Ficta versus Possibilia

Alberto Voltolini (University of Palermo)

There have been few attempts to draw a distinction betweenficta (mythical and literary characters, and fictionalcreations in general) and unactualized possibilia (objectsof unrealized assemblages, of false but coherent scientifictheories, of unfulfilled plans) qua respective allegedreferents of singular terms occurring in sentencesapparently talking of them. Both have indeed beenindistinctly rejected as belonging to the perverse domainof the non-existent. Those singular terms purporting torefer to them have consequently been considered as emptynon-denoting terms or, at least sometimes in the case offictional reference, as being used in contexts of pretendedreference. This referential peculiarity seems to have beennecessary in order to save the apparent truth of sentencesbelonging to fictional contexts.

This policy, however, has the effect of blurring theontological distinction between ficta and possibilia. Onthe one hand, ficta are a particular kind of abstractobjects, namely constructed abstract objects. Moreover,they are essentially incomplete abstract entities, in thatthey are correlates of finite sets of properties. On theother hand, possibilia are concrete objects as well asrealia, which are ultimately nothing but actualizedpossibilia. In fact, possible objects are objects that,even though they do not actually exist, might have existed,in the particular, Platonic-Kantian, sense of the first-

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order concept of existence here involved, namely that ofbeing effective, i.e. being involved in the causal order.Thus, being a possible unactualized object is tantamount tobeing possibly involved in the causal order. Besides, as anobject existent in this sense may legitimately be qualifiedas complete, the incompleteness which pertains to possibleobjects may be said to be contingent, that is, to regardthem only with respect to the worlds in which they do notexist. With ficta and possibilia two different notions ofcompleteness are therefore brought into play, the formerreferring to a predicative, the latter to a propositional,concept of negation.

Importantly enough, such a difference in ontologicalcharacterization already emerges from semanticconsiderations, namely from the evaluation of the sentencesin which singular terms for either entities are involved.In fact, although the apparent, intuitive, referentialityof singular terms directed either towards ficta or towardspossibilia can be saved in either case, these terms arehowever equivalent to rigid descriptions in the former andto directly referential terms in the latter.

1. Semantico-linguistic data.

Consider the following two sentences:

(1) Napoleon Jr. might have existed(2) Santa Claus might have existed

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where by "Napoleon Jr." one means the non-existent son theFrench Emperor and his first wife Josephine Beauharnaisdreamt of conceiving in Paris the night of Christmas 1800,and by "Santa Claus" the famous mythical character whobrings children presents every Christmas. Even before asuitable semantic interpretation of the above sentences isprovided, no one can doubt that they differ in their truth-value. (1) is true, where (2) is false. On the one hand, asevery history book testifies, Bonaparte had no son from hisfirst wife. Thus, we know that:

(3) Napoleon Jr. exists

when evaluated with respect to the actual world, is false.However, nothing prevents us from imagining acounterfactual situation in which Bonaparte really lay withJosephine at Christmas 1800, so that they conceived a babyin Paris that night who was born nine months after. Withrespect to that situation, (3) would be true, so as to make(1) true as well. On the other hand, there is no possiblesituation which makes:

(4) Santa Claus exists

true, and therefore enables (2) to be true as well. Wewould indeed consider someone who thought that, althoughSanta Claus does not actually exist, he might have, assomeone who has not yet really understood sentencescontaining the singular term "Santa Claus". Again, a childwho finally grasps that Santa Claus does not exist makes a

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different kind of discovery from that made by someone, sayBonaparte, who acknowledges that Napoleon Jr. does notexist, that he only had a dream of him. Indeed, the childcannot console himself by thinking that he might have metSanta Claus, as Bonaparte on the contrary presumably doeswhere Napoleon Jr. is concerned. Unlike the acknowledgementof Junior's non-existence, the discovery of Santa Claus'non-existence amounts to discovering his non-encounterability.

Now consider:

(5) Napoleon Jr. rules France(6) Santa Claus rules Norway.

Leaving the problem of its evaluation as regards the actualworld momentarily aside, (5) may turn out to be true withrespect to one possible world and false with respect toanother. For instance, in a possible world in which Junioris successfully conceived, Bonaparte has no need to marryMary Louise. As he moreover succeeds in keeping the throneafter Waterloo, he passes the French government to Junior.As regards that world, (5) is true. But in another possibleworld in which Junior is also successfully conceived,Bonaparte still loses at Waterloo, making (5) false. Butwhat about Santa Claus? Well, the myth does not sayanything about his claim to the Norwegian throne. Thus,there is no doubt that with respect to the actual world itis not the case that Claus rules Norway. But one cannot seehow things might change in different possible worlds, sinceit is apparent that if Santa Claus had ruled Norway then he

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would have been an utterly different figure. This istantamount to saying that (6) is false as regards allworlds, i.e. is necessarily false.

