Creationism and cardinality

Abstract

Creationism about fictional entities is the doctrine that fictional entities come into existence when the fictions about them are composed: it may be contrasted both with a more platonist view according to which all potential fictional entities have always existed, and eliminativist views according to which there are no merely fictional entities. Creationism is alleged to have a number of advantages over platonism.Three important ones are parsimony, since we do not need to postulate quite so many kinds of fictional entities; a more naturalistic flavour, since the created entities are plausibly thought to be dependent on concrete goings-on; and a better fit, at least in some respects, with ordinary talk, since we talk as if e.g. Conan Doyle is the creator of Sherlock Holmes, as well as the Sherlock Holmes stories.Creationism, however, suffers from paradox, and straightforward formulations of creationism lead to contradiction. Specifically, we will argue, straightforward creationist theories suffer from cardinality paradoxes, providing inconsistent answers to the question of how many fictional objects there are. This is not much of an advantage for platonism about fictional entities, since naive platonistic theories of abstract objects often face cardinality paradoxes, and naive platonistic theories of fictional entities are no exception. But one might have thought creationism, in avoiding the abundance of platonism, might avoid the over-generous principles that lead to paradox. Unfortunately, not so. After explaining how straightforward creationism is refuted, we will briefly discuss the prospects for avoiding this paradox 2 in a principled manner. Our main purpose in this paper is to point to the problem, since creationists to date may well not have avoided it. Among the creationist theories of fictional objects that do not have any explicit resources to avoid this problem are those of Salmon (1998, esp 293-296), Thomasson (1996Thomasson ( , 300-307, 1999, and Kripke (2013, 71-78). CreationismAccording to the creationist, fictional entities exist in virtue of being featured in fictions. Holmes exists in virtue of appearing in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and was brought into existence when the relevant fiction was composed. Fictional objects have properties according to the fiction. In the fiction Holmes lives in London. Holmes does not really live in London, he only fictionally lives in London. He is not clever, he is only fictionally clever and so on. They also have non-fictional properties. Holmes, the fictional entity, is more famous than any non-fictional detective; though these 'non-fictional' properties are not, in general, just derived from the content of the fictions in which such objects appear.