Thirteen years ago, I published in Italian a book called Riferimento e intenzionalità [Reference and Intentionality] (ETS, Pisa 1992), in which I argued for a committal theory on intentional objects as possible entities. Intended to lie halfway between the ontological proliferation of entities à la Meinong and the ontological sobriety defended by Russell from 1905 onwards, this theory recognized that we both refer to and think about entities that do not exist insofar as they are entities that do not actually exist; yet it also insisted that these entities must be things that possibly exist. As a result, paradoxical and contradictory items-in a word impossibilia-were ruled out of intentionalia as well as out of the overall inventory of what there is.However, it suddenly occurred to me that prima facie our thoughts "direct" themselves not only upon things such as the possible unactual son of Elizabeth I and Philip II, but also upon creatures of imagination such as Hamlet and Ophelia, Desdemona and Othello; that is, upon fictional objects. Since entities of this kind may well appear to be contradictory or paradoxical entities, it is hard to rank them among possible entities. Nonetheless, it seems to be a firm intuition that we think about them as much as about possible unactual entities such as the actually nonexistent complex made up of this jacket and those trousers. So it appeared clear to me that the theory of intentionality I had originally developed should be somehow implemented in order to account also for the fact that we think about fictional entities.Yet I did not want this thinking about fictional entities to force me to accept all kinds of would-be items from the Meinongian jungle.A solution came to mind in 1994 when I published a paper, "Ficta versus Possibilia" (Grazer Philosophische Studien 48, 75-104). In that paper, I drew a distinction between possible and fictional entities. But I included the fictional in the domain of actualia, as entities that actually exist albeit in a nonspatiotemporal way: that is, as actual abstract entities. Moreover, I conceived x of these abstracta as a peculiar kind of complex entity. I imagined that two distinct factors led to their identity: a set of properties, the properties mobilized in the relevant story, and a make-believe game, the storytelling process in which one makes believe that there is an individual having more or less the properties which figure in that set.For a long while, this idea remained an undeveloped intuition. Yet more and more reading of the literature on the subject convinced me that the logical space of the positions on fictional entities should also contain the articulated expansion of that original intuition. A conference I organized on this subject in 2002 at the University of Eastern Piedmont at Vercelli, Do Ficta Follow Fiction?, gave me the opportunity of resuming my original thoughts and comparing them with the opinions of some of the most well-known experts on this subject. I also benefited greatly from presenting my ongoing ideas in ...