2. Evaluation of the data. I: possibilia

The data adduced in the previous Section may be accountedfor by appealing in the first instance to the distinctionbetween concrete and abstract entities. Slightly adjustingthe traditional characterization, we will consider asconcrete the entities that may causally interact in adirect manner with their environment1, and abstract theentities that may exist only in the form of therealization, namely of the exemplification by means of aconcrete object2. Such a distinction may be applied here,in that we take possibilia as instances of the former,ficta of the latter, class of entities3.

Armed with this ontological distinction, we can turnto evaluate the above sentences, and see how such adistinction emerges from this evaluation. Let us firstfocus on possibilia. We can take (3) as a subject-predicatesentence whose proper name refers to a possibleunactualized concrete object, Napoleon Jr., and predicatesof it a particular first-order property, namely that ofexistence, false of him as regards the actual world andtrue of him when other possible worlds are brought intoplay for semantic evaluation. This makes (1) true as well,particularly in its de re reading which of coursepresupposes a possibilist quantification, that is, a

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quantification on possible objects4: of such an object,Napoleon Jr., it is true that it might have existed.

Three problems are traditionally raised at this point.First, how can conditions of identity be provided forunactualized possibilia? Second, how can we refer by meansof a proper name to an unactualized object? Third, whatkind of property is this first-order property of existence?As to the first question, following Kaplan and Kripke wecan give a definite answer to it. Since it is not among mypurposes in this paper to establish the best candidate forsuch identity conditions, I shall here assume that theKaplanian-Kripkean answer works: Napoleon Jr. is the (only)possible offspring of gametes Z, where by such gametes onemeans the Bonapartian sperm and the Josephinian egg thatmight have united that Christmas night5. As anyone can see,"the (only) possible offspring of gametes Z" is anobstinately rigid description in a Kaplanian sense, namelyit denotes one individual only in all possible worlds, eventhe worlds in which that individual does not exist6.

Insofar as such a description gives the identityconditions for an entity such as Junior, I may legitimatewhat I have hitherto implicitly assumed, that is, that thepossible unactualized Junior and the intentional, dreamt-of, nonexistent Junior are one and the same entity. So thatto dream of Junior's existence is not so meager aconsolation for his actual non-existence, as the dreamt-ofJunior is the very same individual that would have existed,if Bonaparte and Josephine had had fruitful intercoursethat Christmas night7.

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Second, we may consider an obstinately rigiddescription such as that given above as the onlydescription suited to fix a particular reference for a namesuch as "Napoleon Jr." - or (since I do not in generalthink that objects have names in virtue of something, be it acausal link, the satisfaction of a description orwhatever8) the only description entitled to focus on adeterminate, albeit non-existent, object as the referent ofthat name. Such an object is indeed individuated by theindividual essence expressed by that description. However,the question of how much we know of it aside, it is by nomeans exhausted by that essence, precisely in the same wayas with an actual object, at least insofar as even actualobjects, as some of the detractors of the distinctionbetween a possibile and its essence also acknowledge9, havean individual essence10. (Incidentally, this last thesis iswell accepted by me, insofar as in my view actual objectsare nothing but actualised possible objects.) In fact, letus suppose that the individual essence of, say, the FrenchEmperor, Napoleon, is that of being the offspring of twogametes, those of his respective Corsican parents. Sure,nobody questions that Napoleon might not have existed, forinstance in a possible world W. Suppose now that among theinhabitants of such a possible world there are somephilosophers who maintain that possible objects are nothingbut their individual essences. In particular, they maintainthat a certain possible, there nonexistent, object who isthe, there unactualised, offspring of the afore-mentionedgametes (suppose for simplicity that Napoleon's parentsstill exist in W), is nothing but such an individual

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essence, so that, no matter which name they had used inorder to denote it, they would have employed nothing but anabbreviated description. Well, the fact that what peoplewould do and say in such a world is, as Kripke hasrepeatedly said11, of no interest to us insofar as ourcounterfactualisations are concerned does not prevent usfrom saying that, if the philosophers of W maintained theabove thesis as regards the (possible) offspring of a

1 This thesis was originally defended by the early Russell: cf.Cocchiarella (1982:183-5).2 On this, cf. Cocchiarella (1989:19); and also Zalta (1983:50).3 Cf. Zalta (1983:60,93); Cocchiarella (1982:213).4 For this notion, cf. Cocchiarella (1982); Haller (1989:65).5 Cf. Kaplan (1989b:607), Kripke (1973:67). That the essence sospecified is an individual essence, is specifically highlighted bySalmon (1987:94). 6 Following Salmon, Kaplan defines an obstinately rigid designator as"a designator that designates the same object at all worlds,irrespective of whether the object exists there or not"; moreover, heimplicitly acknowledges the notion of an obstinately rigid descriptionby adding that "all directly referential terms will be obstinatelyrigid (though not every obstinately rigid term need be directlyreferential)" (1989b:571). Of course instead of bringing "the possibleF" into issue, I might have simply considered the merely de factorigid description "the F", where "F" designates the property whichmentions the relevant origin of its possessor, as the descriptionproviding the individual essence even of a possible object. The latterdescription, however, would have such an object as its (only) possibledenotation, whereas the former has already it as its unique denotationactually.

