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Names in Fiction

Those of us familiar with Tolkien’s writings would seem to be in a position to accept both of these sentences. And yet how can we? If Frodo doesn’t really exist, then he doesn’t exist. If he doesn’t exist, then he doesn’t have any properties, and so doesn’t have the property of being a hobbit who was adopted by his cousin. So the truth of (2) would seem to preclude the truth of (1). Nevertheless, it seems that we should like to accept them both: in The Lord of the Rings, Frodo is a hobbit who was adopted by his cousin; but, of course, being a creature of fiction, Frodo doesn’t really exist. In his rich and imaginative essay, “Fictional Names in Psychologistic Semantics,” Emar Maier sets out to resolve this conundrum. Maier begins by helpfully setting out three approaches to fictional names (pp. 2–4). The first is realism. Realists urge us to extend our ontology to include fictional entities that can serve as the referents of fictional names (e.g. Parsons, 1980; Thomasson, 1999). From a semantic point of view, fictional names work much like ordinary proper names: both are simply referring expressions, something like the logician’s individual constants. Theorists with a “robust sense of reality” might balk at the metaphysical extravagance of the realist approach (Russell, 1919). But Maier does not press philosophical objections of this sort. Rather, he observes that (unless more is said) the realist approach predicts that (3) entails (4) (pp. 2–3):