It is often noted that institutio~l objects and artifacts depend on human beliefs and intentions and so fail to meet the realist paradigm of mind-independent objects. In this paper I draw out exactly in what ways the thesis of mind-independence fails, and show that it has some surprising consequences. For the specific forms of mind-dependence involved entail that we have certain forms of epistemic privilege with regard to our own institutional and artifactual kinds, protecting us from certain possibilities of ignorance and error; they also demonstrate that not all cases of reference to these kinds can proceed along a purely causal model. As a result, realist views in ontology, epistemology, and semantics that were developed with natural scientific kinds in mind cannot fully apply to the kinds of the social and human sciences. In closing I consider some wider consequences of these results for social science and philosophy. REALISM AND HUMAN KINDS 58 1 Many thanks to

This challenging study places fiction squarely at the centre of the discussion of metaphysics. Philosophers have traditionally treated fiction as involving a set of narrow problems in logic or the philosophy of language. By contrast Amie Thomasson argues that fiction has far-reaching implications for central problems of metaphysics. The book develops an 'artifactual' theory of fiction, whereby fictional characters are abstract artifacts as ordinary as laws or symphonies or works of literature. By understanding fictional characters we come to understand how other cultural and social objects are established on the basis of the independent physical world and the mental states of human beings.

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Arguments that ordinary inanimate objects such as tables and chairs, sticks and stones, simply do not exist have become increasingly common. Some arguments for eliminativism are based on demands for parsimony or for a non-arbitrary answer to the special composition question; others arise from prohibitions against causal redundancy, ontological vagueness, or colocation; and others still come from worries that a common sense ontology would be a rival to a scientific one. This book makes the case that the mistakes behind all of these superficially diverse eliminativist arguments may be traced to a common source, and may be successfully resisted by adopting a small cluster of interrelated and independently plausible theses about reference, analyticity, and modality. By adopting these theses, we can make sense of our common sense world view without internal contradiction, violation of plausible metaphysical principles, or rivalry with a scientific ontology. In the end, however, the most important result of addressing these eliminativist arguments is not merely avoiding their conclusions. It also leads to important metaontological results, bringing into question widely held assumptions about which uses of metaphysical principles are appropriate, which metaphysical demands are answerable, and how we incur ontological commitments. As a result, the work of this book hopes to provide not only the route to a reflective understanding of our unreflective common sense world view, but also a better understanding of the proper methods and limits of metaphysics.

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