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certain sperm and a certain egg, they would be wrong.Nobody questions that an actual object is more than itsindividual essence, in the sense that the former isirreducible to the latter12. Should such an individual notexist in a certain possible world, this would not mean thatit has become identical with its individual essence,regardless of what people, who are able to grasp such anessence precisely as we do, would say in such a world.Thus, by parity of reasoning, such people could say that weare wrong if we said in our actual world that a possibleobject is identical with its individual essence insofar asan object existing in that world of theirs although not inours were indeed concerned. Therefore, I can ultimately saythat no concrete object, regardless of its actuallyexisting or not, is nothing but its individual essence.

Thus, the semantic thesis I wish to hold regardingpossible objects is that we can refer to them directly, by

7 It is often maintained that dream objects, and intentional objects ingeneral, have to be ranked with (a certain kind of) fictional objects(cf. for instance Fine (1982:101), Parsons (1980:208)). It seemshowever to me that this is not mandatory at all. Once we assume thatan intentional object's essence is such as that proposed in the textas regards the thought-of Junior, we may legitimately sustain that itis one and the same entity that is thought-of as well as possiblyexist. For a similar opinion, cf. also Castañeda (1986:334).8 On this, cf. Almog (1991:596-8). I here can only assume that such aposition can be maintained even from a different ontological point ofview, namely from a 'Kantian-possibilist' framework of objects takenas discoursive possible objects. I defended such an idea in Voltolini(1991).

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means of directly referential terms figuring in sentenceswhich have the same subject-predicate structure assentences in which directly referential terms designateactual objects13. As a matter of fact, it has been oftenacknowledged that a reference to possible objects can beperformed descriptively, or, in other words, that one canalways find a singular term equivalent to a descriptionwhich has a possible denotation; but I am not interested inmaintaining such a doctrine. First of all, when it isexpressed in terms of non-rigid descriptions, it faces awell-known problem. If, instead of "Napoleon Jr." or as itsalleged equivalent we had, say, "Bonaparte and Josephine'sfirst baby", which, of the various actually non-existentdenotations of such a description, each one in its possible

9 Cook (1983:308) wavers between an ontological and epistemiccharacterization of the thesis of the indistinguishability of apossible object from its individual essence when he writes that "thedescription [expressing a certain individual essence] supposedlysingles out a possible object. If it does, then we should be able tocast off the description and just talk about the object. [...] Thereis no difference between a possibility concerning a description'sbeing satisfied and a possibility concerning an individual singled outby either the description or the name, because there is no individualsingled out by and detachable from the description". We will herebriefly discuss the ontological reading of this argument; were thisinstead to be taken epistemically, it would turn out to be irrelevantfor semantic purposes. For more on this, cf. Voltolini (1994c).10 Cf. e.g. precisely Cook (1983:308).11 Cf. Kripke (1980:77-8).12 Cook indeed explicitly acknowledges this. Cf. (1983:308).

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world, would be Junior?14 Possibilia, I would add, are notgiven as possible denotations of such descriptions, butthey must already 'be' there in order for any suchdescription to have a possible denotation, where this'being' has to be understood in the early Russellian senseas distinct from the sense of existence we are going toexplain: a possibile has being necessarily, existencecontingently15. True, a defender of possibilia asdenotations of appropriate descriptions might retort thatthe afore-mentioned problem of an insufficient specificityof the description does not arise insofar as an obstinatelyrigid description of the kind indicated above is involved.Such a description cannot but have Junior as itsdenotation; by the way it is construed, moreover, italready has this denotation in the actual world as well asin all other possible worlds. However, once admitted that apossible does not reduce itself to its own individualessence, I would argue that that the appropriatedescription cannot but have Junior as its denotation doesnot imply that "Junior" means that description, any morethan "Bonaparte" means "the actual offspring of gametes Y"(where such a description involves the Emperor's parents'relevant Corsican cells), which nevertheless has Bonaparteas its only denotation in all possible worlds. Indeed, soKripkean have we become that sentences having "Bonaparte"as its subject do not have a quantified structure, even:

(7) Bonaparte exists

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if "existence" is to mean a first-order predicate in thesense I am going to explain. For no such subject-predicatestructured sentence expresses any proposition when itssubject term is referentless, whereas the opposite holdswith an allegedly corresponding, existentially quantified(even in the 'possibilist' sense selected here) sentencewhose relevant descriptive term may well bedenotationless16. Once "being referentless" is taken to mean"not referring even to a possible object", one does not seewhy things should change under this respect when by meansof such a sentence a possibile is called into play, forinstance in (3)17.

