seems suitable for that sort of claim. In particular, prefixing does not account for the appeal to fictional objects in (4) or (5) because those claims do not report how things are according to the relevant fiction; they report how things are in ordinary life. Prefacing fares little better: it is at least not obvious that anybody is pretending that some proposition holds when they utter (4) or (5), or when somebody adopts the attitude described in one of them. (In the next chapter we will see that things are not that simple, and that some

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prefixers and prefacers have suggested broadening their accounts so that meta-fictional claims are not left out in the cold. But for now we are interested in explaining why despite the popularity and power of the strategies of prefixing and prefacing many philosophers think that more needs to be said.) In short, many philosophers contend that we cannot confine fictional objects entirely within their stories and we do not merely pretend to assert, ask and wonder about them. Because of metafictional claims, some take seriously the hypothesis that there are fictional objects and characters after all: heroes we wish we could be, places we would like to visit and elixirs we are glad not to have imbibed. These almost certainly will not be organisms with flesh and blood in the same way that we are, locations with real spatiotemporal coordinates and liquids with real chemical constitutions that could, in principle, be sold over the counter. Just what sorts of things fictional objects are on this account is a lively focus of research. Saul Kripke notes helpfully that an object can exist and share essential features with an organism without being an organism: a toy duck is not a duck (2013: 89). Maybe fictional people are, or are very similar to, toy people. But there is more to be said because, unlike toy ducks, real ducks and real people, Robinson Crusoe and the Jackal are not real physical objects. Perhaps they are real abstract objects, as numbers and games are often taken to be by those who believe in them: abstract objects created by authors. (This kind of account of fictional objects, which nowadays often goes under the names ‘artefactualism’ or ‘creationism’, has gained increasing popularity over the last two decades.) We have presented prefixing and prefacing as rival strategies and we have just noted that some regard neither as satisfactory, preferring to confront and embrace the possibility of genuine fictional objects. However, some writers draw on more than one of these three approaches. Perhaps the most obvious way to do this is to argue that although many meta-fictional claims might, after all, really be statements about (genuine, existing) fictional objects, objectfictional claims ought to be handled either by prefixing or prefacing, because they are not claims about these real objects. But now that the distinction between meta-fictional and object-fictional claims is available, a new objection to prefixing looms, raising the possibility

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that the prefacing strategy is the only candidate for making sense of object-fictional claims. The prefixer thinks I can truly say that the Jackal was an assassin, so long as my claim is underlyingly about what the story says the Jackal is like, rather than about what some object called ‘The Jackal’ is like. Surely, though, the claim that a story says a certain thing is meta-fictional. It is not about a fictional individual. It is about the story, so its truth depends on how things are outside the world of the fiction – specifically, on how the story has been constructed. One way to illustrate this is by exhibiting a prefixed transform of a passage from a story: ‘Any problems?’ the Jackal asked, according to Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal (Forsyth 1971: 113). In the same story, it says that the Belgian armourer looked embarrassed. ‘Well, yes, I am afraid so’ the story represents him as saying. The story then says that the assassin surveyed him coldly, with no expression on his face, and that his eyes were half closed and sullen. In the same story, the assassin is next reported as saying, ‘You told me that if I came back on 1 August I could have the gun by 4th August to take home with me’. The flow of the story is recoverable from this extraordinary rendition, but the rendition itself reports what the story says, rather than telling the story. If we think there is such a thing as telling a story, prefixing does not do it. Prefacing, plausibly does. (Walton 1978; Joyce 2005 make this point.) Hence, we should probably accept that prefixing only preserves the idea that object-fictional claims are truth-evaluable by treating them as meta-fictional. This may or may not be a strike against prefixing, depending on whether telling a story really is different from reporting the contents of one. But given that prefacing replaces truth with a different norm, it raises the possibility of combining the view that meta-fictional claims are truth-evaluable with the view that object-fictional claims are not. Kripke’s (2013) account incorporates this perspective on object-fictional statements, while sharply

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distinguishing them from various sorts of meta-fictional ones. It is an account that combines prefacing, prefixing and a commitment to the existence of fictional objects. Where, in all these accounts, are claims of nonexistence? They are meta-fictional claims par excellence, and they have proved to be among the most problematic. In section 2 we briefly gave Russell’s account of such claims of nonexistence, but admitted that one shouldn’t blithely assume that the problem of their analysis should be considered solved. If anything, that was an understatement. Russell and Frege both thought that names had a kind of descriptive content, and Russell relies on this in his analysis. But such descriptivist accounts of names are now widely seen as deeply mistaken, thanks to Kripke’s arguments in Naming and Necessity as well as related arguments by Donnellan (Donnellan 1972; Kripke 1980). There is now deep disagreement about how they should be analysed. (For Kripke, they are strange outliers; cf. Kripke 2013: 144–160). We revisit such claims in Chapter 6. We are now ready to take on fictionalism. Our excuse for pursuing the topic of fiction so far at this time is that all of the sorts of objectfictional and meta-fictional claims we have met in this and the previous section appear to have analogues in other realms: number theory, moral theory and modal enquiry, for instance. Our explorations in this section thus prefigure a framework that is applicable to many arenas. However, the relationship between philosophical treatments of claims within and about fiction, on the one hand, and fictionalism about various sorts of claims, on the other, is somewhat oblique, as we shall now see.

4.3 Defining fictionalism: What’s the problem? The philosophical community is as likely as any other to coin specialized terminology, but then allow its usage to drift haphazardly or allow it to be applied differently by different practitioners. ‘Illocutionary act’ is not always used in accordance with the intention J. L. Austin had when introducing it, just as ‘atom’ no longer applies, in scientific

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discourse, to indivisible particles. Sometimes, the drift is due to refinements in our understanding of which properties are essential to the things originally labelled with a term, but often not. (‘Realism’ is such a term, as we saw earlier.) ‘Fictionalism’ is yet another culprit. Etymology bequeaths the assumption that something, kind of thing, or body of information under scrutiny deserves a fictionalist treatment if it is fiction, or like fiction. ‘Fictionalism’ evokes something made up, like a character in a novel. More generally, perhaps, it evokes something that does not exist – maybe many metaphysicians once presumed that ‘fictional’ and ‘nonexistent’ can be used interchangeably, so that it would be reasonable for nonbelievers to describe numbers, discredited scientific posits, God and John Harvey Smith as fictional. Over time, though, the notion of (literary) fiction became central to what it means for something to be fictional, and so the question of the nature of fiction became important to understanding what it is for something to be like fiction. Meanwhile, however, use of the term ‘fictionalism’ has gathered momentum independently of the study of fiction, and the views it now designates – about numbers, morals and more – do not all display defining features of the most popular, current views about fiction. Commentators have stuck the label onto positions that they take to be similar to others that have already been certified as fictionalist, and the tribe has increased accordingly without any formal vetting process. Not everybody is entirely happy with this. Matti Eklund writes the following in his Stanford Encyclopedia entry on fictionalism (Eklund 2017). ‘The farther we depart from paradigmatically fictionalist theses, clearly relating [a] discourse … to fiction or pretense, the more questionable it becomes whether the views discussed really deserve the label “fictionalism”.’ Richard Joyce’s (2005) moral fictionalism is faithful to the etymology. Joyce holds that moral claims are all false, but that engagement in moral deliberation and discourse is useful for streamlining and policing our decision-making. Hence, we should pretend that many familiar moral precepts are true. Such precepts are fictions, or like fictions in crucial respects. We accept that torture is wrong by pretending we believe it, just as we do with the claim that a crocodile bit Hook’s arm off. In the former case, and perhaps also in the latter, something worthwhile accrues to us if we do this. Certainly, not everybody

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regards all fiction as false or our engagement with it as pretence, but Joyce’s analogy between morality and fiction nonetheless helps to explain and defend the view. Other fictionalisms depart more radically from treatments of fiction. Gideon Rosen writes: Fictionalism is now a familiar option in a number of areas. The present revival may be dated with some precision to 1980 – that annus mirabilis which saw the publication of both The Scientific Image [(Van Fraassen 1980)] and Science without Numbers [(Field 1980)]. (Rosen 2005: 17) But the analogy with fiction is somewhat strained when applied to Field’s 1980 view about mathematics (though not so much to later developments of it). Field takes all mathematical claims to be false, because they quantify over numbers and there are none of these. Yet Quine (1948: 37) and Putnam (1975) remind us how extraordinarily useful mathematics is; indeed, they argue that it is indispensable for science, so it should be retained. Thus far, the recipe is like Joyce’s, so there is the same analogy with fiction. However, Field seeks to vindicate both the falsity and the usefulness of mathematics rigorously. He shows how a typical scientific theory such as classical mechanics can be reconstructed or ‘nominalised’ without including in the theory any statements that imply that there are numbers corresponding to masses, forces and distances. But we should still agree that mathematics is useful, because (1) it is much simpler to work with than the nominalizations and (2) it can be shown that using it does not license any scientific results that could not in principle be licensed without it. We say more about Field’s view in Chapter 7. But the message should be clear enough. If the nominalization of scientific theories succeeds, we may continue to multiply, differentiate and triangulate without fear, all in the service of science. What is initially unclear, however, is whether likening what Field envisages to our imaginative engagement with fiction is illuminating. Evidently we are to behave as if mathematical theorems are true, but does this amount to treating them like claims in stories? Might it not be at least as sensible to regard our allegiance to mathematics as simply a short-cut? Unlike Joyce,

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Field in 1980 did not invoke an analogy with fiction, though by the end of the decade, he was happy to call his view fictionalist, supplementing his nominalism with a prefix view, according to which mathematical assertions cannot be short cuts, since they are strictly false taken at face value and merely elliptical for claims about what is true in mathematical theory. To the extent that Field is nowadays classed as a paradigm fictionalist (a classification we happily endorse), we think this is because this later construal of his views has won the day. Rosen’s other harbinger of contemporary fictionalism is far further from fiction. As we mentioned in section 3.2, van Fraassen (1980) argues that a claim’s acceptability as a contribution to scientific theory depends not on whether it is true, but on whether it is empirically adequate – whether it is faithful to the way things observably are. This yields a disanalogy with fiction. Nobody thinks that our acceptance of the claim that Donald Duck had a wealthy uncle is settled by its empirical adequacy, unless we are doing science when we entertain it. Of course, there is a deeper similarity, since engagement with fiction is often thought to be a pretence which is a form of prefacing, while an appeal to empirical adequacy is also a form of prefacing. However, van Fraassen’s view about the scientific acceptability of claims does not depend for its plausibility on an analogy with fiction. In other words, unlike Joyce, he does not and need not invoke an analogy with fiction to defend his view, and nor should any of his supporters. At this point there are various ways we might proceed. We could either decide to be a broad church, accepting everyone (or nearly everyone – there will no doubt be some who deserve excommunication) who self-identifies as a fictionalist. Or we could accept a tighter account, but one with explanatory bite: we could characterize fictionalism in such a way that it is clear what interesting property unites the views that qualify, while also making it clear what it is that disqualifies other views (and why it may nonetheless seem tempting to include them). This second route is the one we will take. That way we can capture both the inclination to see a view like van Fraassen’s as a form of fictionalism, as well as the disinclination that many feel. (We say more about some of these close cousins in Chapter 9.) It will also yield another payoff further down the line. In Chapter 8 we will look at a range of more or less familiar objections against fictionalism of any stripe. By having a tight account it will be

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easier to discern common problems and responses to the problems without being side-tracked into considering objections that are less central to their alleged status as forms of fictionalism. Even though we don’t aim to be (overly) ecumenical, we do aim to capture central cases that nearly everyone agrees on. That might make our starting point unstable, since philosophers clearly disagree about the central cases (Rosen thinks of Field and van Fraassen as virtually inaugurating modern fictionalism, whereas we began by expressing some scepticism about the link of their work to the notion of fiction). Here we are inclined to follow something like the method of reflective equilibrium, beginning with cases that we are sure about because of their clear link to the notion of fiction and seeing what happens when we relax the requirement of such a link. If that results in the inclusion of views that few of us would be prepared to count as forms of fictionalism, we should be suspicious of relaxing the link. We stress, though, that the resulting way of classifying views as fictionalist is to a degree arbitrary: there may be different reflective equilibria, depending in part on which cases we are prepared to see as paradigmatic. In short, it is not likely that we will persuade many to change the way they apply the term ‘fictionalism’. That is fine, so long as we appreciate the nature of the demarcation problem we are all dealing with.

4.4 Characterizing fictionalism We present three theses that together characterize fictionalism about a field of enquiry or area of discourse. The theses concern anything that appears to be a claim affirming the existence or describing the nature of a field’s central posits, as we will call them. (The central posits of ethics include moral properties, moral judgements and moral facts. The central posits of mathematics include numbers, classes and shapes. The central posits of a science are the theoretical entities that distinguish its subject matter.) The theses we propose draw together our reflections about fiction in the present chapter with our earlier discussion in Chapter 3 about the way theorists may relegate existence in certain otherwise successful fields of enquiry.

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(Recall that in relegating existence one takes the question as to whether there really are things of the kind posited in a certain area of discourse as being irrelevant to the theoretical and practical purposes successfully served by the discourse. One may relegate existence in this sense if one sees that these purposes are successfully served even though one thinks these posits don’t exist or if one is unsure or if one doesn’t care.) You are a fictionalist about a field by our lights so long as you endorse, with respect to that field, Factuality, Quasi-Fictionality and Utility: FACTUALITY Every apparent claim of the relevant sort is indeed a claim, something that is in the business of being either true or false; it expresses a proposition; it is a representation (accurate or otherwise) of how things are. It is truth-apt. QUASI-FICTIONALITY Any claim p of the relevant sort resembles object-fictional claims in so far as the norm of acceptance or assent for claims of that sort is not truth but truth in a fiction or story F of some kind, where appeal to this norm instead of the truth-norm embodies a strategy of relegating existence and where the notion of truth in some fiction or story F is understood in one of the standard ways in which this notion is understood in the case of literary fiction (specifically, in terms of either prefixing or prefacing, that is, either in terms of the truth of the prefixed claim ‘In fiction F, p’ or else in terms of what is required of a pretence based on fiction F). UTILITY The contribution that engaging with the discourse in this way is able to make to the field of enquiry, or to practices served by the field of enquiry, is sufficiently weighty to warrant engaging with the discourse (and hence making and assessing claims from the area of discourse), a contribution that would have been no greater (given the aims of enquiry in the field) had the central posits of the field of enquiry actually existed and its central claims been true.4 To give a bit more substance to this understanding of fictionalism, here are some remarks about each of the main theses. First of all,

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Factuality is a necessary part of every view that describes itself as fictionalist, whatever else the view endorses. For Factuality, what appear to be claims affirming the existence or describing the nature of a field’s central posits are indeed claims – sentences that are used to express propositions rather than, for example, commands or attitudes of approval and disapproval. (A quick note of caution: we have already had occasion to worry about empty names, and at some point we will need to face the challenge they might pose to Factuality. Put this concern aside for now.) To endorse Factuality is thus to deny nonfactualism, and as a consequence expressivists, emotivists and other non-cognitivists about the language of morality do not qualify as fictionalists. Utility too is endorsed in one way or another by every fictionalist. Utility is a nod in the direction of the familiar thesis, often taken as definitive of fictionalism, that a theory need not be true to be good. The condition requires that engaging in the discourse in question has positive payoff, despite the fact that its central claims aren’t true, or aren’t believed to be true, on a face value reading of those claims – a payoff that would not be higher in any interesting sense if its claims were true. (‘Payoff’ here covers anything that might be considered a good worth aiming for, and shouldn’t be understood in narrow utilitarian terms; more on this in section 5.4 below.) Note that there shouldn’t merely be some slight payoff, such as the way in which engaging in phlogiston-talk was useful in terms of efficiency and familiarity (although at the risk of getting things wrong) before oxygen theory came to be one’s theory of choice when discussing combustion. The pay-off should be robust and shouldn’t run a risk of leading us astray when we raise our standards of precision, say. Finally, we have Quasi-Fictionality, easily the most distinctive of the three theses. We draw attention to three features. First, the ‘Quasi’ is crucial. Quasi-Fictionality entails not that the field under scrutiny is genuinely a work of fiction, but that there is at least an important and informative analogy between the field and fiction. To embrace QuasiFictionality about arithmetic, say, you must first believe that our practice of contemplating and manipulating numbers raises issues similar to those raised by fictional objects. We affirm that there is an even prime, even though some of us also affirm that there are no

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numbers (on the grounds that numbers must be abstract objects and there are none). Deep down there seems to be no contradiction here, just as there seems to be no contradiction between affirming that the Jackal was an assassin and affirming that the Jackal does not exist, since he is just a character in a novel. Having noted this similarity, the friend of Quasi-Fictionality about arithmetic seeks to explain the lack of tension in the case of numbers by drawing on the wisdom of those who have considered the case of fiction, perhaps by regarding the claim that there is an even prime as prefixed – as a true claim about what is true according to the theory or story of arithmetic. (Note that she might simultaneously regard the claim that Bluebeard had many wives as prefaced – as pretend true. If so, by endorsing Quasi-Fictionality about arithmetic she agrees that apparatus commonly, even if mistakenly, deployed in the analysis of object-fictional claims is useful for analysing claims made within arithmetic.) Secondly, we said that the norm of acceptance is truth in some fiction or story F, where appeal to this norm embodies a strategy of relegating existence. Note the appeal to a notion of acceptance, an epistemic state distinct from belief. It is easy to see this as the weak link in the account. For one thing, the notion of acceptance has received a range of different (and incompatible) explications in the literature (one familiar explication is found in Cohen 1989.). We think, though, that a reference to this literature would be a mistake. Acceptance as we employ the idea is beholden to a certain norm, the norm of truth in a fiction, and so we are talking of attitudes of a kind we are already familiar with from our discussion of fiction – in particular pretence (more generally, preface-relative assent) or the kind of assent to a sentence taken at face value when the speaker is really asserting the corresponding prefixed claim.5 We return to this issue when discussing van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism in Chapter 9. Thirdly, the usual fictionalist about arithmetic denies there are numbers. Indeed, denying existence is essential to the way some writers characterize (mathematical) fictionalism. For Mark Balaguer, for example, Fictionalism … is the view that (a) our mathematical sentences and theories do purport to be about abstract mathematical objects, as platonism suggests, but (b) there are no such things

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as abstract objects, and so (c) our mathematical theories are not true. (Balaguer 2015) Our own characterization of fictionalism is more tolerant, allowing for fictionalists about arithmetic who are simply cautious, expressing uncertainty about whether numbers exist (‘who could ever know such a thing?’) but who think that whether or not numbers exist they have nothing to do with the successful way in which we do and apply arithmetic. Such a relaxation means that we can allow for both ontological and epistemological motivations for fictionalism. While we take Factuality, Quasi-Fictionality and Utility to be individually necessary and jointly sufficient for fictionalism,6 it is worth explicitly stating some other conditions that help to make it clear just what fictionalism’s commitments are, on our understanding of fictionalism. First of all, two conditions that are implied by QuasiFictionality. According to TRUTH RELEGATION, central claims of the discourse (those that concern its central posits, the ones whose existence is in question) are able to make their contribution without this presupposing the truth of those claims. And according to what we might call NON-DOXASTICISM, the appropriate attitude towards such claims from the point of view of the purposes served by the discourse is not one of belief but of acceptance without belief. (Even if there are participants in the discourse who are somewhat inclined to believe that the posits exist, this belief has nothing to do with the manner of their participation in the discourse.) On the surface at least, the combination of these two conditions is weaker than Quasi-Fictionality since they say nothing about the role of prefixing or prefacing or analogies with fiction. They are worth highlighting since some accounts of fictionalism suggest such weaker conditions in place of Quasi-Fictionality. (Perhaps, for example, some philosophers count van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism as a fictionalist account of theoretical science because they choose to highlight Truth Relegation and Non-Doxasticism rather than QuasiFictionality.) Finally, here is an important condition that is not implied by Factuality + Quasi-Fictionality: according to MISREPRESENTATION, the central claims of the discourse are not true because its posits don’t exist. For reasons already given, we have not included Misrepresentation

