Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Table

Abstract

The primary aim of this paper is to provide a plausible fictional creationist explanation of when and how a fictional object comes into existence without a successful creative intention, focusing on the problem posed by Stuart Brock’s nominalist author scenario. I first present some intuitions about parallel scenarios for fictional objects and concrete artifacts as data to be explained. Then I provide a sufficient condition for the existence of artifacts that can explain both cases. An important upshot of this is that there is an overlooked way to bring artifacts into existence that should merit serious consideration, and this leads to a version of the mind-dependence, but not the intention-dependence, view of artifacts.

Fictional Creationism and Negative Existentials

“… See Parsons, 1980 for Meinongianism andZalta, 1983 for Platonism.3 Another common objection against creationism relates to the question of how to individuate fictional objects (seeBrock, 2010;Everett, 2005Everett, , 2013, which I will not discuss in this paper but have addressed elsewhere(Lee, 2022(Lee, , 2023.4 For simplicity, I will primarily focus on singular negative existentials. Nevertheless, I expect that similar arguments and explanations in this paper apply to descriptive or quantified FNEs as well.5 Of course, most philosophers at least agree that if one uses sentence (4) or (5) in a so-called intra-fictional or internal metafictional context and conveys the proposition expressed by "According to the Sherlock Holmes stories, Sherlock Holmes does not exist," the conveyed proposition is not true.…”