13 As already argued (among others) by Salmon (1987:94).14 For this question, cf. Kaplan (1973:505-6), Kripke (1980:157-8),Rosenkrantz (1984:142-3). The conception of possibilia as possibledenotations of one and the same singular term is apparently defendedby Hintikka, e.g. in (1984).15 For the distinction between being and existence, cf. Russell(1904:515). This thesis has been recently revived by Williamson(1990).16 This was originally suggested by Donnellan (1966:296-7), (1974:21).For other arguments against the equivalence between a proper name anda de jure rigid description (cf. fn.5) of the form "the actualoffspring of gametes G", cf. Salmon (1982).17 One might however appeal to the theory of singular propositions asthe items expressed by any genuine subject-predicate sentence and saythat no such proposition can be generated when any alleged subject-predicate sentence and a possible unactual object are at issue. InVoltolini (1994c), however, I have attempted to show that even thisargument fails.

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Third, the first-order property of existence is a non-qualitative property, that is, a property which can in noway contribute to the individuation of the object whichpossibly has it. In this respect, it is akin to the first-order property of being realized (which may pertain toabstract objects, such as species and sets) or to thesecond-order property of being instantiated (which maypertain to properties). Following a Platonic-Kantiantradition, I link existence, when so conceived, withcausality, and interpret existence as the non-qualitativefirst-order property of being directly involved in thecausal order, namely of being a subject of causalmanipulations18.

3. Evaluation of the data. II: ficta

Once I assume that in (4) "Santa Claus" refers to afictum as an abstract object, the interpretation I havejust given of the property of existence allows us tounderstand why (4) produces a necessary falsehood, so that(2) is false as well19. Qua abstract entity, a fictum cannotbe directly involved in the causal order, no more than anumber, a linguistic type or a species (other kinds ofabstract entities) can be. Thus, it is now possible toaccount for both the disappointment a child has ondiscovering that Santa Claus does not exist, and itsgreater import as compared with that felt by Bonaparte onarousing from the dream of his and Josephine's heir. Unlike

18 For this thesis, cf. Castañeda (1989b:241-2), (1990a:461).19 Cf. also Zalta (1983:96).

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Bonaparte's discovery of Junior's actual non-existence,which is in any case an empirical discovery, the child's isa categorial discovery. Even if the course of the world hadbeen utterly different the child would not have had anybetter chance of meeting Santa Claus, no more than he wouldhave had any chance of meeting numbers, types or species.

Such an ontological gap between ficta and possibiliaallows me to expand a remark of Kripke's, namely that if ina different possible world there had been an individualuniquely santaclausian, that is, an individual who had doneall and the only things Claus does in the myth, this wouldnot mean that Santa Claus existed in that world20. Indeed,if such an individual had existed, then the abstract objectthat Santa Claus, qua fictum, is, would have been realized,in the sense in which, say, the species of unicorn wouldhave been realized if in that world there had beenindividuals who had been unicorns. Moreover, the concept ofbeing santaclausian would have been uniquely instantiated.But this is not tantamount to saying that Santa Claushimself would have existed, in the sense of existence asbeing effective given in the previous Section21.

Thus, although what I have just said allows anabstract object to be possibly realized even if it is notactually so, this does not turn it into a possible objectin my sense, that is, into an entity which may be

20 Cf. Kripke (1973:40). On this point, cf. also Haller (1989:69).21 In the same sense, Zalta (1983:60,76,96) distinguishes between beinga possibly existing object, a property which pertains to concreteindividuals, and being weakly possible, the property of beingexemplifiable by concrete objects which pertains to abstract entities.

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effective. If we are fond of paradoxical situations, wemight even suppose that a story be written concerning theoffspring of a certain Bonapartian sperm and a certainJosephinian egg, whom is even called "Junior" in such astory. Well, nobody but our possible individual Junior maybe the individual who instantiates the fictional Junior,that is, not only the former is the latter's possibleinstantiator, but also he is its only possibleinstantiator, i.e. he who instatiates it in every possibleunactual world in which it is instantiated. But this doesnot mean that the two Juniors are one and the same entity.To say the least, insofar as the actual world is concernedthe fictional Junior is already the offspring of thosegametes, whereas the possible Junior is evidently not22.

But what kind of abstract object is a fictionalobject? The answer I am now provisionally prompted to giveis: a set, a finite set of properties. For instance, SantaClaus is constituted by the class of properties the mythattributes to it23. Thus, a simple answer as to the questionof a criterion of identity for a fictum is at hand: afictional object is nothing but the finite set of its

22 This paragraph is intended to cope with a problematic remark byKaplan (1989b:610fn.107), who wonders whether two such individualsshould be considered the same individual. In point of fact, thecomparison between the two individuals raises the, albeit apparent,problem mentioned in the text, only if: i) the alleged story does notgo further (otherwise it would manifestly enclose properties which thefictional, but not the possible, Junior possesses necessarily; ii) thegametes in question within the story are not already fictional gametes,as our theory instead requires (see later).

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properties, so that, as is the case with any setwhatsoever, if we substitute one of these properties byanother we get a different fictum24. Borges' (and Lewis')opinions notwithstanding, Cervantes' Don Quixote and PierreMenard's Don Quixote are precisely one and the samecharacter, if they are constituted by the very same set ofproperties25.