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in our account of fictionalism, although we have also seen that some other accounts, such as Balaguer’s, do include it. The last two paragraphs remind us that fictionalism is a contested concept (annoyingly so, no doubt, but a fact of life). We have presented what we take to be one promising and well-motivated account, but acknowledge it can and will be contested. We encourage readers to compare what we say with what others have said, for example with the sophisticated account found in Armour-Garb and Woodbridge (2015). (While the account offered in this chapter is in the same fiction-focused spirit as theirs, there are differences, such as the way they stress the (serious) content to which sentences from the target discourse are redirected.) Above all, we don’t simply want to say that other accounts get it wrong if they count more views than we do as instances of fictionalism (say, because of the way they highlight Truth Relegation and Non-Doxasticism). They can count as examples of fictionalism under a more permissive construal: ‘fictionalism broadly construed’, for short. There is one issue left open from the previous chapter that deserves closure, and now is a good time to address it. Fictionalism, we noted, is often said to be a form of anti-realism. But in what sense, precisely? We now have our answer. Fictionalism in the way we have characterized it is not an anti-realist view in the ontological sense or epistemological senses described in the last chapter, for to relegate existence in the way described is neither to endorse Misrepresentation nor to embrace mind-dependent existence. To see the sense in which our brand of fictionalism is anti-realist we need to go back to something like the way in which Bigelow and van Fraassen characterized realism (see section 2.7). Say that for a realist about a region of discourse D (mathematical discourse, the discourse of physical science, moral discourse, etc.), (i) sentences of D have a representational semantics and so have truth-conditions, and further, (ii) aiming at truth of the sentences of D is the proper goal of assertive utterance and acceptance when engaging in D. Fictionalists about discourse D are anti-realists on this conception of realism, because even though they endorse Factuality and so accept condition (i), they resolutely reject (ii) – so long as sentences of D are taken at face value, truth is not the norm of assertive utterance or acceptance. This is not to say that truth is of no interest to those who engage in the

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discourse. In uttering or accepting sentences of Ds, speakers may well be indirectly aiming at other truths, for example prefixed claims such as ‘In the fiction of mathematics, 2+2=4’. Whether they do so, and, if so, how they do so, is a function of the kind of fictionalism in question, and this is something we cover in the next chapter.

4.5 Summing up The business of this chapter was to define fictionalism, mindful of the instability and fuzziness in the concept and of the different emphases to be found in different writings about it. We presented our definition at the start of section 4.4. We prepared for it by plotting the scope and limits of the analogy between fiction and fictionalism. The account we came up with takes the fiction analogy very seriously – some would say too seriously – although it is worth emphasizing that the account manages to bring a degree of unity to views as varied as Joyce on morality and Field on mathematics as well as to similar views that are motivated not by the conviction that morality and mathematics are false but by the view that we don’t know and don’t care (since it doesn’t impact on our moralizing and mathematizing). After a short survey of fictionalism’s pre-history, the next chapter teases out some patterns in this welter of views by highlighting important divisions within fictionalism.

4.6 Further reading The bulk of section 4.1 was occupied with the problem of empty names and its interaction with ontological issues. There are a number of good surveys of the philosophy of reference and the philosophy of language more generally. See, for example, Devitt and Sterelny’s Language and Reality (1999) and Lycan’s Philosophy of Language: a Contemporary Introduction (2008). See Frege 1897a for the distinction between the sense and the reference of a linguistic expression. Russell 1905 presents Russell’s famous theory of the way definite descriptions function (including their role in negative

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existentials), and Russell 1911 extends this theory to ordinary proper names. Salmon (1986) and Soames (2002) are extended defences of the view that names are mere labels, so that empty names are meaningless. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has excellent entries on all these topics, both general and more specialised. See 3.6, the ‘Further reading’ section of Chapter 3, for examples of theorists who have proposed prefixing and prefacing views of different regions of discourse. Kripke’s Reference and Existence (2013) is a lightly edited transcript of the John Locke lectures given by Saul Kripke at Oxford University in 1973. They discuss in detail those aspects of the philosophy of reference that impact on empty names and existential statements. Although no longer cutting edge, this work forms a sequel to Kripke’s famous Naming and Necessity lectures which refocused the agenda of semantic theory by mounting thorough criticisms of the FregeRussell legacy. Kripke 1973 also introduces the now-familiar artefactualist ontology of fictional objects as abstract objects created by authors, an account Nathan Salmon endorses and develops further in Salmon (1998). Peter van Inwagen defends another version of the view in van Inwagen (1977), taking fictional objects to be abstract theoretical entities of literary criticism. Amy Thomasson independently articulated and developed a version in her Fiction and Metaphysics (1999); another version was developed by Alberto Voltolini in How Ficta follow Fiction (2006a). Anthony Everett’s The Nonexistent (2013) defends a pretence preface view of talk of fictional objects, supported by a careful analysis of a propositional attitude that he thinks explains pretence and imagination. Eklund’s entry on fictionalism in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides a good overview of fictionalist treatments of various domains. Kalderon’s Fictionalism in Metaphysics (2005a) is a widely cited anthology of articles about fictionalism. For a more critical account of a range of fictionalist positions, see Sainsbury’s Fiction and Fictionalism (2009).

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his chapter does two things. We begin with a short and selective account of past forays into positions that might look like fictionalism. To say that we make no effort to be complete would be an understatement. The historical reflections are to give a sense of some debates that look quite a lot like the debates we have been focused on, and where the resolutions adopted sometimes look quite a lot like fictionalism. We will give reasons to be sceptical of this reading of the history, and then stress how strikingly different contemporary fictionalism looks by considering some prominent divisions in contemporary fictionalism.

5.1 Some history We have talked of fictionalism as an important contemporary phenomenon in philosophy. But most trends in philosophy have their precursors, and fictionalism is no exception. Even a brief examination, however, is enough to show that finding clear examples of fictionalism in the modern sense is not easy, even on a broad construal of fictionalism. The reasons are instructive. One often-cited example of fictionalism is that of sixteenth-century thinkers and astronomers like Andreas Osiander and Nicholas Ursus who thought that astronomy was in the business of ‘saving the appearances’ rather than describing reality, and who argued that this

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was the best way to understand Copernicus’s heliocentric hypothesis: one could rely on it when doing astronomy without deeming it true. Construed as a view about how to approach the central claims of Copernican theory, such a view conforms to Factuality (since the factstating potential of such claims was never in doubt, only their epistemic status), as well as to Truth Relegation. But not to Quasi-Fictionality: no one should be surprised that the notion of fiction is simply absent from the way Osiander and Ursus viewed astronomical talk. All that mattered to them was success in predicting observations of heavenly bodies. In Osiander’s words, the task of the astronomer was to think up or construct whatever causes or hypotheses he pleases such that, by the assumption of these causes, those same [observed] movements can be calculated from the principles of geometry for the past and for the future too … It is not necessary that these hypotheses should be true, or even probable; but it is enough that they provide a calculus which fits the observations. (Osiander’s preface to Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium) In short, astronomical fictionalism seems a genuine form of fictionalism, but only in the ‘broadly construed’ sense. It is also a very odd form of fictionalism since it is restricted to just astronomy. In fact, all the evidence suggests that astronomical fictionalism was relatively shortlived, and this was probably because of its restriction to astronomy – a restriction that seemed more and more arbitrary as astronomy was integrated into the rest of physical science, with physical science understood as an enquiry into the nature of physical reality. It is surprisingly difficult to find other clear historical examples of fictionalists until the nineteenth century, although some seem to come close. The seventeenth-century French philosophermathematician-physicist Blaise Pascal might be thought a contender. He offered a famous pragmatic argument (‘Pascal’s Wager’) in support of wagering for God, arguing that it is far better to immerse oneself in the practices and rituals of the (Christian) religious community, despite not believing them, than not to do so (Pascal 1670, Part III, §233). But Pascal was not a fictionalist. The fictionalist about a region of discourse thinks that the norm of acceptance for sentences from the discourse is not truth, while Pascal was committed to quite the

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opposite point of view. For him, the very point of engaging in this pretence was to inculcate religious beliefs.1 There are others who look like close contenders (some are discussed in Rosen 2005; Sainsbury 2009, chapter 7). Because of his injunction to ‘think with the learned, but speak with the vulgar’ (Berkeley 1710, §51), Berkeley is sometimes classified as a fictionalist about talk of physical objects, causation and so on. But for Berkeley, to think with the learned was to think of such entities and relations as fundamentally mind-dependent; his claim was that talk by ordinary folk (‘the vulgar’) about physical objects, their properties and the relations among them, requires a new immaterialist interpretation, since the ‘learned’ had recognized that the materialist interpretation is incoherent. He did not claim that such talk is for the most part false. Berkeley wanted to uphold existence and truth (he was with the ‘vulgar’ on this point), not relegate them. He certainly wasn’t an anti-realist in the sense in which modern-day fictionalists are antirealists. (Suppose, however, that you are suspicious of the category of mind-dependent objects, and doubt that we can really make sense of there being or existing such things. Then for you perhaps the only way to make sense of a view like Berkeley’s is by interpreting it along broadly fictionalist lines, a line we tentatively suggested towards the end of section 3.2. Hartry Field suggests something similar when he claims that talk of mathematical entities as ‘constructed by’ the mind is best interpreted as ‘simply a picturesque way of saying that mathematical talk should be interpreted along fictionalist lines’ (Field 1989: 27). But it is clear, we think, that this is not how Berkeley himself understands his view.) Even if Berkeley wasn’t a fictionalist about talk of physical objects, some have thought that his views about mathematics are fictionalist in spirit. Take geometry, where he saw contradictions everywhere – infinitely divisible lines, for example – while acknowledging the extreme usefulness of the field. But Berkeley thought that contradictions were inconceivable, so it is unlikely that he would have agreed that such claims are genuinely factual, in the sense required by the condition of Factuality. It is much more plausible that for Berkeley theorems of geometry served as useful calculating devices. It is almost certain that that is how his view of arithmetic should be interpreted.2

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In the case of a number of other historical figures, it is difficult to be sure. It is sometimes claimed that Hume, for example, held broadly fictionalist views about such things as causation, personal identity and even multiplicity. He writes, for example, that ‘the identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one’ (Hume 1739: I. iv. 6). And when discussing our tendency to attribute existence to multiplicities when talking about a group of twenty men, say, he writes: these twenty men may be considered as a unite … That term of unity is merely a fictitious denomination, which the mind may apply to any quantity of objects it collects together. (Hume 1739: I. ii. 2) But Hume’s views are notoriously difficult to interpret. On one interpretation, we impose unity on items in experience that are in the final analysis unconnected. That suggests a mind-dependence of the kind discussed in Chapter 2.3 As in the case of Berkeley, perhaps fictionalism provides a way of making sense of such appeals to mind-dependence, but that is not the same as saying that Hume was a fictionalist. We suspect that it is in the end best to remain agnostic. Another contender is Jeremy Bentham. Bentham’s theory of fictions in language holds that even the most useful forms of language are full of terms that grammatically purport to name real things (singular terms like ‘rest’, ‘motion’, ‘obligation’ and so on, as well as common names like ‘plant’), even though they really only name ‘fictitious entities’ (Bentham 1843: 195). Assuming that talk of ‘fictitious entities’ is best taken as a colourful way of saying that the corresponding terms are fictitious or lack reference, this certainly sounds like a version of fictionalism (at least of fictionalism broadly construed). But Bentham thinks that we are often able to clarify or explain what we really mean with such sentences by giving paraphrases. If his view is that such paraphrases look beyond grammar and the images associated with fictitious terms to give the literal meaning of such sentences – and in some ways this seems the most likely construal of Bentham’s words – then we don’t have a modern-style fictionalism (Rosen 2005: 52– 56). Otherwise we may have.

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There are other nineteenth-century philosophers who on at least a cursory reading look like advocates of varieties of fictionalism. Nietzsche is a notable example. It is perhaps a sign of the high profile currently enjoyed by fictionalism that there is now a cottage industry in attempts to depict someone like Nietzsche as a genuine fictionalist. But in virtually every case these attempts are followed by rebuttals of such attempts, since alternative readings generally seem more plausible. For example, it is often noted that for Nietzsche our ordinary discourse about the world involves massive error, even though it may have been instrumentally useful. Unlike modern fictionalists, however, Nietzsche took this to be reason to reject the discourse on its intended interpretation, not to maintain it. More plausibly, some advocate an interpretation of Nietzsche’s account of created value that they claim is fictionalist in the modern sense (see Hussain 2007), with ‘free spirits’ urged to engage in a ‘fictionalist simulacrum’ of valuing while knowing that nothing is valuable in itself. Once again, however, this is at best fictionalism broadly construed – even if there is Truth Relegation, there is no hint of Quasi-Fictionality. And even that much may be an interpretive stretch (see the discussion in the metaethics section of Leiter and Sinhababu 2007). It turns out that the philosopher who in some ways is the most likely example of a genuine fictionalist prior to the resurgence of fictionalism in the late twentieth century is also the person who was most responsible for giving fictionalism the bad press it had for much of the twentieth century: Hans Vaihinger, who argued in The Philosophy of ‘As If’ (Vaihinger 1924) that we construct models of the world that contain evident fictions and then behave ‘as if’ the world matches our models because of the utility of behaving this way. An early example was the atom, something that is supposed to be a centre without extension but also the bearer of forces. There can be no such thing, Vaihinger thought, and so the atom is a fiction: something that turns out to be a useful posit, but not real. (At other times Vaihinger gave a broader construal of fictions as any posits whose existence we didn’t, or perhaps couldn’t, have evidence for.) Vaihinger himself saw fictions in virtually every domain of enquiry: atoms, substance, free will, God and so on. And because he tended to see fictions everywhere, his own view of how theorists should proceed doesn’t sound much like modern fictionalism. He simply

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counselled them to be careful, not to assume that things really existed just because they were useful. Although theorists were certainly supposed to do ‘as if’ the world was a certain way despite being uncertain whether it was, or certain that it wasn’t, Vaihinger didn’t offer a clear account of how they were to proceed. (He didn’t, for example, suggest imaginative pretence as a way of engaging with scientific discourse that contained fictions, unlike the way some contemporary philosophers understand the way scientists use models in science.) In addition, he did not always clearly distinguish between the thought that a false but simple theory may be useful because its explanations and predictions are close enough to the truth, and the thought that in certain domains of enquiry acceptance of even the best available theory is not truth-normed. As we have seen, it is the latter thought that is distinctive of modern fictionalism, at least on its broad construal. Armed with their verificationism about meaning, the logical positivists would have regarded that thought as unintelligible. In the end, their views won the day. Given the power and influence of the movement in the twentieth century, it is not surprising that it took until close to the end of the century for Vaihinger’s perspective to re-emerge, although in a somewhat altered form.

5.2 Content versus force: Prefixing, prefacing and beyond Some three decades have now passed since fictionalism reappeared as a promising new intellectual tendency in philosophy. In the previous chapter we presented our preferred account (but also saw how contested the concept is). But there is no denying that even on our preferred understanding fictionalism still presents as somewhat vague and loosely structured. It is now time to zero in on some distinctions among the different ways in which fictionalism presents itself on the contemporary philosophical scene. In order to defend her view, any fictionalist about some arena must tell us how we are to evaluate its central claims. Here are two alternative approaches one might adopt towards evaluation. The first approach says that a central claim, when allegedly put forward as

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a contribution to the arena, is not itself put forward in the pursuit of truth, but some appropriately related claim is. Prefixing illustrates this approach. If I am a prefixer about standard arithmetic, I am not interested in whether there is an even prime, but I am interested in whether, according to the standard theory of arithmetic, there is an even prime. The second approach to evaluation says that any claim of the relevant sort is answerable to a standard other than truth. As Gideon Rosen puts it: ‘literal falsity is simply not a defect and literal truth as such is not a virtue’ (2005: 16). Prefacing illustrates this scenario. The operative standard might be, for instance, pretend truth, or as-if truth. We will call these two approaches to evaluation content and force fictionalism respectively, adapting terminology from Eklund 2017. Both approaches are ways of implementing Truth Relegation, as we define it in section 5.4. Where do the terms ‘force’ and ‘content’ come from? ‘Content’, in particular, has a number of closely related meanings in the philosophy of mind and language. It is easy to become confused. The contrast with ‘force’ draws on a particular usage of these words. This is the usage they have in discussions of speech acts. (See Green 2000.) We use language to perform a dizzying variety of expressive and communicative acts: asking, asserting, commanding, demanding, exhorting and so on. These are, in the jargon, illocutionary acts. (Such acts can also be performed non-linguistically: with quizzical looks, nods of the head, traffic lights and so on.) Each of these act types plays a characteristic type of role in human expression, communication and representation and is therefore said to have a different force. If I ask whether the bathroom is upstairs and you assert that the bathroom is upstairs, our utterances differ in force. Those utterances agree in content, however: the two different types of function are served by the very same proposition: the proposition that the bathroom is upstairs. By contrast, if you demand that you see the manager and I demand that you vacate the bathroom, our utterances have the same force, but differ in content: the same type of role (of illocutionary act) is being performed by two different propositions. Now we can explain the application of content and force to fictionalism. A content fictionalist about an arena holds that the contents of its central claims – the propositions those claims are used to express – are not what they seem to be. The propositions

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that we seem to be asserting when we speak or write about, say, numbers or right actions, are not the contents we really are asserting; they stand in for, redirect us to, other propositions. And what seem to be beliefs or judgements affirming the existence or describing the nature of central posits actually have different contents; the sentences we accept are not in fact those whose contents we believe. A force fictionalist about an arena, on the other hand, holds that its central claims play a different type of role from the one they seem to play. The propositions that we seem to be asserting when we speak or write about numbers or right actions are not asserted after all; a speech act with a different force is performed: in so far as we merely do as if we are asserting, we quasi-assert rather than assert. And what seem to be beliefs or judgements affirming the existence or describing the nature of central posits are neither beliefs nor judgements; our attitudes towards the propositions involved are different: they are quasi-beliefs. The most prominent kind of content fictionalism is prefix fictionalism, or meta-fictionalism, as Yablo (2001) calls it. According to this view, the ordinary ways of stating central claims are elliptical versions of claims whose truth-value is of interest to those working in the arena. The content that is really expressed can, it is said, be recovered by prefixing extra information to the elliptical surrogate. So when one apparently claims that p and thereby makes a central claim about the arena, one is really claiming that, according to some account, theory, etc., p. A prefix fictionalist about arithmetic holds that to say 2 is an even prime is in fact to advance a claim with different content, such as: according to the standard theory of arithmetic 2 is an even prime. A defender of prefix fictionalism about some arena must tell us exactly what the prefix is and hence, exactly which content is really being expressed. She must also address counterparts of the difficulties we met in section 4.2 for prefixing views about fictional objects. For instance, if she is a mathematical fictionalist, she must explain how ‘2’ can be a meaningful expression when there is a significant chance that numbers do not exist and that claims to the contrary are only true within the scope of a prefix. She must also explain why making claims and judgements about numbers does not feel like making claims and judgements about the content of a theory and why doing arithmetic does not feel like working out what

