Strict Quineans will insist that our ontological commitments are revealed, not by the natural language sentences we hold true, but rather by the way we choose to paraphrase these into First Order Logic but I will ignore this complication here.
There has recently been considerable interest in accounts of fiction which treat fictional characters as abstract objects. In this paper I argue against this view. More precisely I argue that such accounts are unable to accommodate our intuitions that fictional negative existentials such as ''Raskolnikov doesn't exist'' are true. I offer a general argument to this effect and then consider, but reject, some of the accounts of fictional negative existentials offered by abstract object theorists. I then note that some of the sort of data invoked by the abstract object theorist in fact cuts against her position. I conclude that we should not regard fictional characters as abstract objects but rather should adopt a make-believe theoretic account of fictional characters along the lines of those developed by Ken Walton and others. 1 See Braun [2], Howell [9], Kripke [12], Salmon [24] and van Inwagen [34] and [32]. Thomasson develops her account in [27], [28], and [29]. 2 Such accounts are defended in Walton [36].
ANTONY EVERETT
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