This is not to say, however, that artistic productionhas no part at all in the definition of fictional objects.Kripke draws an interesting distinction between an actuallycreated fictional character, say Santa Claus, and one neveractually created, the result of a mistakenly assuming aterm referred to a certain fictional character where inactual fact it was never supposed to. This is precisely thecase, Kripke writes, with "Moloch", which we have taken asreferring to a mythical monster where it is actually usedin the Bible as a common noun either for kings or for humansacrifices. Thus, Kripke comments, we can say that thefollowing sentences:

(8) Gilgamesh exists (9) Moloch exists

are respectively true and false, in that the former assertsthe mundane existence of a fictional character - as genuineas the existence of anything else (spatiotemporal objectsincluded), the latter the mundane existence of what doesnot exist at all26. Insofar as, however, Kripke himselfacknowledges that a fictional object is an abstractentity27, the first part of his thesis is wrong. That is to

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say, insofar as existence means being effective, its beingpredicated of a fictum provides only a necessary falsehood,as is precisely the case with Santa Claus in (4). In orderto be truly predicated of Gilgamesh in (8), therefore, "toexist" must have a different meaning from that which it hasin (3), (7), and also (4).

23 See again Cocchiarella (1982:213). In (1992:312), Santambrogioequates ficta with another kind of abstract object, generic objects suchas The Whale or The Triangle. The reason why I do not adopt thisstrategy, which nevertheless presents many analogies with thatintroduced here, is that I do not want to attribute any element ofgenerality to sentences like e.g. (10) below in which ficta areinvolved. That is, it seems to me that (10) works differently from"The Whale is a mammal", in that if we were legitimated to give aquantified paraphrase of either sentence, an existential rather anuniversal quantification would be in order with the former. Zalta(1983:93) also equates ficta with abstract objects which are not sets.They are simply defined as entities failing to exemplify existence(1983:12,18). He motivates his choice by saying that sets cannotexemplify properties which serve as their elements (1983:36). But theinstantiation relation of exemplification an object has to a propertyiff it externally possesses it is utterly different from the inclusionrelation of encoding an object has to the same property iff itinternally possesses it (for internal and external predication, seebelow, fn.39).24 For this thesis, cf. Parsons (1980:28). As Parsons well knows, sucha criterion is not so simple as it may appear. He indeed gives someinteresting replies to objections that may be raised against thedoctrine of ficta as sets: cf. his (1980:175-202). He however

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In a first approximation, we might say that such asense of "to exist" must be such that its being predicatedof Gilgamesh in (8) is tantamount to a categorialpredication, hence to a predication which should benecessarily true of the object it applies to. We might thussuppose that "to exist" here means "to subsist", and thatin such a sense it is necessarily true of the character ofwhich it is predicated, so that (8) provides a necessarytruth. Once it is so interpreted, however, "to exist"should also apply to Moloch, so that (9) should be true andnot false, as Kripke suggests. In fact, if a fictionalobject were merely a set of properties, (9) should also betrue (and necessarily), insofar as we have hitherto atleast understood the Bible as talking about M={F,G,H...},namely a certain set. Qua set, M={F,G,H...} certainlysubsists. However, Kripke seems to be intuitively right inholding that within the realm of fictional characters thereis no such a thing as Moloch, so that (9) is false and nottrue. The same point may be made with respect to a givenfictional character and a counterfactual situation in whichnobody has ever talked of it; for instance, acounterfactual situation in which no myth concerning

considers this criterion as holding both for fictional and forpossible objects, in that both entities are for him set-correlates.Insofar as I here distinguish between ficta and possibilia, I thinkthat what Parsons says is valid for ficta only. 25 Cf. also Parsons (1980:188). Borges' different 'opinion' is reportedas well as shared by Lewis in (1978:39).26 I have slightly modified the examples given by Kripke (1973:70-1).27 Cf. Kripke (1973:72).

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Gilgamesh has ever been widely read or known. It seemslikely that in such a situation the set to which Gilgameshis actually correlated would subsist as well, but therewould be no such a thing as Gilgamesh qua character of therelevant myth, so that as regards this situation (8) wouldbe false. Thus, I can account for this Kripkean intuitionif I put matters more precisely as follows. Insofar asficta are precisely creatures of fiction, that is, humancreations and not mere sets, we may say that they notmerely subsist, but rather subsist as fictional characters (inshort, F-subsist). Insofar as this, i.e. F-subsisting, isplausibly what "to exist" means when ficta are at issue, wecan say that (8) and (9) are respectively contingently trueand contingently false, so as to comply with thecontingency of taking a set as a fictional entity28.

I must of course clarify what "to subsist as afictional character" means. It amounts to a set ofproperties being posited and taken as a concrete individual, so asto fulfil one of the main aims of fiction, i.e. to simulatereality. For a piece of fiction apparently talks of

28 A similar thesis is maintained by Fine, who says that a fictionalcharacter has a contingent being in that it amounts to a certainabstract content being in a relation of "indicating" with an author(1982:131). This however does not authomatically imply that differentauthors, different characters, as Fine instead believes (1982:132). Aswe will immediately see, the dependence of a fictum on authorship isgeneric, not specific. Note moreover that to subsist, and therefore toF-subsist also, is different from being realized. Thus, a set beingrealized, i.e. being instantiated by a concrete individual, isdifferent from its F-subsisting, its fictionally existing as it were.