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a theory commits one to. (This is the arithmetical counterpart of the worry about distinguishing reporting what happens in a story from telling one.) She must explain why, on the contrary, one seems to be making claims and drawing inferences that are a priori and necessary, whereas making claims about what is true according to standard mathematics seems a posteriori and contingent. (See Yablo 2001.) Field’s developed theory about the nature of mathematics is a prefix fictionalist view, even though it is not presented as one in his original, nominalistic, 1980 book. He writes: ‘[T]he fictionalist believes that 2 plus 2 equals 4 only in the sense that standard mathematics says that (or, has as a consequence that) 2 plus 2 equals 4’ (1989: 2). Hence, the above problems arise for Field’s fictionalism. They also arise for prefix fictionalism about modality and other arenas where it has been proposed. One can be a content fictionalist without being a prefix fictionalist. One can be what Stephen Yablo calls an object fictionalist. Like the prefix fictionalist, the object fictionalist regards the ordinary ways of stating central claims as misleading or obscure. For her, though, what seems to be the central claim that p is really the claim that q, where q says that the world is the way it needs to be in order for p to be true in the relevant fiction. Consider a number-involving sentence like ‘The number of children Princess Diana had is 2’. The meta-fictionalist says that what is asserted is something along the lines of: according to the number fiction, the number of children Princess Diana had is 2. According to the object fictionalist, on the other hand, what is asserted is not something about the fiction but something about the world, namely that Princess Diana had a couple of children (or, in logically more perspicuous terms: There are entities x and y such that each of them is a child of Princess Diana and anything that is a child of Princess Diana is identical to either x or y), a proposition that makes no reference to numbers as entities. Similarly, what makes “2 + 2 = 4” true in the number fiction is something like the following worldly fact: if there are two Fs, and two Gs, then barring overlap there are four (F-or-G)’s. Written as a sentence of first-order logic, with numerical quantifiers defined inductively in the manner of Frege, this is seen to be a logical truth, and so object fictionalism for mathematical discourse preserves the air of a priority and necessity that seems to attach to truths of mathematics. (After describing difficulties for object

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fictionalism, Yablo 2001 also presents and espouses yet another variant of content fictionalism, which he calls figuralism. We come across figuralism again when discussing close cousins of fictionalism.) Force fictionalism usually manifests as preface fictionalism, according to which central claims are to be interpreted at face value, but are used to express attitudes other than beliefs, are not asserted but only quasi-asserted and hence are to be measured against a standard other than truth (what we loosely called ‘truth in a fiction’). Which standard this is depends on the arena and we can, if we wish, imagine it being stated in a preface. When one apparently claims that p and thereby makes a central claim about the arena, it is p that is at issue, but what one is interested in is something other than its truthvalue. A preface fictionalist about arithmetic holds that when we say there is an even prime, we must decide whether or not this is true in the pretence that constitutes our engagement with arithmetic, or (perhaps) whether we are to respond as if it is true. A defender of preface fictionalism about some arena must tell us exactly what the preface is and hence, which standard of evaluation operates in the arena. This in turn might embroil her in a discussion of how such a standard works. What is pretence? What does it mean to say that we act as if some claim is true? Joyce is one theorist who defends preface fictionalism – about morality – and takes up these issues (Joyce 2005). One might be a content fictionalist about one arena, like arithmetic, but a force fictionalist about another, like morals. But it is also possible to be both a content fictionalist and a force fictionalist about the same arena. This might even look tempting. Take metafictionalism. As we saw earlier, it would be puzzling if sentences S from the discourse of fictional story-telling were taken to be elliptical versions of longer prefixed sentences: ‘In the story, S’. (How could we ever be fairly accused of lying to our children about Santa in that case?) An alternative – and this is how Yablo understands the view – is to take the meta-fictional claim that S is the case in the story as the content that is asserted through a speaker’s quasi-asserting the unprefixed claim that S. This combination of force and content fictionalism looks even more attractive in some ways if we take a version of object fictionalism as our preferred version of content fictionalism. Consider again the number-involving claim that the number of children Princess Diana

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had is 2, and the number-free claim that Princess Diana had a couple of children. By what mechanism do I get to express the latter content when I utter the former? According to the composite view, applied to numbers, when I say ‘The number of children Princess Diana had is 2’, two illocutionary acts are performed. First, the proposition that the number of children Princess Diana had is 2 is quasi-asserted (see section 3.2) – taken by me to be true in a pretence. (This is the force fictionalist component.) Second, the proposition that Princess Diana had a couple of children is thereby (indirectly) asserted, in so far as this is the real-world truth that makes the sentence ‘The number of children Princess Diana had is 2’ true in the pretence. To accommodate this kind of move, we need to say more about how real-world facts make claims true in a pretence, but the idea is straightforward enough. There are rules that loosely govern what it is correct to say when we are playing a game of make-believe. In a game of cops and robbers, for example, pointing one’s finger at a person and saying, ‘Bang!’ counts, from the perspective of the game, as shooting that person. Suppose I tearfully insist that I shot Johnny, but that others take issue with my claim. What would make my claim true in the game or pretence is that I pointed my finger at Johnny and said, ‘Bang!’ – that is the real content I am indirectly asserting by saying, ‘I shot Johnny!’, a content that others are disputing. The object fictionalist thinks a similar kind of story can be told about the number fiction (say, via a rule that stipulates that if there are n Fs – using ‘there are n … ’ as a quantifier – then, from the perspective of the pretence, the number of Fs is n). We say much more about the operation of such rules in the next chapter, where we discuss the case of fiction. Instances of pretence where the purpose of a speaker’s utterance is to affirm, in this indirect way, the fictional-truthmaking circumstances for the utterance are nowadays often called semantic pretence.

5.3 Meaning versus use Fictionalism further subdivides according to a distinction drawn by Eklund (2017) between meaning and use fictionalism. Let us suppose that you are a fictionalist about discourse centred on literary fiction.

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When I utter the sentence ‘Robinson Crusoe was a castaway’, I am not seeking to report its literal truth; I am probably pretending, or making believe (if that is different), or prefacing in some other way, or perhaps indirectly expressing my belief in the prefixed version. You may well have a developed story about what I am doing. Well, you are a meaning fictionalist about the discourse if you think your story must be captured in any accurate analysis of what the sentence means. As a matter of the semantics of the English language, ‘Robinson Crusoe was a castaway’ does not aim to report a literal truth, but rather at whatever the fictionalist story alleges – or so says the meaning fictionalist. (If you are a meta-fictionalist, this might mean, for example, that the logical form of the sentence – its true semantic structure – contains an unexpressed prefix that is not present in the sentences taken at face value.) By contrast, you are a use fictionalist about the discourse if you think that when we use such sentences to report on a fiction they continue to have exactly the semantics they would have if they were used in perfectly serious discourse about the world (i.e. with ‘Robinson Crusoe’ as a name subject to the right account of semantics for names, and ‘castaway’ meaning whatever it means when news-reports, say, talk about castaways). On this view, to utter ‘Robinson Crusoe was a castaway’ assertorically, and without any kind of preface, would be to say something either false or meaningless (depending on your preferred theory of meaning), something a person might do if she mistakenly believed that Crusoe was a real castaway. Meanwhile, when I utter that sentence as part of a literary discussion or a quiz, I am using it in a kind of non-serious way, to pretend, make-believe, or whatever your fictionalist story alleges. I am doing something similar to what I do if I say, ‘The enemy approaches’, to alert you, playfully or hyperbolically, that the boss is coming. (Eklund 2017 calls run-ofthe-mill assertoric use of declarative sentences ‘literal’ and these other uses non-literal. So, a little confusingly, we should say that I don’t speak literally when I give my answer to the quiz, even though there is a good sense in which my words carry their ordinary ‘literal’ meanings.) In short, for the use fictionalist about a region of discourse the linguistic phenomena that compel us to embrace fictionalism should be explained as part of a theory of the pragmatics, or use, of the

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language, not its semantics. (Note that one can be a use fictionalist while also being an advocate of the idea of semantic pretence mentioned at the end of the previous section; the latter has nothing to do with the meanings of the words used in a pretence.) Use fictionalism is perhaps more intuitive and certainly more popular. Even if I would stake my fortune on the claim that Robinson Crusoe was a castaway, I might be easily forced to concede that really he does not exist and so was not a castaway at all – if you are talking literally. A mathematics teacher might staunchly inscribe ‘There is only one even prime’ on the whiteboard, but if she is also a philosopher, she might doubt the existence of numbers and suspect that her sentence is literally false. We take use fictionalism to be the default kind of fictionalism, and reject attempts like Yablo’s to define descriptive or hermeneutic fictionalism as a meaning fictionalism (see section 8.3). We don’t rule out meaning fictionalism altogether. For some pretence theorists, there are fragments of discourse where the meaning of certain central expressions comes from the fictions that embed them, and where relevant sentences cannot be meaningfully used outside of pretences. That is a reason to count the view as a version of meaning fictionalism since it holds that the right account of what the sentences mean makes reference to the way we engage with a fictional story. (Some fictionalists think a meaning fictionalism of this kind offers the right account of claims of nonexistence like ‘The Jackal doesn’t exist’, a view we discuss in the next chapter.)

5.4 Description, prescription and propaganda Any fictionalist proposal of any of the above types might be mooted as a description of the way the community in fact regards the central claims of some arena and all apparent references to its central posits. Alternatively, it could be offered as a prescription: a recommendation about how we should regard the central claims and what our attitudes should be towards apparent references to the central posits, in order to reflect what is really going on metaphysically.

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To defend a descriptive (or hermeneutic) thesis, one must provide evidence of existing patterns in behaviour, perhaps empirically, perhaps via philosophical analysis. An especially tempting target for descriptive fictionalism is the practice of engaging with fiction itself. People who knowingly invent or recount stories do not believe that they thereby represent real objects or situations, and this is not because they have learned to be cagy about what people tell them. It is rather because they know that they are just making stuff up or reporting what somebody else made up. Engagement with fiction, pretence and role-playing comes naturally to us early on. We know from previous sections that the status of the likes of Hamlet and Holmes is actually controversial. Still, the folk view about them is that they do not exist, but are worth thinking and talking about. Descriptive fictionalism is arguably true at least of fiction, therefore, a claim we explore further in the next chapter. Consider too the appeals to possible worlds familiar to contemporary metaphysicians and logicians. When we say that the laws of nature could have been different, a metaphysician may find it convenient to regiment this by saying that there are possible worlds in which the laws of nature are different, or that there are physically impossible worlds that are nonetheless metaphysically possible. When we say that any logical system that aims to track modality had better require that anything actual is possible, we might say that the formal model theory for modal logics implements this by requiring that the actual world be one of the possible worlds. But do philosophers really believe that there are possible worlds? An analyst of their thought and talk might argue that there is nothing to suggest that they do, just as nothing suggests that they are committed to the genuine physical existence of centres of gravity or Robinson Crusoe. However defensibly and however reflectively, philosophers fall into line with thought and talk about possible worlds in technical contexts and this may well elucidate relationships among modal facts. Perhaps it will be conjectured that (most) philosophers regard central claims about possible worlds as false (Misrepresentation) but worth entertaining (Utility) because of the systematicity they promote. (Perhaps they would only admit to this after considerable prompting, but that seems enough.) This would be to conjecture that descriptive fictionalism about possible worlds discourse is true. This

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is a claim about existing practices. (Our analyst might go on to ascribe a robust view to such philosophers: perhaps claims about possible worlds should be represented as elliptical versions of claims about a theory; or perhaps instead philosophers merely pretend that some of them are true.) One might, without undermining this descriptive fictionalist conjecture, still pursue the matter of whether there are possible worlds. Presumably, though, the defender of descriptive fictionalism takes philosophers and mathematicians to be either agnostic or sceptical about them. What about some of the other areas in which fictionalism has supposedly made inroads: mathematics, theoretical science and morality, say? Ever since Field’s monumental work defending mathematical fictionalism, mathematical fictionalists have tended to favour prescriptive, or revolutionary, versions over descriptive ones. This is not surprising. According to descriptive fictionalism, mathematicians themselves are not really interested in the truth of the claims they contemplate, and it is surely not going to be easy to establish such a lack of interest (cf. Burgess 2004). The notable exception to this trend is Yablo’s figuralism (Yablo 2001), although we have already raised the question of whether it counts as a version of fictionalism. Van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism (about science) is descriptive too, in so far as he argues that science aims, by definition, merely at empirical adequacy (Van Fraassen 1994: 181). But van Fraassen is at best an advocate of fictionalism broadly construed, so again doesn’t present as a clear example of descriptive fictionalism in our sense. Morality is in a somewhat different boat, since philosophers (and not just philosophers) often see morality as less than objective – as not in the business of stating mind-independent facts and perhaps not even in the business of fact-stating at all, according to expressivists and other noncognitivists about morality. Mark Kalderon uses this perspective on morality as a basis on which to build a distinctive kind of descriptive preface fictionalism about morality (Kalderon 2005b). To defend prescriptive fictionalism about some arena, one must first argue that construing its central claims as transparent and true is unwise, because they are false (Misrepresentation), or not known to be true, or because even if they are true that couldn’t possibly have an effect on why we engage, or should engage, with the discourse.4

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One must next argue that the practices of thought and talk associated with the arena should be retained even so, modelling this on the way we retain fictional talk and thought despite fiction’s insensitivity to truth. Prescriptive fictionalists do this latter by arguing that the practices are valuable because of the way in which they serve an important function (Utility). Here is an example. Suppose you are an atheist or agnostic: you maintain or suspect that central claims in theistic religions, taken at face value as descriptions of the ways and commands of transcendent beings, are false. Suppose too that you do not think society should abandon the practice of thinking and acting as though there is a God. Perhaps you think that such conduct provides the best or only way for people, including yourself, to be motivated to live moral lives and choose worthwhile life-goals. This constitutes an attempt at a defence of a prescriptive fictionalism about theological discourse. (Your stance might be that we should think and act as if central theistic claims are true and that this attitude, rather than theistic beliefs, promotes the benefits that a religious life offers. This would make you a prescriptive preface fictionalist.) Maybe this is not a particularly respectable fictionalism. Most philosophers are likely to reject the claim that moral motivation can, or should, be subserved by religion in this way.5 Nonetheless, religious fictionalism has come to be seen as a serious alternative to the usual forms of atheism and agnosticism (another testament to the pervasive influence of fictionalist casts of thought in modern philosophy). But whether or not such a prescriptive religious fictionalism is worth a second look, it is interesting that a broadly similar emphasis on the individual and societal benefits of engaging with false beliefs underlies Joyce’s relatively popular prescriptive moral fictionalism (Joyce 2005, 2016). For Joyce, however, it is morality itself, not just God, that should be cast aside. He thinks that morality is deeply error-ridden, that there simply are no moral properties of the kind morality requires for the truth of its central claims. Despite this, morality should be retained as a fiction or ‘myth’ because make-believe moralizing is no less socially beneficial than the real thing. Other prescriptive fictionalisms, say a prescriptive prefix modal fictionalism of the kind first described by Gideon Rosen (Rosen 1990), pinpoint other ways in which engagement with a discourse

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can be ‘useful’ and thus satisfy Utility. One caution. Talk of Utility and the way an account like Joyce’s stresses social benefits may suggest reliance on a broadly based utilitarian way of motivating prescriptive fictionalisms. That is not the intention. Some who exploit analogies with fiction to shape their defences of fictionalism might be uneasy about seeking extrinsic benefits for mathematics, morality, or religiosity. Many of us value a night at the opera, a movie marathon or twenty-three hours of Grand Theft Auto, but those who insist that such pastimes can be valuable certainly do not all agree about whether their worth can be traced to some good that is extrinsic to them, let alone about what that good would be. In that spirit, we intend Utility to be understood in a manner that allows for multiple and possibly irreducible ways in which activities and pastimes might be deemed worthwhile. Even engaging with fictional stories can be considered useful and worthwhile: not because people can learn from fiction, although that may be true as well, but because engaging with fictional stories brings them enjoyment and satisfaction, however that is to be explained. A final comment on the terminology of ‘revolutionary’ versus ‘prescriptive’. Much prescriptive fictionalism is dubbed revolutionary. Joyce’s is an example. It recommends a policy yet to be adopted since it regards our actual attitudes towards the posits rooted in error. Others go further. Zoltán Szabó in fact defines fictionalism as revolutionary fictionalism: To be a fictionalist about Fs is to think that our naïve attitude toward F-discourse is only halfway correct: we are right in thinking that we use genuine singular terms that purport to refer to Fs, but wrong in thinking that they actually succeed in referring. In engaging in F-discourse we inadvertently slip into fictional talk. (Szabó 2001: 294) From our point of view, this usage is unfortunate on a number of counts. First, it makes no real use of the notion of fiction (‘fictional’ is taken as meaning something like ‘non-referring’). Secondly, it defines fictionalism in terms of an error theory about the region of discourse, thus disqualifying descriptive forms of fictionalism and collapsing fictionalism into revolutionary fictionalism. The term ‘prescriptive’ has no such connotations. We noted in section 3.5 that prescriptive

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fictionalism need not be revolutionary, and that one could in fact advertise one’s fictionalism as both prescriptive and descriptive, if it recommended the status quo. Descriptive and prescriptive forms of fictionalism are both different from what Joyce (2005: 299) calls propagandism, the advocacy of the use of propaganda (which can be loosely described as a method to bypass the rational will of others). Like prescriptive fictionalism, propagandism is a recommendation, made on the understanding that an arena’s central claims are likely to be false and that the associated practices are worth retaining. The recommendation, however, is not that we all construe our practices fictionally, endorsing QuasiFictionality or perhaps just Truth Relegation. Rather, the propagandist holds that the benefits pursuant on allegiance to the practices are best secured if people believe (perhaps falsely) that the central claims are true and act accordingly. Allegiance to the practices is thus a kind of societal placebo. Perhaps society benefits if other people – not the cognoscenti – are encouraged to believe religious doctrines, doctrines that the propagandist herself takes to be dodgy. Propagandism is not fictionalism. It is a third available response, alongside the abolition of our practices and the acceptance of prescriptive fictionalism about them, to the perceived likely falsity of central claims. Evidently propagandism is the least reputable of the three: it counsels withholding crucial facts from the populace, or modifying people’s psychology so that those facts are disregarded.6

5.5 Where to next? In this chapter, we began by offering a brief and selective account of some of the pre-history of present-day fictionalism, before offering some more insight into modern fictionalism by noting and commenting on some of the divisions it harbours. Along the way, we have observed much diversity among fictionalisms and an appreciation of this diversity is handy for negotiating the literature. Unfortunately, this diversity also masks the reasons for treating fictionalisms as a collection. But there are such reasons. The purpose of the next two chapters is to give an account of some of the most

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prominent and much-discussed fictionalist positions in the literature, noting the similarity in reasons theorists often have for advocating them but also signalling some of the problems these reasons face. We begin the next chapter by focusing on the discourse of fiction itself, the use of language that is focused on fictional creations like Hamlet, Holmes, the Jackal, and so many others.

5.6 Further reading There is a more extensive discussion of some of the precursors to modern fictionalism in Rosen (2005) and Sainsbury (2009, chapter 7). Yablo (2001) is useful for its categorization of different kinds of fictionalist positions, culminating in what he says about his own view of mathematics at the time, figuralism, which he deliberately casts as a descriptive, not a revolutionary, form of fictionalism. Chapter 9 below discusses whether the view really is a form of fictionalism as we understand it. A descriptive fictionalism about morality, very different from Joyce’s revolutionary variety, is defended in Kalderon (2005b). Field (1989) is a manifesto for one form of prescriptive mathematical prefix fictionalism. These positions are all described in more depth in Chapter 7 below. Walton (1990) discusses the principles of generation that determine what is to be imagined or pretended in games of makebelieve. (We say more about his views in the next chapter.) ArmourGarb and Woodbridge (2015) use Walton’s ideas in their sustained defence of the notion of semantic pretence, which they appeal to in fictionalist accounts of a broad range of fragments of discourse (including talk of existence, of propositions and of truth).

6 Fictionalism about Fiction

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n this chapter we return to discourse in and about fiction – fictional discourse, for short. The reasons are simple. First of all, if any region of discourse deserves a fictionalist interpretation surely fictional discourse does: there is no Hamlet and no Holmes, but we better not be prevented from the important business of reading and talking about them! So now that we have defined fictionalism and talked about its divisions, this is a good place to take what we have said for a solid test run. (All going well, satisfying Quasi-Fictionality, a condition that takes the discourse in question to be importantly similar to fiction, should be a cinch – after all, nothing is quite as much like fiction as fiction itself.) Secondly, fiction is also the place where we have to face up to one of the most difficult issues discussed in this book: the nature of nonexistence. Debates about existence were the topic of section 1.1 and there we encountered a rift between those who think existence can be explained in terms of quantification and those who take it to be a property possessed by some things and lacked by others. Perhaps the best-known examples of claims that feature in this debate involve fictional names: ‘Sherlock Holmes doesn’t exist’, say. Such claims are particularly difficult in light of the fact that the most celebrated way of arguing for the quantificational view – Russell’s theory of definite descriptions, which as we saw earlier was used by Russell to argue that ascriptions of (non)existence involving names do not need a property view of existence – is now widely seen as discredited by the arguments against descriptivism about names by Saul Kripke and others.1 This in turn suggests that we might have to make room after

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all for the property view of existence and the view that Holmes is a nonexistent object. And that would seem to have drastic implications for any fictionalist views of even ordinary fictional discourse. High time, then, to apply our talk of fictionalism and its divisions to the case of fiction.

6.1 Fictionalism about object-fictional discourse Before we start, a quick reminder of the reach of fictional discourse. Apart from object-fictional claims whose truth (in the story) depends purely on what happens inside the story, there are the meta-fictional claims whose truth depends in part on how things are outside the fiction. (These include what are sometimes called internal metafictional claims: prefixed claims of the form ‘In or according to the story, … ’, whose truth depends on the fact that something has been recorded as a story and on what this story contains; it also includes claims like ‘Hamlet is a fictional character’, whose truth, unlike that of ‘Hamlet is a person’, depends on the fact that there is a story about Hamlet, not just on the internal events of the story, as well as comparative claims that transcend any particular story, such as ‘Robinson Crusoe is more famous than any real castaway’). Consider the fragment of fictional discourse consisting of objectfictional claims. There are philosophers who are realists about this fragment, in particular philosophers who identify as Meinongian. They think that there are fictional objects, and that object-fictional claims are literally true or false about such objects (not surprisingly, they will usually grant that authors have a kind of a priori access to these objects). Clearly, Meinongians are not fictionalists. They do not relegate truth. For them a claim like ‘Robinson Crusoe was a castaway’ is a strict and literal truth. But most philosophers of fiction reject Meinongianism, and incline to the view that people who tell fictional stories are engaged in pretence: they pretend, for example, to be reporting something about the world or to be people reporting something about the world. (Such a view was defended by Kripke in his 1973 John Locke Lectures (Kripke 2013) as well as by Lewis 1978.)

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As for readers of fiction who report on the content of the fiction, one widespread view is a pretence-invoking preface view of the kind defended by Walton. Another is a prefix view of the kind defended by Lewis. Both approaches were developed to deal with the case of fiction. Both explicitly relegate existence. These views of objectfictional statements should therefore be construed as fictionalist accounts par excellence, since they are paradigm examples of views that embrace Factuality and Quasi-Fictionality. In particular, it is trivially true that they exploit concepts developed to account for the curious case of fiction (namely, Walton-style prefacing as well as the prefixing favoured by Lewis) in their prefacing and prefixing accounts of what is really going on when authors and readers use object-fictional discourse. We briefly return to Lewis’s prefixing account below, but first we say more about how the notion of pretence plays out in the case of fiction. This is particularly important because of the increasingly prominent role that the notion of pretence plays in contemporary fictionalism. We begin with Walton’s account of games of makebelieve, a subject briefly broached in earlier chapters. In seminal work first published in the 1970s, Walton brought the philosophical importance of such games to the attention of the philosophical community. He argued that a number of puzzling features of talk about objects of art, including works of fiction, were best explained in terms of the idea that an object of art was a prop in a game of make-believe. The fundamental explanatory notion – the idea of a game of makebelieve – was itself to be understood as the very notion at play in our ordinary understanding of games of make-believe: the kind of games that children engage in from a remarkably early age. On Walton’s account of such games, they are extended periods of imaginative activity for which participants typically choose props that facilitate or enhance their imaginings. Thus consider a game that requires its participants to imagine that certain oddly shaped stumps are bears. That such stumps are bears is an expressly made piece of makebelieve, one that may be announced by means of a stipulation (‘Let’s pretend that stumps are bears, OK?’). Other propositions are then true in the game because of the implicit understanding that certain actions then naturally count as acts involving bear. Running away from a stump with a look of terror on one’s face, for example, will count

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as running away from a bear in great terror, putting a rope around a stump will count as lassoing that bear, and so on. To understand the game, it is not enough to know what is expressly made true in the game – we also need to know how further pretend-truths are generated from such real facts as putting a rope around a stump. In Walton’s terminology, there are certain (often implicit) principles of generation that govern the way the game is to proceed, in addition to the quite explicit principle that establishes the game in the first place (‘Let’s say that stumps are bears’). One such principle says that X’s putting a rope around a particular stump, where the stump is one that counts as a bear in the game, counts as X lassoing that bear. Such principles prescribe what is to be imagined, specifying how certain expressly made believe propositions (say, that these [stumps] are bears), together with sundry facts about the world (say, that Sally puts a rope around that stump), generate further propositions to be imagined (‘Sally lassoed a bear!’). Such propositions then count as fictional (or fictionally true) in the game.2 Note that a very common reason for engaging in pretence is to say something about the real world, not the world of make-believe, through the vehicle of pretence. Take Sally again. Her successfully throwing a rope around a certain stump makes it fictional that a bear has been lassoed. The latter fictional truth is what interests her as she triumphantly prods the stump and shouts ‘Caught another one!’ Here we have what Walton calls content oriented pretence or makebelieve. But sometimes one wants to communicate the real-world fact that makes a claim fictional. Sally’s mother might complain that this is the second time that Sally left a lasso around a bear, and this is naturally seen as affirming that she once again left a rope around a stump. Mother is involved in what Walton calls prop-oriented pretence or make-believe. She aims to affirm something about the worldly props – stumps, a rope – on which Sally’s and her own gameplaying are based, and she does so by talking through her pretence.3 Props aside, she thereby engages in the kind of semantic pretence briefly discussed in section 5.2: through saying, in the context of a pretence, that this is the second time that Sally left a lasso around a bear, she indirectly asserts what it takes for her utterance to be fictional or true in the pretence, namely that this is the second time that Sally left a rope around a stump.

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Perhaps one should say that Mother is really playing an extension of Sally’s game, one in which she plays a role that allows her to use Sally’s game for her own prop-oriented purposes. In any case, the phenomenon of prop-oriented pretence is widespread. Suppose that Sally and Johnny are playing distinct games involving props as bears. They might then decide to draw a critical comparison between the bear-props by engaging in an appropriate extension of the two games. Sally might declare, for example, that ‘These bears [Sally’s] are much more frightening than those bears [Johnny’s]’, thereby using prop-oriented pretence to affirm something about the ability of the bear-props to engender fear in the participants of the games. In a remarkably fruitful extension of the idea of children’s games of make-believe, Walton took it to include our engagement with art. In Walton’s words: [I]t would be surprising if make-believe disappeared without trace at the onset of adulthood. It doesn’t. It continues, I claim, in our interaction with representational works of art (which, of course, itself begins in childhood). (1990: 12) Consider in particular works of fiction (these are the representational works of art most relevant for present purposes). Walton argued that such works should be thought of as props in games of make-believe played by readers and listeners, where, as in other games of makebelieve, the props prescribe what participants in the games are to imagine and hence what is fictional in the games.4 The props in this case are (typically) stories written or narrated by authors, whether in the form of prose or poetry, and in games of make-believe where these props are appropriately used – as Walton puts it, in games authorized for such works – readers or listeners make-believe that they are presented with a serious record of actual happenings, perhaps one related by a (fictional) narrator, with proper allowance made for the fact that this record is presented in one or another style and genre. Such a work generates fictional truths, both fictional truths that are generated directly (typically through being expressed by assertively used sentences in the work of fiction, although allowance will need to be made for unreliable narrators) and fictional truths that are generated indirectly, perhaps on the basis of what

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would follow from directly generated fictional truths, given beliefs that are universally and firmly held in the community to which the work’s author belongs. The latter is the substance of what Walton calls the ‘Mutual Belief Principle’; the Reality Principle, by contrast, looks to what is actually the case rather than to what is commonly believed in the author’s community. (For a discussion of where these principles come apart, see Walton 1990, section 4.3.) Both principles would allow us to count ‘Robinson Crusoe had both a heart and a spleen’ as an obvious fictional truth, even though there is nothing in the story that implies such a claim. All this bears out the fact that Walton counts as a descriptive preface (specifically, a pretence) fictionalist about object-fictional discourse. Surprisingly enough, however, Walton can also be classed as a content fictionalist about this kind of discourse, just like Lewis. For Walton, someone who assertively utters ‘Robinson Crusoe was a castaway’ is involved in pretence, but through the pretence is able to assert something. She indirectly asserts that the fictional work Robinson Crusoe has a certain property or is a certain way, namely the way it must be for the kind of pretence that she engages in when making her utterance to be appropriate or prescribed for that work.5 This is tortuous, but in a way similar to what a prefixer would take the content of such utterances to be. The need for such a tortuous formulation stems from the fact that Walton takes the unprefixed sentence to be primary and also thinks that because ‘Robinson Crusoe’ is an empty name it doesn’t strictly have a meaning, so that we can’t simply take what is asserted to be something like ‘It is fictional in Robinson Crusoe that Robinson Crusoe was a castaway’. A prefix form of fictionalism about object-fictional discourse will strike many as far simpler, at least on this count (although, to be fair, prefix formulations still leave us with the problem presented by empty names). On prefix accounts, an object-fictional claim like ‘Robinson Crusoe was a castaway’ is used to express the prefixed claim ‘According to Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe was a castaway’. But how should we understand such a prefixed sentence? There is debate about this, but for our purposes it is enough to point out that for Lewis, who initiated this kind of view, such sentences should be construed as counterfactuals of a certain kind, specifically counterfactuals about what would be the case were the stories in

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question told as known fact. (There are different accounts of how to evaluate such counterfactuals, analogous to the difference between Walton’s Reality and Mutual Belief Principles). One issue that we’ll encounter later is what to say about would-be prefix fictionalisms that use a prefix ‘According to story/theory X, … ’ but where the suggested meaning is quite different from the way Lewis understood such a prefix for the case of fiction.

6.2 Fictionalism about meta-fictional discourse So much for fictionalism about object-fictional discourse. Easy to see, we think, why both accounts qualify as fictionalisms about objectfictional discourse, even though the details of the two accounts are far from straightforward. But things become far trickier when we turn to meta-fictional discourse.6 Consider a claim like: (R) The fictional character Robinson Crusoe was modelled on a real castaway. Many authors, and not just Meinongians, are realists about fictional objects. We earlier mentioned artefactualists about fictional objects, philosophers who think that such objects are abstract artefacts created by authors (see section 4.2). Like Meinongians, artefactualists think that the statement (R) is a literal truth about a genuine fictional object. So these philosophers reject Quasi-Fictionality for the metafictional fragment of discourse concerning fiction. Indeed, they reject Truth Relegation. They are therefore not fictionalists about the meta-fictional fragment of fictional discourse. Despite this, a number of such philosophers (including Kripke) should be seen as fictionalists about the object-fictional fragment of discourse, happy to accept either Walton-style prefacing or Lewis-style prefixing in their accounts and to relegate existence and truth for this fragment of fictional discourse. But suppose you resolutely refuse to believe that there are such things as abstract fictional characters (you might be like Hartry Field,

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who has scruples like this about numbers). You think that purely fictional names never stand for genuine entities, so that sentences like (R) are false or lack truth-value. In that case, you would need another way of accounting for the point of uttering and affirming such sentences. That is precisely what we find in Walton’s pretencetheoretic account of such statements. For Walton, when speakers utter such statements they are at least to some degree involved in what he calls unofficial games of make-believe in which people pretend that fictional names, not just real names, all have a referent and that the expressions ‘[is] a fictional character’, ‘[is] real’ and so on, all stand for genuine properties. In such games, there exist both ‘real’ people and ‘fictional’ people like Robinson Crusoe (Walton 1990). So the way Walton understands meta-fictional discourse is an extension of the way in which he understands object-fictional discourse. What would make a statement like (R) fictionally true from the perspective of such an extended fiction? Walton himself doesn’t provide much detail, but other pretence theorists say more. As in the case of ordinary games of make-believe, this will involve the operation of (implicit) principles that dictate how certain wordly circumstances make certain kinds of statements pretend-worthy: principles that apply to statements of the form ‘X is a fictional character’, ‘X is real’, ‘X is modelled on Y’, and so on (X and Y are place-holders for referring expressions that may come from a fiction). These may be difficult to articulate, but here, at a first and crude approximation, is the principle for ‘X is a (purely) fictional character’: X first appears in a pretence based on a fiction, and does not appear earlier in nonpretend contexts. And here is a suggestion of what it takes for X to be modelled on Y: the real-world item Y guided the way we, or those who initiated the pretence P in which X first appears, are supposed to imagine X. (For a more sophisticated account of such expressions and their uses in extended pretences, and responses to objections, see Everett 2013.) To understand what the real world must be like for (R) to be pretend-worthy, we simply have to apply these principles to the special case of the name ‘Robinson Crusoe’ as it occurs in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. And because, as most authorities think, there was a real castaway who was the inspiration for Defoe’s novel and for the original pretence in which Robinson Crusoe appears, it really is true or fictional in the extended pretence that the fictional character Robinson Crusoe was modelled on a real castaway.

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And now for what is many ways the punch-line of this account. When we utter statements like (R) we are obviously not interested in immersing ourselves in this new pretence. After all, it is not as if this is part of some exciting new instalment of the Robinson Crusoe story! Instead we are – to use what has now become a common expression in this area – ‘piggy-backing’ on the pretence in order to assert something about the world, namely the particular way the world needs to be to make (R) fictional. (We tried to articulate this way in the preceding paragraph. For pretence theorists, the fact that articulation often comes hard helps to explain why we so often speak through the pretence in order to assert such propositions indirectly.) The piggy-backing model is the model pretence theorists tend to advocate for meta-fictional claims in general, making their account a version of object-fictionalism about meta-fictional discourse. That is enough for us to say that Walton’s account of meta-fictional claims of this kind meets the condition of Quasi-Fictionality (as well as Factuality), and that justifies us in classing Walton as a preface pretence fictionalist about this fragment of fictional discourse. (We are once again going to take Utility for granted.). What kind of preface fictionalist? A descriptive fictionalist. For Walton and a number of other fictionalists about this fragment of discourse, the above account captures how in fact we ought to understand the way all of us actually use meta-fictional discourse. It is not a prescriptive recommendation to implement the strategy as a neat new way to avoid committing ourselves to genuine fictional objects. (But note a looming problem. Suppose you say something like (R). You are unlikely to think that you are engaging in pretence when you say this. You are far more likely to think that you are giving voice to the sober truth. We return to this worry in Chapter 8.) We have been discussing a famous prefacing form of fictionalism about meta-fictional discourse. But one can even be a prefix fictionalist about meta-fictional discourse, either of a descriptive or a prescriptive variety. Just as we can have extended pretences to deal with statements like (R), so we can have an extended fiction that takes the most promising realist theory of fictional characters and treats it as just a story. In short, we can invoke what Stuart Brock calls ‘fictionalism about fictional characters’. Varying our diet of fictions somewhat, take a sentence like ‘Anna Karenina is a fictional character’. This sentence gives the impression of reference to a certain fictional

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object, Anna Karenina, which it characterizes as having the property of being a fictional character. On the proposed strategy, the sentence should be thought of as implicitly prefixed by a different kind of prefix or ‘in the fiction’ operator. In cases of this type, the operator would appeal not to the usual kind of story but rather to the realist presumption that the impression of reference to a fictional object seems to support, and it would treat this presumption as a fiction of some kind. The suggestion, then, is that meta-fictional sentences are to be read as implicitly prefixed by an operator like ‘according to the fiction of realism’ or ‘according to the realist’s hypothesis’. Someone who utters the sentence ‘Anna Karenina is a fictional character’ doesn’t assert or believe what this sentence says on its face-value reading (she only accepts the sentence on that reading), but she does assert and believe what it says once fully articulated.

6.3 Existence revisited It is time to change gears for a bit, and return to the debates about existence that were the topic of section 1.1, in particular the debate between those who think existence can be explained quantificationally and those who take it to be a property possessed by some things and lacked by others. The issue has suddenly become salient again, because it probably did not escape your notice that nothing has been said so far about what is arguably the most famous and most widely discussed kind of meta-fictional claim: negative existentials like ‘Sherlock Holmes doesn’t exist’ and ‘Robinson Crusoe doesn’t exist’. These, recall, place pressure on the quantificational view. Russell famously sought to rescue the quantificational view by offering his theory of definite descriptions, in conjunction with the view that names are simply disguised definite descriptions. At the start of the present chapter we noted that arguments against descriptivism about proper names by Saul Kripke and others suggest that we might have to make room after all for the property view of existence and the view that Holmes is a nonexistent object. And that would seem to have drastic implications for any fictionalist views of even ordinary fictional discourse.