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individuals who, by means of predicative terms denotingprecisely the one and the same properties they denoteoutside fictional contexts29, are described as doing thingsnormally performed by ordinary individuals. Insofar as theyare fictional entities, sets are taken as concreteindividuals: this is why ficta are set-correlates rather thanmere sets only. (This may be indirectly shown by referenceto any fiction whatsoever, which usually inaugurates thedescription of its characters by saying "There was once anindividual who..." rather than by saying "There was once aset of properties which ...".)

I may reformulate this latter point in terms of atheory of (ontological) dependence. Although ficta are, aswe have seen with Don Quixote, indifferent to their actualcreators, insofar as they are however created by humanelaboration in general we may say that they genericallydepend for their being as fictional characters, not merely assets, on some kind of intentional performance30. This is theperformance by means of which a set is taken as a concreteindividual, where this performance amounts to a publicthinking of the set as an individual, i.e. to a sharedimagining of its being such an individual. In other terms,although it is contingent whether, say, Don Quixote is

29 We thus share Castañeda's position according to which ficta possessordinary properties, which is what makes them simulating reality,though they possess such properties in a special ("internal") way, bytheir being a set of such properties (on this latter point, seefurther on in the text). Cf. Castañeda (1989a).30 For such a notion of generic dependence, see Mulligan-Smith(1986:118). Such a theory has also been defended by Sosa (1985/6:486).

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publicly thought of by Cervantes or by Menard, it is not atall so that Quixote is publicly thought of in some episodeof thinking. If nobody had publicly thought of him, hewould still have subsisted as a set of properties, but notas a fictional character. The fact that there is no such afictional thing as Moloch can therefore be accounted for asfollows, that nobody has actually had a public thoughtconcerning it, but only presumed he had31.

The thesis I have just put forward allows me to dealwith a tricky problem Fine raises against any "internalist"conception of fictional objects, that is, against anyconception of ficta as agglomerates of abstract entitiessuch as properties are. How can we say that two characterswhich are described within a story as having precisely thesame properties are really two distinct entities (suppose,to complicate matters, that they are distinguished within

31 What we say here seems to echo the following remarks by Kripke: "afictional character ... exists in virtue of more concrete activitiesof telling stories, writing plays, writing novels and so on"(1973:72). See also Parsons: "The author makes them [i.e., characters]fictional objects ... We might even say that the author bestows on themfictional existence" (1980:188). However, Sosa remarks that in order for afictum to subsist, it is enough that it be imagined by someone, eventhough no piece of fiction ever publicly appears (1985/6:486). Thisseems to allow Moloch to be a fictional character, insofar as we asBible-readers have thought of it this way. I do not want to bedogmatic on this. If this were the case, however, it should be notedthat Moloch would not be a character of the Bible, but rather of adifferent, potential, text, namely the Bible-as-being-understood-in-a-certain-way by a certain community.

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the story neither by different names nor by beingexplicitly described as distinct, so as they do not haveneither a nominal nor a relational property as theirrespectively differentiating property32)? Conversely, we mayadd, how can we assure that a story, say, a song, whichintroduces a character by saying "There lived a lady by theNorth Sea shore..." does not introduce a new character somestrophes later, but it simply repeates the same verses? Iam now entitled to say that in the former case thecharacters involved are two, whereas in the latter case oneand the same character is at play, because although the setof properties involved is the same, different vs. the same(kind of) act of publicly thinking that set as a concreteindividual is performed33. This finally prompts me toprovide a more refined criterion of identity for ficta thanthat given above: a fictum is nothing but a certain set ofproperties plus a certain (type of) intentionalperformance, that is, a (type of) act of publicly thinkingthis set as a concrete individual.

The influence of human creation on the ontologicalnature of ficta is further seen in the fact that where awork of art actually begins and/or ends is largely a matter

32 Parsons puts forward the "different properties, differentcharacters" solutions to these less complicated cases. Cf.(1980:192,200). For the whole problem, cf. Fine (1982:132-5). 33 Nothing of course prevents the audience of the song from taking thetwo groups of strophes as concerning different characters. Insofar asthe audience does so, however, it allegedly generates two differentficta as much as a different story from that generated by its originalauthor (say, the song-as-understood-by-such-an-audience).

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of convention. That is, there is no doubt that an essentialfeature of a story, as well as of a myth, is that it can beprolonged (or shortened). This can be accounted for in ourcharacterization if we say that it is not sufficient togain (or to lose) a property insofar as the elaboration ofa story proceeds to be identified as a different fictum.Thus, the Iliad's Ulysses and the Odyssey's Ulisses aredifferent characters, even though their respectiveproperties (partially, at least) overlap; but d'Urfé'sAstrée and Baro's Astrée are one and the same, in that Baroclaimed he was completing the work, l'Astrée, which d'Urféleft unfinished. We can thus qualify a fictum not only as a(mentally) generated abstract object, but also as aconstructed abstract object, in more or less the same way aswhich some mathematical entities are. For instance, as muchas new ciphers are given to π insofar as it ismathematically developed, new features can be attached to acharacter insofar as it is progressively elaborated.