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Fictionalist resources to deal with such claims appear limited. Note, for example, that despite the considerable reach of the kind of fictionalism about fictional characters discussed at the end of the preceding section, its net doesn’t extend to such claims. According to the realist’s hypothesis Holmes exists. Worse is to come. First, the problem of how to understand the true claim that Holmes doesn’t exist is in the end not simply an issue about a certain kind of metafictional claim. For negative existentials often involve other sorts of names. We deny not only that Holmes exists; we do the same with the planet Vulcan, not to mention the Roman god Vulcan. Secondly, these are all singular claims of nonexistence, phrased using proper names. But worries of the same general sort might plague you about the claim that some characters in The Three Musketeers existed and others did not, which is a general, quantified claim of (non-)existence (see section 1.4). You might be convinced that this proposition is true, but utterly unsure how to establish that the appeal to existence is an appeal to quantification. Must you accept the property view? Should you address the problem of how to interpret singular but also general claims of nonexistence by giving the non-quantificational existence property view another hearing? Pretence fictionalists think they have the answer. The view has been rolled out by a number of different pretence theorists, but the essential idea is again due to Walton. Here is the pitch. As in the case of ordinary games of make-believe, claims of existence and nonexistence are made from the perspective of pretences that are governed by (implicit) principles that dictate how certain worldly circumstances make certain kinds of statements or utterances pretend-worthy. That much was claimed in the preceding section on behalf of statements like ‘Robinson Crusoe is a fictional character’, ‘The fictional character Robinson Crusoe was modelled on a real castaway’, and the like, but this time the focus is on the word ‘exists’. The idea is that talk of existence and nonexistence is based on a game of make-believe that has a Meinongian view of existence: ‘exists’ stands for a discriminating property that some things have and some things don’t have. Note that the word has no other use, according to these philosophers. ‘Exists’ acquires its meaning from its use in this kind of game of make-believe, so this account of existential locutions is a meaning rather than a use fictionalism (see section 5.3 above). It

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is also assumed that in this game any name (either fictional or nonfictional this time) stands for an object. We now need to specify under what conditions we are right to utter a sentence ‘N exists’ (where N is a name); that is, under what conditions speakers are required to pretend this. Proponents generally take their options to be limited. With the assumed death of descriptivism about proper names, they will not take such a pretence to be prescribed just if the descriptive condition associated with the use of N is satisfied by some object. Instead they will say something like the following. Such a pretence is prescribed just if there is some object to which the name N genuinely refers (i.e. some object to which N as used apart from the pretence refers). Correspondingly, we are right to utter ‘N doesn’t exist’ just if there is no object to which the name N genuinely refers. For these pretence theorists, then, it is correct to say ‘Sherlock Holmes doesn’t exist’ simply because non-pretended attempts to refer with ‘Sherlock Holmes’ fail utterly. (That prediction is surely right. Just try asking your London guide whether Holmes really lived at 221B Baker St.) But we can say more. As in the case of the metafictional claims discussed in the previous section, pretence theorists of this kind hold that in stating, ‘Sherlock Holmes doesn’t exist’ your purpose is not to revel in what takes place in this new game of makebelieve. It is instead to affirm or assert whatever it is that makes it mandatory to pretend the truth of ‘Holmes doesn’t exist’. In other words, what you assert is that non-pretended attempts to refer with ‘Sherlock Holmes’ come to nothing. And on the surface little may be needed to extend this account to quantified existentials like ‘Some characters in The Three Musketeers existed and others did not’. Pretending the truth of this statement is required just if there are some names in The Three Musketeers that genuinely refer and others that don’t. In the end, then, it seems that preface fictionalists of the Walton kind have a general way of dealing with meta-fictional claims, encompassing even negative existentials (claims that eluded the kind of prefix fictionalism about fictional discourse discussed earlier). So there we have it: an account that acknowledges the apparently Meinongian behaviour of ‘exists’ as the word is used in claims of existence and nonexistence, but stays true to the idea that in the end we need nothing more than the existential quantifier to understand

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this use. Whether such a view is ultimately defensible, of course, is a very different question. But even if the view proves unsatisfactory, that is not the end for fictionalism about fictional meta-fictional discourse. Perhaps prefix fictionalism about meta-fictional discourse works better for the most part. Perhaps negative existentials are best seen as outliers, to be treated in a very different way from other metafictional claims so that prefix fictionalism’s failure to give a coherent account of such claims should not be seen as a mark against it.7 That, however, is a debate for others.

6.4 Concluding comments In this chapter we have not simply talked about fiction and the extent to which many philosophers can be described as fictionalists about fictional discourse. By focusing on the case of fiction, we have also uncovered some of the strategies that preface and prefix forms of fictionalism will use when applied to other regions of discourse. This will not come as a surprise. We defined fictionalism in terms of an overarching analogy between the way fictionalists approach a discourse and the way certain philosophies of fiction relegate existence in their account of fictional discourse. Let us now see how this all plays out when we turn to more serious fictionalisms: fictionalisms that are not focused on a type of discourse (fiction) whose existence is rooted in the idea of imaginative play and aesthetic pleasure but focused instead on the sober discourses of mathematics, metaphysics, morality and much else, and so responsible for the high-profile fictionalism enjoys in current debates in metaphysics and elsewhere.

6.5 Further reading See the readings mentioned in the ‘Further reading’ section for Chapter 5. Currie’s The Nature of Fiction (1990) presents a theory of fiction that is superficially similar to Walton’s pretence account in Walton (1990), but offers a Gricean view of how fiction-making results

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in make-believe and a realist view of meta-fictional statements. Everett (2013) presents a more fully worked out version of a Waltonian account of object-fictional and meta-fictional sentences, one that locates its understanding of pretence and the imagination in the cognitive account offered by Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich (see, e.g., Nichols and Stich 2003, chapter 2). For another fictionalist way of thinking about fictional discourse, see Predelli (2019). For fictionalism about fictional characters, see Brock (2002) and (2016). Crimmins (1998), Everett (2013), and Armour-Garb and Woodbridge (2015), articulate similar versions of Walton’s view as applied to statements of existence. Alternative pretence-fictionalist account of existential locutions are given in Evans (1982, chapter 10), and Kroon (2000) and (2004a).

7 Fictionalism: Why, Where, How?

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s a general philosophical strategy, fictionalism is thriving. Fictionalism has become a buzzword in philosophy, and fictionalist treatments of this or that topic are now rife in metaphysics – even their detractors are for the most part willing to take them seriously. It is time to scrutinize the reasons for this more closely. In this chapter we aim to be mostly descriptive, describing what prominent fictionalisms say and why they say it, and citing realist, abolitionist and nonfactualist alternatives. But we begin by looking at some general methodological considerations in favour of exploring fictionalist options. Later sections appeal to these general motivations, and other more specific motivations, to show why and how philosophers have become fictionalists about various familiar and no-so-familiar domains of discourse.

7.1 Methodological motivations for exploring fictionalism We have already come across one source of motivation, arising from debates about the nature of existence. These were the topic of section 1.1, and there we encountered a rift between those who think existence can be explained in terms of quantification and those who take it to be a property possessed by some things and lacked

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by others. Suppose there are claims you really want to affirm that apparently quantify over things you do not believe in, and that do not seem to reduce conceptually in any obvious way. How can this be done, consistently with your also declaring that there are no such things or that these things do not exist (or perhaps only exist in some kind of problematic mind-dependent way)? As we saw in the last chapter when looking at examples that arise from fiction, Waltonian preface fictionalism about existential locutions thinks it has the answer to this conundrum. But this source of motivation for fictionalism rests on another. For we need to ask: how could you have got to the point of wanting to quantify over things that you do not believe in in the first place? The understandable desire to engage with works of fiction serves as one answer to this question, but that seems a trivial case and it is certainly not a case that most fictionalists focus on when they jostle to give their answers to this question. The answers that fictionalists give will mostly focus on things non-fictional. In this connection, think about people’s metaphysical commitments. These can often seem excessively inflationary. Metaphysicians are eager for a coherent conception of reality and to that end, they posit obscure things, both in their own theorizing and in their reflections on theorizing in other disciplines. Over the centuries, they have treated us to haecceities, tropes, propositions, souls, nonphysical beliefs and desires, nonphysical qualia,1 numbers and classes as abstract entities, possible worlds that exist outside of the normal causal order, and moral facts that exist independently of all moral agents. Some of these are the contribution of professional metaphysicians, ancient and modern; others were taken over, with some changes but much reflection, from the thought and talk of ordinary people. Many are awkward, queer, or freakish.2 They are imperceptible and sometimes the processes or states they are invoked to explain are also imperceptible.3 This renders them awkwardly different from the things ordinarily deemed real. To be sure, natural science too encourages us to countenance unfamiliar items, like superpositions, gravitational waves, black holes and genes. But arguably this is acceptable because we can assess hypotheses about these scientific posits, in combination with accepted science, by deriving predictions about the behaviour

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of observable reality and observing whether those predictions are borne out. Every philosopher of science knows that these tests are never infallible,4 but updating our scientific world view in accordance with them has increased our ability to manipulate our environment. By contrast, it is hard to imagine how we could test the theories that give rise to awkward metaphysical posits for any features other than internal theoretical consistency, breadth of application and harmony with our own homely intuitions about what the world is fundamentally like. It is equally hard to establish (and even believe) that we have made enormous leaps forward in our understanding of the world or our ability to manipulate it by embracing these awkward posits. Since many of these awkward posits are controversial, hard to test, short on practical implications and hard to fit into our preferred world view via reduction to more familiar stuff, one might suspect that some of them are surplus to ontological requirements. Those who reach this verdict about particular posits (objective moral properties or nonphysical beliefs and desires, for example) might be expected to discard them. After all, theoretical physicists discarded caloric fluid, a substance that was supposed to explain the flow and the phenomenology of heat, when it was shown that any phenomena it helped to predict or explain could be predicted and explained by a theory that did not posit caloric fluid – one that had significantly greater predictive and explanatory potential. Discarding a posit would presumably mean refraining from invoking it when making judgements about what the world is like. One might still defensibly speak, write, or think about it, but only as part of the history of ideas, the imagining of alternative ways things might be, or poetry. Certainly, we would expect the discarder to discourage everybody, everywhere, from acting as though the posit existed. This has been the crusade of, among others, Paul Churchland (1981) when it comes to beliefs and desires, physical or otherwise. He has insisted that a sufficiently developed neuroscience will show that there are no such things, not even if we construe them as bundles of other things, and that we should get ready to stop behaving as if there are. Of course, some awkward posits are more than specialists’ speculations. Beliefs, desires, numbers and perhaps free-floating moral facts are among the purported things that frame our experience and inform our most significant judgements. To excise

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any of them from the list of all things is to impute entrenched, systematic error to the people. By itself, imputing systematic error is hardly a revolutionary act: science long ago unseated cherished folk explanations of agricultural and meteorological phenomena, among others, and philosophers are not shy about denying the existence of God. Yet loyalty to folk categories is often elevated and presented by philosophers as a conservative methodological principle: down the abolitionist path there be dragons (even if none exist). In fact, a stronger case than mere respect for folk wisdom is sometimes available for the retention, in some capacity, of ‘folktheoretic’ metaphysical posits. An appeal to numbers, however abstract, awkward and irreducible they are, provides an organizing framework for countless human endeavours, most of which are mostly engaged in non-philosophically. Numbers support bridges, ward off bankruptcy and promote security in the digital age. Even if tropes only help a few theorists with problems about universals, numbers help all of us with far more than our homework. Interestingly, similar considerations can be adduced in favour of certain more arcane metaphysical conjectures. An appeal to possible worlds provides technical machinery for dealing with the logic of necessity, possibility and contingency; it sharpens and deepens enquiries into the question of what it means for a thing to have a nature, or essence; it holds out the prospect of truth conditions for counterfactual conditionals, ascriptions of dispositions and supervenience theses – all of which rely on claims about how things are not, but might be; it precisifies important proposals about what constitutes a valid argument (see, for example, Beall and Restall 2006), a proposition (Stalnaker 1976) and an episode of rational deliberation (Stalnaker 1978). Ontologically embarrassing posits may thus be part of elegant, flexible frameworks in which genuinely fertile ideas are incubated and old ones receive a satisfying, systematic treatment. So it is not merely hard to envisage life without some of these props; it is also hard not to be impressed by their resilience, utility and fecundity. What to do in such cases? We have already come across one strategy: adopt some form of antirealism that declares the posits to be dependent on such things as minds or conceptual schemes. But such a strategy has the difficulties we noted in Chapter 2. It is hard to understand what mind- or conceptual-scheme-dependent existence

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comes down to. What is it even to commit to there being such things when they are nothing without minds? (Intuitionists and idealists about mathematics run into this problem when they declare numbers to be mental constructions.5) More likely, perhaps, are attempts to render thought and talk about awkward posits harmless by demonstrating that they are really just upshots of more acceptable and familiar processes. Consider, for example, the logicist’s (Frege 1879) effort to paraphrase talk about numbers, or naturalistic strategies (as in Jackson 1998; Finlay 2014) for showing that moral and other prescriptive properties are really just naturalistic, descriptive ones. However, even those who are sympathetic to the possibility of such conceptual reductions are likely to admit that in many cases, we have not got very far with explaining how they work.6 Given these troubles, it is gratifying to entertain the possibility that some of these posits are to be treated in something like the way fictional objects are treated, or in a way that sidesteps the question of whether they exist. A descriptive fictionalist about a region of discourse featuring a particular awkward posit denies that the masses are deluded, holding instead that their apparent loyalty to the posit is not ontologically loaded. A prescriptive fictionalist might not let the folk off the hook, but she thinks they should exploit the theoretical power of apparent commitments to the posit, prepared to admit to its conceptual irreducibility, while eschewing ontological commitment to it and indeed avoiding the question of whether such a commitment is necessary. So if a posit threatens to be a false posit, abolishing the practices it facilitates is not the only option, because there is also fictionalism which can rescue things that perhaps should be rescued. Note that this is not an argument for fictionalism about this or that area of discourse. It is a reason for checking it out. Here is another reason. Metaphysicians have a knack for problematizing thought and talk about even ordinary things. This is not inflationary; it is not the defence of awkward, suspicious, posits. It is the admission that very humble folk classifications look precarious when scrutinized carefully. We noted in section 1.1 that questions can be asked about the existence of even middle-sized physical fare, like my hairbrush. If it is physical at all, my hairbrush is just a composite of smaller things and exactly which things these are might change over time, as bristles fall

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out and hair follicles get in. How much change must occur before it is not the same object anymore? What happens if part of it is burned, or if all of it is burned and I collect the ashes? Does my hairbrush have enough diachronic stability to qualify as an object at all? If it qualifies, is this only because, for any two or more objects, situated in any regions of space-time, the fusion of those objects is itself an object? Such questions remind us, as much good science does, that the way the world appears can differ starkly from the way the world is. Hence, even my tendency to act as though there are hairbrushes, cows and stones might be in need of justification. Once again fictionalism, this time about talk of ordinary objects, might be explored as a response to such concerns: descriptive fictionalism would allow the folk to save face; prescriptive fictionalism would let them carry on much as before.7 So there’s the initial sales pitch. Metaphysicians problematize the nature of existence; they adopt commitments that appear excessive; they even undermine our faith in ordinary things. Fictionalism offers to de-problematize the nature of existence, to guarantee the bits you like about the troublesome metaphysics and scrap the rest, and to restore our faith in the way we talk about ordinary things. It may not be the only vehicle en route to this destination, but these benefits suggest it is worth a test drive. There are roadblocks along the way that threaten different types of fictionalism (we consider the most common and worrying in the next chapter), but we suspect many can be circumvented. In any case, we think their danger has often been exaggerated. Whether any particular fictionalism can ultimately be justified will, of course, depend on the intricacies of the case, and in each case readers will have to make their own judgement after weighing up the costs and benefits. It is now high time to introduce some of the major fictionalist programmes and their competitors, perhaps with the occasional reminder of some of the special problems they face. We begin, in the next three sections, with the Three Big Ms: Mathematical, Modal and Moral Fictionalism. These are the three fictionalist programmes that have become emblematic of the rise of modern fictionalism. (Notice how we persist in excluding van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism. We have said quite a lot already about why this is, but will say more in Chapter 9.) We conclude, less systematically, with a selective survey of the bewildering array

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of other fictionalisms that have appeared over the last three or so decades. (Because it is selective, and because we feel bad that so much is being overlooked, our section on Further Reading will overcompensate and look bloated as a result).

7.2 Mathematical fictionalism Imagine you became utterly convinced that numbers do not exist, perhaps as a result of highly rational discussion with a genuine authority or perhaps by reflecting on what numbers are supposed to be like and then deciding that there couldn’t be such things. Imagine you could articulate your reasons for denying their existence and even convince others to do likewise. Imagine, furthermore, that this was a conversion: prior to the encounter, you had either believed in numbers, or been indifferent or unsure about their ontological status. Would you now forswear arithmetic and seek new ways to do all the things you used to do with numbers? Or would you continue much as before, while acknowledging, at least in your reflective moods, that you are not adding or multiplying real things? Hartry Field in his groundbreaking work Science without Numbers (Field 1980) took the latter alternative. He announced his book as a defence of nominalism: if numbers existed they would be abstract entities, but abstract entities are causally inert and too remote, therefore, from our cognitive faculties to be able to explain the reliability of our beliefs about them (Benacerraf 1973). We should refuse to admit such weird objects into our ontology. Easier said than done, however. How could we possibly continue doing science if we banish numbers from our theories? As we were reminded in earlier chapters, there is a famous argument for numbers that claims that we have good indirect evidence for their existence: the Quine-Putnam argument that since numbers are indispensable to our best scientific theories we should admit their existence (Quine 1948; Putnam 1975). It is Field’s response to this argument that makes his position so distinctive. What he suggests is that mathematics can be dispensed with, and he suggests a way of showing this – he chooses as his sample an impressive classical theory like Newtonian gravitational

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theory, and describes a way of nominalizing it, that is, reconstructing it without quantifying over mathematical entities. Like Hilbert’s axiomatization of geometry, he replaces Newton’s use of numerical functors with the use of comparative predicates, so that the theory no longer implies that there are real numbers corresponding to masses, forces and distances. Assuming similar nominalizations are available for other parts of science, that leaves us free to adopt an error theory of mathematics. Because there are no numbers, much of mathematics is false (in particular, all claims that imply that there are numbers are false), but this doesn’t affect our scientific theories since they can be reconstructed without introducing the falsehoods of mathematics. But, of course, no scientist works like this, or would want to work like this. Even if successful scientific theories could all be nominalized, the resulting reconstructions would probably be very complicated and hold little interest for practising scientists. This is where the second major element of Field’s nominalism comes to the fore. Field doesn’t want us to give up mathematics, and he insists that we don’t need to. For although mathematics is largely false, he shows that so long as it is consistent it is also conservative relative to the nominalized parts of science: if you use it, it won’t get you any (nominalistic) claims about the world that couldn’t have been derived without it. What mathematics does do is typically provide a much easier route to such claims. That is what makes it so useful. Field says he is a nominalist. In Science without Numbers he doesn’t self-identify as a fictionalist about mathematical discourse. So is he? Well, surely some of the pivotal ingredients are there. First of all, mathematical discourse is to be taken at face value and is not to be paraphrased away into discourse that doesn’t quantify over mathematical entities. Field’s position is not the kind of instrumentalist view that sees mathematics as a purely calculative device; mathematics comes with a semantics. So it satisfies the condition of Factuality. Secondly, Field’s view is a poster child for Truth Relegation: he thinks that the contribution made to science by mathematics does not presuppose the truth of purely mathematical claims, but rests on the gain in efficiency they bring to doing (nominalistic) science. (The contribution they make to other parts of pure mathematics is to be understood in terms of more theoretical virtues, like the virtues of