I must however be very careful here. True, a storymight have been, and often actually is, prolonged, by theaddition of new adventures featuring a given character. Butthis is not to say that a character might have hadproperties which it does not actually have. The formercounterfactualizaton concerns us as the authors of therelevant story, not the character itself34. I may putmatters in the following, Kaplan-like, fashion: once weacknowledge that a story is complete, we establish that acertain character has been generated. Once it has beengenerated, however, it remains the same throughout allworlds, so that it gives a fixed contribution to the

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semantic evaluation of the terms used to denote it35.Perhaps such an acknowledgement never obtains explicitly.But this is a different, so to say an epistemological,matter, which is what I have just taken into account when Isaid that it is largely conventional where the boundariesof a story lie36.

4. Further explanations: completeness vs. incompleteness, inconsistency

Let us now pass to consider the semantic evaluation ofsentences (5) and (6). As far as I know, the receivedtradition about Santa Claus says nothing about hisrelationship with the Norwegian government. Thus, theproperty of ruling Norway is not contained in the relevantset, nor can it be once it has actually been excluded. (6)is therefore necessarily false. To put it in ontologicalrather than in semantic terms, we can say that a fictum isan essentially incomplete entity: it possesses only what (it hasbeen established that) it possesses, and nothing else37. Onthe other hand, our possible Junior is actually indifferentto the problem of ruling countries, insofar as in order fora concrete entity to rule a country it has to exist. Butfor the very same reason such a problem would concern him,were he to exist; in some worlds positively, in othersnegatively. This is why, with respect to the worlds inwhich Junior exists, (5) would sometimes be true andsometimes false. Again put ontologically, Junior is anaccidentally incomplete entity, insofar as (contingent)completeness - i.e., for any property either having or nothaving it - is a corollary of existence in the afore-

25

mentioned sense. True, the properties a concrete objectmust either have or not have are not necessarily existence-entailing properties38, but in order for such an object tobe (contingently) complete, the existence-entailingproperties must also be taken into account. For example, iteither is or is not the case that Junior has theintentional property of being dreamt of by Bonaparte, even

34 This thesis is also hinted at by Napoli, who however remarks that itis not enough in order to avoid counterfactualizations concerningcharacters themselves, as such counterfactualization may be containedin the relevant stories regarding them. For instance, in a Conan Doylenovel Dr. Watson could say: "Holmes might have been a whale hunter"(1992:389fn.22). However, insofar as this counterfactualizationobtains within the story, it presents just another feature of thecharacter it concerns, the complex property of being possibly a whalehunter, which belongs to Holmes necessarily as any other propertywhich characterizes him. Had Watson declared that Holmes might havebeen a whale ecological tutor, Holmes would have again been an utterlydifferent personage.35 I call this generation-evaluation distinction Kaplanian insofar asKaplan employs a similar one with respect to another kind of abstractentity, i.e. with propositions. Cf. Kaplan (1989b:613).36 Thus it is largely a matter of convention whether it is a singlework or else a whole cycle of such works which we consider asconstituting a complete fictum. Either way we will be dealing with twoquite distinct characters. Erec et Enide's Arthur is different from theArthur of the whole Arthurian myth: trivially, the two are constitutedby different properties. Cf. also Parsons (1980:189). Thus, I am readyto answer a question originally raised by Adams (1981:14-5). Supposethat we found a story concerning a character whose performances are

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though he does not actually exist. But this is not enoughin order to qualify him as (contingently) complete, sincein his particular case there are many properties (indeedall the factual, i.e. existence-entailing, ones) withregards which neither alternative can be assessed. Theproperty of ruling France is precisely one of these.

As a matter of fact, two distinct notions ofcompleteness (and incompleteness) have here been tacitlybrought into play, insofar as abstract vs. concrete objectsare concerned. According to the first, an abstract objectis complete iff, given any property and its negative, theobject has either. A fictional object, therefore, isincomplete in this sense in that for some property F andits opposite non-F it has neither (and necessarily).According to the second notion of completeness, a concreteobject is complete iff, given both any predication of aproperty F to it and its contradictory predication, eitherthe first or the second holds. A possible nonexistentobject, therefore, is incomplete in this sense because itis neither the case that it F-s nor is the case that itdoes not F. Thus, in the end an ontologicalcharacterization such as that of being complete is given insemantic terms, according to whether internal (predicative)or external (propositional) negation is at issue.

very similar to those Doyle attributes to Sherlock Holmes in hisstories. Would then such a character be Holmes or not? I would reply:yes, only provided that we take as Holmes the character of the wholecycle and moreover we decide that this 'new' story belongs to such acycle.