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theoretical elegance and simplicity.) Still, there is no mention of how any of this is like fiction – the parts of mathematics that imply that numbers exist are taken to be categorically false, so it is tempting to assume that when we use mathematics to do science we are treating it as merely a calculative device. All content is immaterial. Field’s later work (see Field 1989) makes the label of fictionalism more clearly appropriate. He notes that it seems counterintuitive to reject a claim like ‘2+2=4’ as simply false. He acknowledges a sense in which it is true, but says that no translation procedure along the lines of non-committing conceptual reductionism that can do the trick. Instead, ‘the sense in which ‘2+2=4’ is true is pretty much the same as the sense in which “Oliver Twist lived in London” is true’ (1989: 3). In effect, he introduces a fictional operator ‘In, or according to, arithmetic’, and that allows him to affirm that according to arithmetic 2+2=4. While disagreeing with the Platonist, Field can thus maintain a kind of verbal agreement with the Platonist. By dint of this prefixing move Field can declare himself a fullfledged fictionalist: his view not only satisfies Truth Relegation (and, of course, Factuality) but also Quasi-Fictionality. And of course he shows himself to be a prescriptive, indeed a revolutionary, fictionalist. It took insight, perseverance and a willingness to buck the system – the stuff of revolutions – to show that despite the literal falsity of (much of) mathematics we know we can use mathematics reliably when doing science. Or, at least, we would know this if scientific theories could indeed be nominalized in the way Field intends. There is, we should add, lots of doubt on this score, both on whether the account can be extended to other mathematical scientific theories and on whether Field’s account of Newtonian mechanics and his defence of the conservativeness of mathematics is truly free of Platonistic assumptions. For details of such criticisms, see, for example, Malament (1982), Shapiro (1983), Resnik (1985) and Chihara (1990). Such criticisms might suggest that mathematical fictionalism is in trouble. But some self-declared fictionalists think that is the wrong take-home lesson. They think that Field was being unnecessarily hard on himself when he laid down the conditions for a successful version of nominalism-fictionalism. There is now even a label to acknowledge this point. Field has been called a Hard Road fictionalist (cf. Colyvan 2010 which uses the term ‘hard

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road nominalism’). By contrast, Easy Road fictionalists think that even if mathematics should prove to be indispensable to empirical science, we can still understand the application of mathematics to science in a fictionalist way: nominalization is not needed. The idea is this. Empirical science has both a nominalistic content, namely what it entails about the purely physical, non-mathematical world, and a Platonistic content, what it entails ‘about’ an abstract mathematical realm. This Platonist content is largely false, since there are no numbers. Perhaps we can’t neatly carve off the numberfree nominalistic content from the total body of empirical science, contra Field, but that is not to say that science requires mathematics to be true. It doesn’t. Mathematics simply enables us to represent the physical, non-mathematical world in a particularly useful and theoretically powerful way, nothing more. Rather different versions of such an Easy Road fictionalism have been defended by Mark Balaguer and Mary Leng (see Balaguer 1996a, 1998, 2015; Leng 2010). Both espouse Truth Relegation and, of course, Factuality, but Balaguer’s view is a kind of prescriptive prefix fictionalism that invokes truth in what he calls the story of mathematics as the hallmark of what makes mathematical claims assertible though false (Balaguer 2015). By contrast, Leng’s is a preface (pretence) fictionalism of (as it seems) a descriptive variety, modelled on Walton’s notion of prop-oriented make-believe (see section 6.1). On her account, scientists in effect weave a story – one that includes mathematics – around non-mathematical physical systems that function as worldly props in a game of make-believe, and then utter sentences based on this game of make-believe. As in the case of the meta-fictional claims discussed in the last chapter, scientists can indirectly assert something about the world by speaking through the pretence or make-believe: they affirm the realworld circumstances that need to obtain for these sentences to be fictional or true in the game. Many will think these fictionalist programmes complicated and abstruse, and will doubt that their philosophical motivation is weighty enough to off-set the complications. That may be especially true of working mathematicians, who may be amused rather than worried to be told (by philosophers, of all people) that their discipline – the Queen of the Sciences! – is largely false but not to worry. We return

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to this complaint in the next chapter. Before we leave mathematics, however, one final point about prefix fictionalism. We have argued that Field’s 1989 position deserves to be described as a form of prefix fictionalism, since it explicitly describes its prefix as being like the usual ‘in the story’ prefix of fiction. Balaguer’s position is less clear. Even though Balaguer relies on an ‘in the story of mathematics’ prefix, his understanding of this prefix is nothing like our usual conception of the ‘in the story’ prefixes of fiction. On Balaguer’s account, the story of mathematics is just what he calls ‘plenitudinous’ Platonism (roughly speaking, the view that all conceivable abstract objects exist), and to say that a sentence S is true in the story of mathematics is to say that S would have been true if this kind of Platonism had been in place.8 On the surface, this makes for quite a different kind of ‘in the story’ prefix. Balaguer, in fact, strongly denies that fictionalism has any close connection to fiction, so perhaps we should not be surprised by this. Nonetheless, we are prepared to treat this debate about prefixes as an interfamilial squabble. Certainly the form of Balaguer’s mathematical fictionalism is close to that of a standard prefix fictionalism, and, arguably, that is enough.9 That leaves us with just one last position to comment on, a view that for many is emblematic of the new wave of fictionalist views that emerged in the 1990s and remains one of the most influential such views, even though its author has now renounced it. This is Yablo’s figuralism. Like van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism, there are features of the view that take it out of the circle of views we count as clearly fictionalist. (We don’t deny that it is a version of fictionalism broadly construed.) Still, it is close enough in spirit and even detail to views that we are prepared to count as fictionalist to warrant further discussion. Yablo’s view will reappear in the final chapter as one of fictionalism’s close cousins.

7.3 Modal fictionalism Alongside mathematical fictionalism, the most widely discussed fictionalism about an important metaphysical notion is modal fictionalism. Modal notions like necessity, contingency, possibility

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and impossibility have a long and illustrious history in philosophy, but it is important to emphasize that modal fictionalism per se is not a fictionalism that denies the existence of such modes of truth and falsity and treats them as fictional. If, say, you are a modal primitivist who sees modal notions as unanalysable, you should not see modal fictionalism as a fictionalism about these primitive modal notions.10 Instead, modal fictionalism is a fictionalism about one especially productive way of systematizing claims of necessity and possibility: the appeal to possible worlds, where possible worlds are understood as parts of logical space that are just like the actual world except that different propositions are true at different possible world (although necessary truths are true at all possible worlds). On this view, we get correlations like the following: (*) Necessarily p if and only if at every world (accessible from this one) p is the case; Possibly p if and only if there is a world (accessible from this one) at which p is the case At an unreflective first blush, such worlds sound like concrete totalities of a certain kind, just like our own actual world – each with their own denizens and goings on, parts of a logically (but not physically) interconnected multiverse. This picture gives us an intuitive grip on the idea of a sentence being true at a world. Famously, that is precisely what David Lewis decided possible worlds had to be (Lewis 1986), although after more than just an unreflective first blush. This view is now known as modal realism, a view reviled by many and whose reception, as Lewis saw it, was mostly a series of ‘incredulous stares’ accompanied by very few arguments (Lewis 1986: 86, 133, 135). Suppose you are one of those who share in the outrage at modal realism (‘You actually think there exist other worlds that have talking donkeys in them?!’), but agree that it is an elegant theory and extremely useful for all kinds of philosophical purposes. You then have various options. One is to reinterpret the notion of a possible world so that it becomes more acceptable ontologically but remains useful: that is what so-called ersatzers do – they take possible worlds to be abstract entities, perhaps maximally consistent sets of sentences

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over some expressively powerful language (‘linguistic ersatzism’). Lewis thinks these views are more trouble than they are worth, and many agree that they lack the intuitiveness and simplicity of the modal realist picture. Suppose you agree with this assessment, but still can’t bring yourself to believe there are such things. What you might then do is become a fictionalist about possible worlds. Instead of believing in them, you treat this theory of possible worlds as an extremely useful fiction. Notice that this was a two-step process. First, we agreed that possible worlds talk affords an extremely productive way of systematizing claims of necessity and possibility (as represented by the correlations (*) above), even though the simplest, most elegant view of what such talk is about – concrete totalities of a certain kind – is hard to take seriously. Next we said that we can secure all these advantages without inheriting the implausibility of this elegant theory by appealing to the fiction that this elegant theory is true. To do this, we need to use a general bridging principle like the following: p if and only if, according to the hypothesis of a plurality of worlds PW, p*. (Here p is a proposition and p* is its possible-worlds ‘paraphrase’ (Rosen 1990: 335) given by correlations like (*)). This yields such claims as ‘Possibly there are talking donkeys if and only if according to PW there is a possible world, accessible from this one, in which there are talking donkeys’; ‘It is impossible that 2+2=5 if and only if according to PW there are no possible worlds accessible from this one at which 2+2=5’; and so on. So there we have it. We can treat concrete possible worlds as no more real than Robinson Crusoe; Crusoe’s existence is confined to a fiction, and the recommendation is that we do the same to concrete possible worlds. This, in skeletal form, was how Rosen first presented modal fictionalism in Rosen (1990).11 Since Rosen’s paper, there has been a proliferation of publications on the topic. We won’t rehearse the history or give many details, but simply present some of the highlights. One of these is the vigorous debate that has ensued about the content of the most appropriate modal fiction PW. There are sensitive questions about what possible worlds are like according to this fiction, and how many there are. This makes a difference to what get counted as modal truths. Rosen himself now prefers to base the

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fiction on the view presented in Lewis (1968), after initially proposing to base it on a variant of Lewis’s (1986) theory of possible worlds. (The change of mind was in response to the technical debate on the BrockRosen objection that modal fictionalism is self-defeating, a problem we discuss in the next chapter.) But whatever the most appropriate modal fiction turns out to be, it seems clear that the task of selecting and then justifying such a fiction is of the highest importance. After all, don’t the real facts about modal status – what is really possible or necessary – depend on the choice if modal fictionalism is right? But here we have to make a distinction. They depend on the choice if the modal fictionalism on offer is strong modal fictionalism (Rosen 1990: 354; Nolan 1997b). According to strong modal fictionalism, the truth of modal claims is to be explained in terms of the content of the fiction about possible worlds. So the explanatory direction goes from fiction to modal truths. There is an alternative understanding of modal fictionalism – timid modal fictionalism – that denies this strong dependence (Rosen 1990: 354). Timid modal fictionalism can thus allow modal truths to determine what goes into the fiction. It thereby forgoes being an explanatory theory of modality, but its lack of bravado does give timid modal fictionalism a number of advantages. One of the most important is that it escapes a certain problem of circularity. For we need to ask what is meant by the prefix ‘according to PW’. Natural proposals for how to understand this, akin to Lewis’s understanding of ‘in or according to fiction F’ prefix, include ‘If PW were true, then P’, ‘It would be impossible for PW to be true without P being true as well’, and so on. But these are all modal locutions, and so circularity threatens unless we can reduce these to non-modal claims. This problem doesn’t arise if we adopt timid modal fictionalism, since the timid version refuses to let the truth of modal locutions depends on the contents of the modal fiction. (Timid fictionalism seems to be Field’s preferred option for a modal fictionalism; see Field 1989: 41, 86.) The strong version has other problems as well (see Nolan 2016), but at least it has strong pretensions: it is a genuine theory of modality, promising an analysis of one of the most difficult and important of philosophical notions. That can’t be said about timid fictionalism. Note that the strong/timid distinction is a new distinction. It is centred on the nature of the link between the fiction and the modal claims. The distinctions talked about in Chapter 5, on the other hand,

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involved the nature of the fictionalist commitments themselves. How do these other distinctions apply to modal fictionalism? In much the same way as before, although there is one surprising gap. For instance, one can understand modal fictionalism (timid or strong) in either a descriptive or prescriptive way. Although we are not aware of sociological surveys that show this, it is likely that most philosophers who engage in possible worlds discourse would class themselves as realists of some kind, although not in the modal realist sense of Lewis but as ersatzers. That suggests that modal fictionalists may have a hard time defending a descriptive version of their view, and that they would be better off defending their view as a prescriptive proposal. But maybe not. Maybe realists simply misrepresent the way they and others understand the basis of their appeals to possible worlds. (Think about the folk’s use of phrases like ‘the best of all possible worlds’. If prompted, the folk would probably deny that they are expressing a commitment to a realm of different worlds.) In section 5.4, we briefly reviewed the prospects for such a descriptive approach to modal fictionalism. What about the preface versus prefix distinction? Here there is a gap. In the literature, modal fictionalism is presented as a prefix fictionalism. That is how Rosen first presented it, and others have followed him in this. We suspect that the reason is that Rosen, living with Lewis’s modal realism and Lewis’s prefix account of truth in fiction, took this to be the default form of fictionalism. But there is no clear reason why one shouldn’t be a preface modal fictionalist; indeed, we suggested as much in our brief discussion in section 5.4 and some passages in the literature hint at such a view.12 There may even be advantages to preface over prefix modal fictionalism. ArmousGarb has recently complained that prefix modal fictionalism changes the subject-matter of the initial modal claims it sought to systematize or explain (Armour-Garb 2015). ‘There might have been blue swans’ is about blue swans, or perhaps blueness and swanness. ‘According to the fiction of possible worlds there are worlds containing blue swans’ is about a fiction, not blue swans. These are only some of the issues, some philosophical, some technical, canvassed in the large literature on modal fictionalism. Much as with mathematical fictionalism, the attention lavished on modal fictionalism in the literature is not a sign that this is a particularly

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fragile form of fictionalism, but rather that it seems particularly clear not only why such a fictionalism is worth having – the fictionalist turn here is an obvious application of the metaphysical motivation for fictionalism discussed in section 7.1 – but also what we should expect from a viable form of modal fictionalism. In addition, this is a case where there is a well-known and respected realist alternative to the bloated modal realism that modal fictionalism has in its sights, namely ersatzism, a view held by some of the main players in the field.13 We finish with an aside on time. Modal fictionalism is based on scepticism about alternative possible worlds. There is wellknown world-time parallel: alternative possible worlds are like alternative times. Is there anything that could correspond to modal fictionalism at the temporal level? Some have thought that such a temporal fictionalism could be of help to presentists, people who think that only the present and things present exist; in fact, that to exist is to be present. For suppose you are a presentist. You are opposed in particular to eternalism, which holds that everything in the past and future also exists, but at a temporal distance from the present. There are familiar problems with presentism, one of them what is generally called the truth-maker objection. According to this objection, there is a tension between presentism and two independently plausible principles: (i) that there are objective truths about the past, and (ii) the truth-maker principle that any truth is made true by something that exists These principles suggest that for you any truth about the past is made true by something that exists now! Not a good move. In response, you could simply deny that the truth-maker principle applies to claims about the past or future. But suppose you like both your presentism and the truth-maker principle. In that case you might endorse fictionalism about temporal discourse, and take a claim like ‘Dinosaurs once roamed the Earth’ to be best represented by something like ‘According to the fiction that there exists a past, dinosaurs once roamed the Earth’. Gone is the truth-maker objection! All you have to worry about now is what is the truth-maker for the claim that according to the fiction that there exists a past dinosaurs once roamed the Earth, and that is a claim about a presently existing fiction and should be easier to handle.14

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7.4 Moral fictionalism The third of our Three Big Ms is moral fictionalism, a view that touts the advantages of continuing with moral discourse even if we reject moral claims as false or unbelievable. Here is one reason why you might think that moral claims are by and large false. It is common to think that morality requires that some actions should be performed or not performed regardless of what people want (regardless even of what people really, really want – regardless, that is, of their ends, as philosophers often call these ultimate goals). You certainly should not torture or kill the innocent. And even if driving your neighbour’s red Porsche would give you – in your own words – ‘immeasurable’ satisfaction, you still should not steal it. John Mackie famously argued in Mackie (1977) that the idea that certain actions are categorically required of us in this way indefensible. For such actions would have to have features that make a moral demand on us in ways that have nothing with our ends, and there are no such intrinsically motivating moral properties. Indeed, there couldn’t be. Such properties would be utterly weird, and we shouldn’t believe in them. As a result, Mackie took everyday moral thought to be substantially in error, a perspective he called an ‘error theory’ of moral discourse. But despite holding such an error theory, Mackie thought that moral discourse could continue with the status of a ‘useful fiction’.15 Mackie did not develop this suggestion, and it is easy to think that such a moral fictionalism is subject to an objection that seems to apply to any form of fictionalism that has implications for action. When we perform an action (e.g. rushing in to save a drowning child at considerable personal cost) we are motivated to do so as a result of certain beliefs and desires: for example, our belief that God demands this kind of behaviour (or perhaps that it is the right thing to do), and by our desire to do what God demands (or perhaps our desire to do the right thing). But how can we be motivated to act if these moral beliefs are no longer in place, and all we have are beliefs that certain actions are required of us according to a fiction? How could that motivate a rational person to act? An excellent account of the resources available to the moral fictionalist in answering this and other questions facing moral error

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theorists is found in Nolan et al. (2005). But the most fully worked out response to this motivational worry is contained in Richard Joyce’s defence of moral fictionalism (Joyce 2001, 2005). He argues that an important practical benefit of having moral beliefs is that they diminish the possibilities for rationalization to which we are all prone. Adopting morality as a fiction yields some of the same benefits. Suppose I decide at some point to take the view that moral rules and principles constitute a kind of fiction. I immerse myself in this fiction, rehearsing moral reasons for performing actions rather than trying to satisfy my various ends, until doing so has become second nature. When presented with the chance to take something without paying for it, rather than go through a potentially debilitating internal costand-benefit analysis where I take account of the possibility of being found out, brought before a court of law or, worse, shamed on social media, I simply and without regret leave the item where it is. And I am able to do this through having adopted the fiction of morality as a kind of pre-commitment: a strategy for combating tendencies to rationalization we are all prone to. Generally moral beliefs do the job. Despite having rejected the very idea of moral properties and truths, we are nonetheless able to secure the practical benefits of moral beliefs (or enough of them) by accepting rather than believing moral claims – as much as we can living by its edicts, defending it, cultivating sentiments like guilt, and so on. Let us have a quick look at situating this kind of view in our catalogue of fictionalism and their divisions. First of all, Joyce’s moral fictionalism is a preface fictionalism: it invokes pretence. He denies that morality as a fiction would, or could, have a hold on us if our deliberations involved prefixed claims. Consider a monologue that went ‘No one is around, but even so, according to the fiction of morality, it is wrong to steal that red Porsche, so I won’t steal it’. This feels wrong for the same reason as it feels wrong to take the sentences in a work to be implicitly prefixed is, something we briefly considered in section 4.2. For the fiction to be effective people need to immerse themselves in it, and that requires pretence. Secondly, this is not a content fictionalism. Joyce doesn’t claim that speakers make substantive assertions about the real world when they speak from the perspective of their fiction of morality. If anything, that would take away from the effectiveness of their engagement with the fiction.16 The view it is naturally construed

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as a force fictionalism in so far as it holds that speakers engage in a speech act other than assertion: they quasi-assert or make as if to assert. Finally, this is a prescriptive fictionalism. It required metaethical insight on the part of Mackie and his intellectual heirs to see that morality is error-ridden, just as for Field it required something like Benacerraf’s arguments against Platonism in mathematics to see that mathematics is error-ridden. Of course, these claims about moral and mathematical discourse are contentious. The case against Platonism in mathematics, however, is one that has broad philosophical support, even if fictionalism in mathematics is still a minority view. In the case of morality matters are rather different. Many metaethicists would dispute the view that moral thinking is committed to special kinds of facts or properties, or to the absoluteness of moral value. Here is Tim Scanlon on the matter: [B]elief in irreducibly normative truth does not involve commitment to any special entities. The things that can be reasons are not a special kind of entity but ordinary facts, in many cases facts about the natural world. (Scanlon 2014: 30) And Stephen Finlay argues that it is false to claim, as Mackie and Joyce do, that moral judgements essentially presuppose that moral value has absolute authority, arguing instead that the application conditions for moral concepts are relational (Finlay 2014). Others have expressed other doubts about the viability of Mackie’s argument (cf. Shepski 2008). In short, the view of morality underlying Joyce’s position has many critics. We conclude our brief incursion into moral fictionalism by looking at a very different version of the view: Mark Kalderon’s view, which comes out of debates between cognitivists and non-cognitivists (roughly speaking, those who think that moral discourse obeys Factuality and those who subscribe to a non-factualist account of moral discourse, like emotivists and expressivists). Like Joyce, Kalderon thinks that moral sentences express moral propositions that we have no reason to believe. But he doesn’t think this because he holds an error theory of moral discourse. Instead, he thinks that moral judgements simply don’t involve belief. For Kalderon, the case

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of morality presents us with a dilemma. On one hand, we have a plausible view of the content of moral judgements as representational (Factuality again), and on the other an implausible view of the attitudes involved in moral judgements as beliefs. His solution? Go down the middle: We make-believe that moral discourse states moral truths, and in quasi-asserting, or pretending to assert, moral claims, we are in fact expressing relevant attitudes and recommending those attitudes to others. Kalderon thinks this view combines what is best about cognitivism (it looks for all the world as if we are engaged in ordinary descriptive discourse when we use moral vocabulary) and what is best about noncognitivism (we are doing something very different from just stating facts when we are engaged in moral discourse.) And it allows him, he thinks, to solve some problems faced by expressivism, in particular the notorious Frege-Geach problem of what sense to make, if you are an expressivist, of clearly valid arguments in which sentences occur both in isolation and in the context of conditional sentences (for example: ‘Stealing is wrong. If stealing is wrong, then telling one’s daughter to steal one’s neighbour’s red Porsche is wrong. So, telling one’s daughter to steal one’s neighbour’s red Porsche is wrong’; see section 9.1 below). Kalderon thinks his brand of fictionalism has a way of accounting for the role played by such arguments. For one thing, it can account for their validity: within the make-believe that moral language is factual the premises and conclusion are perfectly factual in content, subject to the usual laws of logic, and so the conclusion follows. Like Joyce’s view, Kalderon’s moral fictionalism has attracted a lot of attention, much of it critical. On the whole neither cognitivists nor non-cognitivists have much liked the thought of reconciliation being forced on them in this way. Cognitivists dislike the residual expressivist element in the view. Non-cognitivists think that something close to Factuality can in fact be captured in a non-cognitivist terms, for example by Blackburn’s Quasi-Realism, a view that arguably gets one all the benefits – and more – of any fictionalist approach to morality, including the ability to solve the Frege-Geach problem (see 9.1). Still others, however, think quasi-realism is itself a form of fictionalism. (David Lewis put forward this proposal in Lewis 2005. We say why we reject it in Chapter 9.)

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We won’t enlarge on these debates. We simply note that here we have another form of preface (pretence) fictionalism, indeed another form of force fictionalism. This time, however, it is a descriptive fictionalism. It captures, Kalderon thinks, the way people in fact engage in moral discourse, even though people might not be sufficiently self-aware to notice that they are doing so. Of course, given this final concession of possible or even likely lack of awareness, it is not surprising that one of the other complaints against Kalderon’s version of moral fictionalism is a generic complaint against descriptive forms of pretence fictionalism in general: If you agree that people aren’t aware that they are engaged in make-believe or pretending, why insist that they are pretending? As promised earlier, we deal with this complaint head-on in the next chapter.

7.5 Fictionalism in science We have dealt – rather cursorily – with the Three Big Ms of contemporary fictionalism. We next want to convey a sense of some of the other domains where fictionalism has made an appearance. We don’t have the space to delve into these areas in detail, so a taster is all we can promise. As promised, the final ‘Further reading’ section will be the place where some of the resulting slack is taken up. Here is the plan. We begin in this section with some fictionalisms that are connected in some way to science (the first one is a natural follow-up to mathematical fictionalism), followed by fictionalisms that primarily concern notions from philosophy (universals and truth), followed by fictionalisms that concern ordinary, common sense notions and posits (physical objects). We present them all in the mode already familiar: they involve existence relegation, whether this is alleged to be a feature of the way folk actually use the discourse (descriptive fictionalism) or is merely prescribed. We begin with a brief mention of a fictionalism in the mathematical sciences inspired by mathematical fictionalism. Take the conception of scientific realism according to which scientific theories aim at truth (this is in line with the conception of realism discussed in sections 2.7 and 4.4.). If you are at all inclined to be a mathematical fictionalist

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of the Easy-Road kind, then you will find it hard to be a scientific realist in this sense. Since it is overwhelmingly likely that the very best scientific theories will quantify over numbers (unless something like Field’s nominalizing of science works), that means that you will think that science cannot afford to aim at truth since even the very best scientific theories will for a very large part be false. So the price we pay for being (Easy Road) mathematical fictionalists is that we can’t be scientific realists. Instead, mathematical fictionalists like Balaguer and Leng embrace what Balaguer has called nominalistic scientific realism, the view that what empirical science entails about the observable and unobservable physical world (the nominalistic content of empirical science) is mostly true, while its Platonistic content (what it entails about the realm of abstract mathematical entities) should be treated in a fictionalist spirit (Balaguer 1998a: 131). (For worries about this kind of combination of mathematical fictionalism and scientific realism, see Colyvan 2010; Psillos 2010.) What if you also have ontological scruples about the theoretical entities of physical science, not just about numbers? Recall that this is close to the position adopted by Hans Vaihinger, who argued in The Philosophy of ‘As If’ (Vaihinger 1924) that we construct models of the world and then behave ‘as if’ our models match the world because of the utility of behaving this way. In the case of theoretical entities, the reason for doubting their existence was not that they were causally inert (like numbers) and so didn’t deserve a place in science. The reason was that they were incoherent in various ways. Vaihinger applied this mode of reasoning widely, and we noted in Chapter 5 that the resulting tendency to see fictions in virtually every domain of enquiry was one of the reasons his views finally fell out of favour. Even today, despite the resurgence of interest in fictionalism, very few philosophers subscribe to some kind of blanket fictionalism about theoretical scientific discourse and its entities. As we have seen, van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism is sometimes thought to be such a fictionalism, we think wrongly. But there might be a more plausible contender. As Arthur Fine notes in an important article on Vaihinger’s philosophy (Fine 1993), once we move away from Vaihinger’s broad understanding of models in science and see model-based science as only part of science (although an increasingly important part),

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his brand of fictionalism can once again seem particularly relevant to an understanding of science. After all, model-based science not only invokes the ordinary (scale models of bridges, say) but also the arguably fictitious: point masses, frictionless planes, infinite reproducing populations, and so on. Indeed, there is now a lively industry devoted to fictionalism about models. We leave discussion of this kind of fictionalism to Chapter 9, since we think that here too there are important differences between such a fictionalism and fictionalisms of the kind we have been focusing on. We end our discussion about fiction in science by talking about a very different kind of science: folk science – specifically, folk psychology. Some see folk psychology as a competitor of a properly scientific psychology in the same way that folk physics (the untrained way in which humans understand basic physical phenomena) is seen as a competitor of a properly scientific physics. When we explain or predict the actions of human beings, including ourselves, we appeal to their beliefs and desires. Beliefs and desires, as well as hopes, wishes, and other propositional attitudes, are posits of folk psychology. They are not states that a mature science of the mind (part of neurophysiology, say) has come up with after considerable theoretical and empirical work. Some, in fact, think that the posits of folk psychology do not exist, since they demonstrably do not belong to a mature science of the mind. If the propositional attitudes postulated by folk psychology do not correspond in any clear way with physical states of the nervous system, reductive materialism (a version of conceptual reductionism) is false. But in that case, we should learn to forgo talking about them in much the same way we have learnt not to talk about witches. We earlier cited Paul Churchland as a defender of this idea. Such an ‘eliminative materialism’ is a highly contested view, but suppose we agree that there are no such states, that folk psychology is simply in error. What should we do? Eliminate all mention of them? Daniel Dennett has long argued for a rather different view: it is best to understand human behaviour at the level of what he calls the intentional stance (Dennett 1987), which allows pervasive use of concepts like belief and desire without making specific commitments to any deeper reality for these posit of folk psychology. Although Dennett himself denies that his appeal to the intentional stance is a kind of fictionalism

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(Dennett 1987: 72), such a perspective does suggest that we might combine rejection of the posits of folk psychology with a broadly fictionalist account of the discourse of folk psychology. Indeed, in recent years psychological (or mental) fictionalism has emerged as a hot topic.17 The motivations of a mental fictionalist may be the same as those of the eliminative materialist. A commitment to materialism and a view that folk psychological states cannot be reduced to neurophysiological states means, they suggest, that there are no beliefs and desires. Eliminative materialists and mental fictionalists of this kind are both error theorists to the extent that both suggest that the folk are mistaken if they accept the tenets of belief-desire psychology. But the fictionalist maintains that we should continue to engage in the discourse; she will advocate (if she is a preface fictionalist) that we pretend that there are beliefs and desires, and (in contrast to the eliminativist) continue talking as if they did indeed exist. This way of talking is far too useful for the folk to give up. That kind of fictionalist is a prescriptive, revolutionary mental fictionalist. But there are other versions on the market. Here is a version that appeals to Walton’s account of prop oriented games of make-believe so a pretence rather than a prefix fictionalism. Adam Toon thinks that we can invoke the ‘game of folk psychology’ to provide a useful means for describing a person’s behaviour. What we are to imagine in this game is that people have certain inner states inside their heads (beliefs, desires, hopes, etc.), states that arise in certain circumstances, interact with each other in certain sorts of ways, and produce certain sorts of behaviour (2016: 283–284). What else we are to imagine will depend on certain (largely implicit) principles of generation for the game. One such principle might say that if a person is looking at an object in good light, then, all things being equal, we are to imagine that this person has a particular inner state (a belief) according to which there is an object in front of them (284). The fact that the game is prop oriented and that this is an instance of semantic pretence comes at the next stage: When we claim that someone has a certain belief, we pretend that they have a particular inner state. Taken literally, this is (or might be) false. And yet, when we attribute a belief, we also make a

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genuine assertion: we claim that they are in a particular state such that is appropriate to pretend in this way. And this claim can be straightforwardly true. (287).18 Toon defends this kind of fictionalism as a descriptive fictionalism, so once again there is the worry that we certainly don’t seem to be pretending when earnestly telling someone about our own or someone else’s beliefs. But both this descriptive and the earlier revolutionary kind of mental fictionalisms are susceptible to another and perhaps even more nasty objection: the views seems incoherent. (We articulate this objection at the start of Chapter 8, but in the meantime see if you can spot it.)

7.6 Fictionalism about universals and truth Consider universals (wisdom, humanity, triangularity, etc.). Something is a universal if and only if it can be instantiated – otherwise it is a particular. But do universals really exist, or should we paraphrase away apparent reference to them? Recall the strategy of non-committing conceptual reductionism: if the strategy works, we could afford to be nominalists, at least about universals. But perhaps no such strategy can be made to work. Should we then commit to realism about universals, a view also known as Platonism? (So far, we have only encountered Platonism as a view about mathematical entities.) The debate has a long, indeed ancient, history, with Plato starring as the eponymous hero (or villain) of Platonism about universals. But maybe we don’t need to take sides in the debate. In his (2000) and elsewhere, Yablo draws up a list of analogies between uncontroversially non-literal discourse on the one hand and discourse about ‘platonic objects’, and decides that they are significant enough to warrant a non-literal, figurative treatment of talk of universals. (Here is one such analogy. Just as it would be silly to ask urgent questions about where we might expect to find your nerve after you tell us that you lost your nerve when contemplating whether to do a 1080 while snowboarding, so it would be silly to wonder whether universals are wholly present in each of their instances.)

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Yablo’s figuralism is one option. Such a view can also be given a more orthodox pretence treatment. Perhaps we should suppose that the linguistic habits of people who speak this way suggest that they are involved in a game of make-believe in which resemblances between particulars correspond to entities that are somehow shared by the particulars. We would have to say something about the (implicit) principles of generation that regulate such a game, and perhaps we can then argue, as before, that people speak through their pretence to make pretence-free claims about the world. An utterance of ‘Poverty is now rife in areas that were relatively free of poverty a decade ago’, for example, will be used to affirm that there are many poor people in the area, whereas a decade ago there were relatively few. That would give us a descriptive pretence fictionalism about discourse concerning universals. Alternatively, if it could be argued that speakers’ talk of universals shows they are committed to Platonism about universals (foolishly, let us suppose, in light of the weirdness of such entities), we might advocate for a prescriptive pretence fictionalism: this is how the discourse should be understood. There is also a prefix alternative. On this view, Platonism is again in error, but it provides us with a certain useful story – the story of existent entities (universals) that are somehow shared by particulars in virtue of the particulars resembling each other. (For the story to be useful, the resulting body of truths about the story would have to include truths like ‘In the story of platonism about universals, poverty is now rife in areas that were relatively free of poverty a decade ago’.) The fictionalist could then argue that when a speaker assertively utters a sentence S involving talk of universals, we should take the real content of her speech-act to be the meta-fictional claim: In the story of platonism about universals, S. Alternatively, the fictionalist could argue that even though we don’t mean this, it is what we ought to mean, in light of the falsity of Platonism. The first would be a descriptive prefix fictionalism, the second a revolutionary prefix fictionalism. The second kind of fictionalism to be discussed in this section is very different. The concept of truth, is and has long been, of central concern to philosophers. But its very centrality and richness is a worry: it is implicated in some of the deepest debates in philosophy but at the same time appears to give rise to logical contradictions

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(a famous example is the paradox of the Liar: ‘This very sentence is false’). Armour-Garb and Woodbridge, and, in a different way, Alexis Burgess, offer fictionalisms about truth and other semantic notions that are supposed to secure the usefulness of a concept of truth and avoid paradox. Here we focus on the work of Armour-Garb and Woodbridge (2015) in particular since theirs is by far the most developed, but briefly mention other approaches at the end. Armour-Garb and Woodbridge propose pretence-involving fictionalisms that broadly follow the kind of Waltonian line we are now familiar with. They hold that in uttering sentences from a discourse subject to a fictionalist construal speakers indirectly affirm or express some serious claim by pretending to affirm another, where the serious claim captures what makes it mandatory to pretend the second claim and hence what makes the second claim fictionally true. (Like a number of other fictionalisms we have discussed, this is what makes their fictionalism a semantic pretence-involving kind of fictionalism.) Now consider truth-talk. Armour-Garb and Woodbridge maintain a deflationary conception of truth; they think that there is no genuinely substantive property of truth, and that ‘true’ and ‘false’ serve as devices of semantic descent and are crucial for expressing infinite conjunctions and disjunctions. Nonetheless, ‘true’ and ‘false’ certainly give the appearance of standing for substantive properties. They reconcile these two features of truth by arguing that talk of truth and falsity should be understood as involving the pretence that ‘true’ and ‘false’ stand for genuine, substantive properties. The deflationism emerges from the principles of generation for this pretence, principles that specify under what circumstances we are to imagine or pretend that p is true/p is false – what pretences are prescribed. Thus, one set of principles says that the pretence displayed in an utterance of ‘[The proposition that] p is true’, or ‘it is true that p’, is prescribed just if p is the case, while an utterance of ‘[The proposition that] p is false’ is prescribed just if p is not the case.19 (There are similar principles for cases in which truth is ascribed to sentences rather than propositions.) Suppose you find yourself insisting: ‘The proposition that Obama was born in the United States is true’ (‘O’, for short). Then these principles imply that you are speaking correctly from the perspective of your pretence (your pretence is prescribed) because

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Obama was indeed born in the United States. Furthermore, what you manage to assert when you utter (O) is simply that Obama was born in the United States, since his having been born in the United States is what makes your pretence prescribed. Quite a mouthful, but we hope that it is clear that Armour-Garb and Woodbridge’s proposal is simply another application of Walton’s machinery. Furthermore, it is an application where the alleged pay-off is more than just the avoidance of nasty metaphysical posits. What makes this theory particularly interesting is the way it proposes to dissolve semantic paradox. What typical instances of truth-talk indirectly affirm are real-world conditions that articulate what the world has to be like for the pretences in question to be prescribed. Consider, for example, the real-world condition that snow is white. The fact that this condition obtains is what makes it correct from the perspective of the pretence to utter ‘The proposition that snow is white is true’. What goes wrong in cases of paradoxical sentences like ‘This very sentence is false’ is that the sentence doesn’t direct us to any real-world conditions that either prescribe the pretence that the sentence is true or prescribe the pretence that it is false, so that the sentence ends up a strictly contentless. Armour-Garb and Woodbridge argue that familiar strengthened versions of the paradox (‘This sentence is either false or contentless’) go the same way, as do other well-known paradoxical sentences such as Curry’s paradox. In short, paradox lost, and not to be regained (and all thanks to the role that pretence plays in truth-talk). Note that this is a descriptive pretence version of fictionalism about truth-talk.20 It holds that the concept of truth itself is not inconsistent. But suppose you think, along with so-called dialetheists (those who believe there are true contradictions), that the concept of truth really is inconsistent, presumably because you think the so-called T[ruth]-schema is constitutive of the concept of truth and because the T-schema logically implies contradictions. (The T-schema says: S is true if and only if p, where ‘p’ is a place-holder for a sentence and S is the name of this sentence.)21 Then you might choose to become another kind of fictionalist about truth-talk: a revolutionary fictionalist who holds an error theory about truth discourse but thinks that the fiction that there is a genuine property of truth satisfying the T-schema is a useful one, to be maintained at all costs. (See Burgess, 2018; Kroon, 2019.)

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7.7 Fictionalism about ordinary objects The previous examples of fictionalisms have mostly been motivated by the metaphysical motivation for fictionalism heading this chapter: a desire to avoid problematic or unnecessary posits, while enjoying the benefits they bring. This last section brings us squarely to the last of the motivations, the fact that philosophers have a tendency to problematize the ordinary. We focus on the case of ordinary objects, and begin with a brief outline of van Inwagen’s view in Material Objects. According to van Inwagen, elementary particles and living organisms are the only material objects there are. But this means that everyday objects such as tables, chairs, computers and clouds do not exist, since they are neither. The impression that there are such things comes about because there are elementary particles arranged in specific ways. Van Inwagen thinks that where it seems that there is a chair, this is because there are elementary particles arranged chairwise – that is all! But this does not mean that we should stop speaking as if there were chairs, computers and so on. As van Inwagen puts it: Nevertheless, sentences like ‘Some of her chairs are very good nineteenth-century copies of Chippendales’ can, when uttered in the course of the ordinary business of life, express truths. These words should be understood as strictly parallel to the following words, which we imagine spoken by Copernicus: According to my theory, the sun does not move. Nevertheless, sentences like ‘It was cooler in the garden after the sun had moved behind the elms’ can, when uttered in the course of the ordinary business of life, express truths. (1993a: 684–685) Of course, the very same sentence can also be used to express a falsehood, for example when it is uttered with a knowing look by a Ptolemaic astronomer (but maybe not when the knowing look isn’t there?). Van Inwagen doesn’t offer a systematic account of the sense in which such utterances count as true, but here is a plausible suggestion. If pressed, ordinary speakers, but not the Ptolemaic speaker, would have said that its being ‘as if’ the sun moved behind the elms was good enough for their communicative purposes.

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What is not clear, of course, is whether ordinary speakers would be prepared to say the same about their chair-utterances, but maybe van Inwagen means that they would be prepared to adopt such an ‘as if’ stance once convinced of his view that material objects don’t exist. In any case, van Inwagen’s view of discourse about ordinary objects appears close in some ways to a kind of fictionalism (broadly construed) about such talk, even though he certainly doesn’t identify as a fictionalist. We next discuss a view about material objects where the fictionalism is quite blatant. Van Inwagen himself sees his view as providing a moderate answer to the ‘Special Composition Question’: Under what conditions do things add up to (make up, compose) a thing. The answer he gives is an absolutist one, but van Inwagen then has to deal with the fall-out from his view: the resulting metaphysics appears quite opposed to common sense. In their ‘Composition as a Fiction’, Cian Dorr and Gideon Rosen take a very different view of answers to the Special Composition Question: Upon reflection, unrestricted composition [given some things, there is at least one composite object they compose] is a contender; but so are certain more restricted principles, perhaps including nihilism [there is no such thing as a composite entity]. Close your eyes and think through the alternatives. Some will strike you as more ‘plausible’ – but that is the appeal to common sense, which we have rejected. None will strike you as evident, as indisputable on pain of incoherence, or so we say. The choice is a choice among coherent alternatives. And for the present we see no basis on which it might be made. (Dorr and Rosen 2002: 166) So what to do? Simply declaring that you have no opinion, and choosing not to say anything that might imply you have a position, is not an option, since refraining from talking about composite things is to refrain from talking altogether. Their advice is to go fictionalist. People should adopt an attitude to the settled claims of common sense and science that is akin to the attitude we have to a claim like ‘Robinson Crusoe was a castaway’. We believe that to be true in the work of fiction, and similarly we should be prepared to say that a claim like ‘Some of her chairs are very good nineteenth-century copies of Chippendales’ is true on the assumption that this or that principle

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of composition holds. Without having this qualification in mind, we would not have a right to say such a thing. (The qualification, they add, needn’t be thought of as a prefix. As they point out, ‘one may begin to regulate one’s speech and explicit verbalized thought, not by what one takes to be strictly true, but rather by what one takes to be true on the hypothesis or assumption that one or another principle of composition is correct’ [170], which sounds more like reliance on some kind of preface.) The resulting fictionalism is a prescriptive fictionalism, although not one based on an error theory but rather on the conviction that we don’t know the facts about composition. And they stress that because the story of composition is just a story there is not even a need for the principle of composition to reflect what we take to be the most scientifically respectable account of composition. It might even be ‘the vague principle that several things compose a single thing when they are sufficiently “unified” or “connected” ’ (170), a vague principle that, they think, would be objectionable if construed as a serious theoretical thesis but not as a fictional claim. Note, incidentally, that our brief discussion of Hume in Chapter 5 suggests that such a principle resembles the kind of principle that Hume thinks we employ when we detect unity and connectedness in experience. But we also suggested that Hume saw the operation of such a principle as showing that ordinary objects and processes are mind-dependent: after all, humans are the ones who project unity and connectedness onto impressions. And such a view, as we have been at pains to point out, is problematic. A fictionalism like Dorr’s and Rosen’s doesn’t face this problem. From the point of view of the fiction adopted, ordinary objects are perfectly mindindependent.

7.8 What now? We have reached the end of our sampler of fictionalisms. We urge readers to explore the ones that interest them, but also to be aware that there are many others. A second point. We are aware that one of the dangers of brevity in a survey like ours is that clever readers will be able to work out their own objections to some of these

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fictionalisms, and that might engender impatience with the views. Some of these objections will be discussed in the next chapter, but that is no substitute for engaging with the authors themselves, or with their various critics. The ‘Further reading’ section that follows is meant to be of help with both these pieces of advice.

7.9 Further reading Mathematical fictionalism: For clear and comprehensive introductions to the various forms of mathematical fictionalism and what separates them, see Mark Balaguer’s entry in the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy (Balaguer 2015) and Mary Leng’s entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Leng 2015). (Recall that Balaguer assumes that mathematical fictionalism is an ontological view, whereas we take it to be a view about mathematical discourse whose motivation may be ontological.) Modal fictionalism: Daniel Nolan’s entry on modal fictionalism in the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy (Nolan 2016) is essential reading for anyone interested in pursuing this topic. Brogaard (2006) is an excellent comparative overview of the choice between fictionalist and ersatzist competitors to modal realism. (Her own preference is for a version of timid modal fictionalism.) Moral fictionalism: Not surprisingly, this is an area that is seeing some of the bitterest disputes between protagonists of the different positions. There is an extremely large and still growing literature on error theory, both for and against (much of it has found its way into our extended bibliography), and a number of books advocating one or another moral fictionalist position. Joyce and Kirchin (2010) (A World without Values: Essays on John Mackie’s Moral Error Theory) is a good collection of articles for and against the kind of moral fictionalism that follows on from Mackie’s moral error theory. Fictionalism in the sciences. There is surprisingly little that clearly counts as fictionalism about the discourse of natural science once we discount the kind of fictionalism about scientific discourse that stems from fictionalism about mathematics. Van Fraassen’s constructive

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empiricism comes close, but in our view counts only as an instance of fictionalism broadly construed (see Chapter 9 for further discussion). For mental fictionalism, see the special issue of the Monist on mental fictionalism (Monist, vol. 96, issue 4). Fictionalism about philosophical topics. A large number of topics fall under this heading. We have already covered existence locutions (Chapter 6). A number of authors have argued for fictionalist accounts of identity statements as a way of solving Frege’s problem of their informativeness (see Crimmins 1998, Kroon 2001a, Armour-Garb and Woodbridge 2015). Not surprisingly, given that propositions, like universals, are usually taken to be abstract objects and therefore susceptible to Benacerraf’s arguments in Benacerraf (1973), some authors argue for fictionalism about proposition-talk. Balaguer (1998b) offers a version of errortheoretic prescriptive fictionalism about such talk (he argues the approach generalises to all talk involving terms for abstract objects). In their 2015 Pretence and Pathology, Armour-Garb and Woodbridge argue for a descriptive ‘semantic pretence-involving’ fictionalism that they integrate with their fictionalism about truth-talk. They also give the most general version of a fictionalism about semantic notions in general, including talk of reference. Fictionalism about other matters. We will mention just two, the first only briefly. In Chapter 2, we took colours to be an especially clear example of properties whose status (ontological and epistemic) was in some sense mind-dependent. The debate about the status of colour is voluminous, and most of it has gone on without mentioning fictionalism. (Of course, someone like Hume regards colours as fictitious in some sense, but that is usually understood in projectivist terms: we project our sensations onto objects.) That has begun to change. Joyce discusses a prescriptive pretence version of colourfictionalism in Joyce (2005). A more detailed version that also responds to objections is found in Gatzia (2007, 2010). One of the fastest growing areas of fictionalism is religious fictionalism, briefly mentioned in Chapter 5. The reason for its growth is probably that fictionalism seems for many to offer a better compromise between two stances of religious engagement and atheism or agnosticism, both seen as attractive to many, than some kind of reinterpretation of God-talk. Some see evidence of such a

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fictionalism in Kant (e.g. Jay 2014), while acknowledging differences. For Kant, the issue was not active disbelief in God, whereas that is what drives most current forms of religious fictionalism. For a relatively early statement, see Le Poidevin (1996: chs. 8, 9). See also Brock (2019), Eshleman (2005, 2010), Cordry (2010), Đurkovic´ (2016), Harrison (2010), Klassen (2012), Le Poidevin (2016), Lipton (2007). For a comparison of different varieties of religious fictionalism, see Deng (2015).

8 Objections to Fictionalism

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y now we hope it is clear why one might be tempted to take a fictionalist stance towards a given discourse. In this chapter we want to consider the main obstacles to taking such a stance – that is, we want to consider the main objections to fictionalism. The objections we want to consider in detail here are general objections, by which we mean objections that are not applicable only to a version of fictionalism about a specific target domain. There are many nongeneral objections like this that we will for the most part ignore. But before we turn to the main objections, let’s consider a non-general objection to mental fictionalism (to illustrate the distinction). As we saw in the previous chapter, a mental fictionalist is a (preface) fictionalist, let us suppose, about beliefs and desires. She thinks we should pretend that there are beliefs and desires. But this sort of view is unstable. First of all, the appeal to notions like pretence and make-believe shows that the very act of stating the position of mental fictionalism presupposes a commitment to the existence of folk psychological mental states. But this was supposed to be a fictionalism about the posits of folk psychology! In the case of revolutionary mental fictionalism, we can add that if there is no clear correlation between propositional attitudes like beliefs and the neurophysical states studied in the natural sciences, then there is unlikely to be a correlation between make-beliefs and our neurophysical states either. In short, if we’re in error about whether beliefs exist, then we’re in error for the same reason about whether the fictionalist attitudes exist also (see, for example, Joyce 2013). (Whether this kind of objection against mental fictionalism can be

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answered in some way or if it shows that fictionalists have finally fallen victim to an overconfidence in fictionalism’s global prospects remains to be seen.) While this sort of problem is fascinating, it is clear that the problem to be resolved applies to a particular species of fictionalism – that is, a variety of revolutionary preface fictionalism about propositional attitudes. The problem cannot generalize more widely. We will be focusing in this chapter on very general problems associated with adopting a fictionalist stance in metaphysics. We will divide the chapter as follows. In section 8.1 we will consider problems for prefix fictionalism; in section 8.2 we will consider problems for preface fictionalism; and finally in section 8.3 we will consider problems for both flavours of fictionalism. Along the way we will make clear whether the objections are directed at the descriptive varieties (i.e. interpretive objections) or prescriptive varieties (i.e. pragmatic objections), or whether they are objections to the coherence of fictionalism. We will also explore possible responses to the objections.

8.1 Prefix fictionalism: Unwanted commitments We have suggested that the primary motivation is ontological; fictionalism gives us a way of continuing to engage in a discourse without committing ourselves to its controversial posits. Although we leave room in our characterization for the agnostic fictionalist, even she will want to say that her utterances don’t commit her to a realm of contentious entities. The first suite of objections we want to consider suggests that fictionalists fail to deliver on their promise in this respect. Let’s consider three reasons why this might be the case. First, if the fictionalist has a ‘taste for desert landscapes and clear blue skies’, that is, if she has nominalist tendencies, fictionalism is not going to be of any help. For while fictionalism is a strategy for avoiding commitment to some entities, the strategy itself relies ineluctably on the notion of a fiction – and fictions are paradigmatic abstract objects. Fictionalists, therefore, should not be nominalists (and if they are, they have some explaining to do).

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Second, consider a conundrum we briefly discussed in Chapter 4 when discussing the condition of Quasi-Fictionality. Recall that the fictionalist’s apparent reference to and quantification over a realm of controversial entities is supposedly avoided by drawing an analogy with fictional discourse. But this analogy will be no help if it turns out that fictional discourse commits us to a realm of fictional objects. To illustrate the point, mathematical realists, for example, claim that numbers are real, but they are abstract entities. The mathematical fictionalist, at least of the prefix variety, suggests that our mathematical claims should be analysed in terms of what’s true according to a certain fiction. It is, of course, true according to this fiction that there are numbers and sets, but it is not true tout court. Or so it seems. But now consider the following worry about such prefixed sentences. Suppose, as many philosophers think, that the only way for it to be true in the Sherlock Holmes stories that Holmes was a detective is for there to be a fictional entity, Holmes. That suggests that, similarly, the only way for it to be true in the fiction of mathematics that 2 is an even prime, or that the empty set has no members, is for numbers and sets to exist as fictional entities. Then the mathematical fictionalist turns out to be a realist after all. There are, of course, a number of ways a fictionalist might respond to this worry. One way is to embrace a kind of fictionalism about fictional characters (see Brock 2002 for an exploration of how the details might be fleshed out). Third, sometimes the technical features of the fictionalist analysis seem to entail realism in a surprising way. One illustration of how is given by what has become known as the Brock-Rosen objection to modal fictionalism (see Brock 1993; Rosen 1993). To appreciate the objection, recall how the modal realist analyses modal claims, such as ‘possibly p’, ‘necessarily p’ and ‘contingently p’ (leaving implicit, for simplicity of presentation, qualifications about the accessibility relation): Modal Realism (MR) It is possible that p if and only if there is a world at which p is the case. It is necessary that p if and only if at every world p is the case. It is contingent whether p if and only if there is a world at which p is the case and there is another world at which p is not the case.

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The modal fictionalist will mirror the realist’s analysis as follows: Modal Fictionalism (MF) It is possible that p if and only if according to the hypothesis of a plurality of worlds, there is a world at which p is the case. It is necessary that p if and only if according to the hypothesis of a plurality of worlds, at every world p is the case. It is contingent whether p if and only if according to the hypothesis of a plurality of worlds, there is a world at which p is the case and there is another world at which p is not the case. The modal fictionalist thus hopes to retain all the benefits of the possible world framework without committing herself to a realm of possible worlds or objects (because any apparent quantification over such entities occurs within the scope of a story prefix). With this background, we are now in a position to lay out the Brock-Rosen problem. To motivate the argument, consider a proposition that is intuitively not only contingent, but necessarily so – perhaps the proposition that kiwis exist: 1 Necessarily, it is contingent that kiwis exist. 2 According to the hypothesis of a plurality of worlds, for all worlds w, at w there is a world w* at which kiwis exist and there is a distinct world w** at which kiwis do not exist. [From 1, MF] 3 According to the hypothesis of a plurality of worlds, at all worlds there are many (i.e. at least two) worlds. [From 2] 4 Necessarily, there are many worlds. [From 3 and MF] 5 If necessarily p then p [Characteristic axiom of T] 6 Therefore, there are many worlds. [From 4, 5] What do we want to say about this argument? First, we want to go on record as saying that there are methods available for the modal fictionalist to dodge this embarrassing conclusion. Harold Noonan (1994), for example, demonstrates that the problem for the fictionalist can be avoided if she appeals to a slightly different fiction –

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for example, if her analysis exploits the translation scheme of Lewis (1968) rather than Lewis (1986). If we do that, the regimentation of the embedded claim (appearing after the story prefix) in (2) is the following: ∀w(Ww → (∃w*(Ww* & ∃x(Ixw* & Kx)) & ∃w**(Ww** & ~∃x(Ixw** & Kx)))) And this clearly does not imply (once conjoined with MF) the regimentation of the embedded claim in (3), which is: ∀w(Ww → ∃w*(Iw*w & Ww* & ∃w**(Iw**w & Ww** & w*≠ w**))) It is worth noting in this context, though, that the problem generalises so as to apply to a wider class of prefix fictionalisms. And it is not clear that Noonan’s solution can be adapted to cover this wider set of objections. Daniel Nolan and John O’Leary-Hawthorne (1996), for example, illustrate how a similar objection can be mounted against a certain kind of (prefix) mathematical fictionalist. Imagine someone who claimed, for example, that there are fortyfive Presidents of the United States, but also denied that the claim committed her to numbers because the term ‘45’ was an idiom of quantification rather than a referring term. On this view, when I make such a claim, I am committing myself to a plurality of Presidents, but not to the separate existence of a number. This is because when I make claims apparently about the number 45 and its relation to the Presidents of the United States, my claim is partly one about the content of a fiction rather than about some mind-independent reality. My claim could be paraphrased as follows: according to the mathematical fiction, the number 45 numbers the Presidents of the United States (where numbering is a fictional relation that holds between numbers and collections of objects). This claim does not commit me to the number 45. However, I can combine it with the following plausible exportation principle: if according to the mathematical fiction, 45 numbers the Presidents of the United States, then there exists (tout court) Presidents of the United States,

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to ensure that my claim actually commits me to the existence of the Presidents. This strategy can be generalized. A mathematical fictionalist might hope to avoid committing herself to a realm of numbers by proposing the following translation scheme to interpret all of her claims apparently referring to a number N: 1 For any sort of entity X, there are n Xs if and only if according to the mathematical fiction, the number N numbers the Xs. But because she also accepts the following exportation principle: 2 If according to the mathematical fiction, the number N numbers the Xs, then there are (tout court) Xs. her commonplace claims involving number terms commit her to the kinds of entities we naturally take her to be committed to. A problem similar to the Brock-Rosen Problem arises for anyone adopting this kind of mathematical fictionalism. To see the problem, one need only turn one’s attention to the very entities the mathematical fictionalist wishes to be fictionalist about (i.e. numbers). Presumably the fictionalist will want to say that there is a sense in which the following claim is true (even if it cannot be taken at face value): 3 There are (at least) 45 numbers This implies (by the fictionalist’s translation scheme) the following: 4 According to the mathematical fiction, the number 45 numbers the numbers (or at least numbers some subset of the numbers). Such a claim does not commit the fictionalist to a specific number, 45, because the claim is one about the content of the mathematical fiction. However, using the exportation principle, it does commit the fictionalist to the following: 5 There are (tout court) numbers. The mathematical fictionalist of this variety, then, cannot straightforwardly dodge a commitment to numbers. Nor can she

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respond to the worry by adapting Noonan’s clever response to the Brock-Rosen Problem. (Lewis’s Counterpart Theory has no relevance here.) These observations suggest that there might be a wider class of fictionalisms that hide rather than avoid their controversial ontology. (Indeed, Nolan and O’Leary-Hawthorne also briefly put forward an similar argument levelled against the prefix fictionalist about universals in the final section of their 1996 paper.) Ideally the fictionalist should provide a diagnosis of and resolution to all such objections.

8.2 Prefix fictionalism: The incompleteness problem Like the Brock-Rosen objection, the incompleteness problem was an objection first raised against modal fictionalism (see Rosen 1990: 341–344). To appreciate the problem for the modal fictionalist, consider the following modal proposition: (M) There might have been κ non-overlapping physical objects. The realist, as we have seen, will analyse this as follows: (R) There is a world containing κ non-overlapping physical objects. This poses a special problem for a fictionalist like Rosen. In order to avoid paradox a modal realist must hold that there is some unknown upper bound κ * to the number of non-overlapping objects which inhabit the most populous worlds. The stipulation is made by David Lewis (1986: 101–104) in response to an argument in Forrest and Armstrong (1984). For the realist then, M has some definite truthvalue, but we don’t (and in principle could not) know what it is. Consider next Rosen’s analysis of M: (RF) According to PW, there is a world containing κ non-overlapping physical objects. The problem for Rosen is that nothing in the fiction implies that κ