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It is important to remark that such a distinctionbetween two notions of (in)completeness is apparently notdrawn in current Meinongian doctrines of nonexistents39.These focus on the former, thinking they can thus escapethe Russell-style objection that nonexistent objects do notsatisfy the principle of the Excluded Middle40. In fact,these doctrines meet this objection with the Meinongianargument that, although it is true that nonexistents do notsatisfy the Excluded Middle principle in its objectualreading, they do in its propositional reading. Although anysuch object lacks both F and non-F, it is indeed the casethat this object does not have F, just as it also does nothave non-F41. We are now in a position to see, however, thatsuch a reply holds for ficta only, not for possibilia. Asfar as the latter are concerned, I must acknowledge that

37 Cf. also e.g. Bonomi (1979:47), Santambrogio (1992:310) for such athesis.38 For such a notion, cf. Cocchiarella (1982:197).39 As is well known, these doctrines can be divided into "doubleproperties" (nuclear/extranuclear)-theories on the one hand and"double mode of predication" (internal/external) theories on theother. For the former, see Parsons (1980), Sosa (1985/6); for thelatter, see Castañeda (1989b), Rapaport (1978), Zalta (1983). For anevaluation of the distinction, see below.40 It is important to recall that Russell's solution to this problemworks only insofar as non-directly referential terms are used, so thata distinction between a primary and a secondary occurrence of them maybe provided. Cf. Russell (1905b:485,490).41 Cf. e.g. Parsons (1980:19). For such a reply in Meinong, see Simons(1988:417).

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insofar as they do not exist they constitute an exceptionto the Excluded Middle principle in its propositional form.But this is no scandal. It must be stressed, in fact, thatthis form of the principle is ultimately nothing but thelogical counterpart of completeness in the second sensegiven above, which pertains to objects insofar as they areexistent42. Thus, I must ultimately take neo-Meinongians'doctrines as valid insofar as we can reinterpret them asconcerning ficta only, not possibilia. This is notastonishing at all, in that they take objects preciselyeither as correlates or as concretizations of sets ofproperties43. This latter thesis works very nicely whereficta are concerned; for as we have seen, ficta are notonly sets, but sets taken as concrete individuals. But itdoes not work, Meinongian's convictions notwithstanding,with possibilia44.

I can now dispel a doubt that may have risen in themeantime. Could we not compare a fictum with an impossibleentity, in that an entity (if any) of that kind shares thefeatures we have hitherto called upon as to ficta, namelythe necessary nonexistence and the necessarily havingneither a property which does not characterize it nor theopposite property? In itself, however, an impossible entitysuch as an all-white and all-black horse is such because itis inconsistent45, whereas a fictum cannot exist, simplybecause it is categorially different from a possibleobject. Thus, neither its necessary nonexistence nor itsnecessary incompleteness depends on any internalinconsistence. This is not to say that there can be noinconsistent ficta; there can, at least insofar as there

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can be sets of incompatible properties46. This is indeedoften the case when we take the unit of generation forficta as the cycles (as in mythology) rather than a singlework. If we consider, say, the chanson de geste-cycle as awhole rather than one of its constituent poems only,Charlemagne is both a clever and an unclever king (comparethe descriptions of him in the Chanson de Roland and inPulcis' Morgante).

42 As Santambrogio nicely says: "an entity, i, exists iff there is adeterminate answer to every question concerning it or in other words,for every F(x) either F[x/i] or ~F[x/i] holds. The Tertium Non Datur is thehallmark of existence or reality" (1990:662). Moreover, as C. Travis(1993) has pointed out, one may legitimately say that an analogoustruth-value gap obtains with sentences concerning an actually existingobject insofar as they are uttered in a temporal situation in whichthat object does not exist any longer. Travis' example is thefollowing: a sentence such as "John is at home" is neither true norfalse if uttered when John is dead.43 For the former option, see Parsons (1980); for the latter, seeCastañeda (1989b). 44 Parsons apparently says that an object is a possible set ofproperties insofar as it is possible that a complete (in the firstsense given above) correlate of the object exist (cf. his definitionof a possible object (1980:21)). But then the problem would be thatthere are many such possible correlates, each one in its possibleworld. In Castañeda, moreover, a possible guise has the implausiblefeature of having properties traditionally considered accidental asnecessarily predicated of it, insofar as it possesses them internally(cf. Voltolini (1993a)).

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5. Does fiction contain real objects?

We saw in passing that an actual object, sayBonaparte, can be individuated by an individual essence ofthe very same kind as that which individuates anunactualized object. This can now be accounted for by thefact that the general ontological category of possibiliaincludes both actual and unactualized objects, insofar asrealia are nothing but possible actualized objects. Thishas the interesting consequence that no actual object canalso be a fictional object. Which prompts us to ask, whatis it we are speaking of when, in novels or plays, we talkof things such as Bonaparte or Paris, St. Petersburg orRussia? It seems that we are faced with at least twooptions: either we are speaking of actual objects whichhave as it were migrated to the fiction we are concernedwith47, or we are speaking of fictional objects, different fromthe actual ones: the Napoleon-of-War-and-Peace, etc. If wechoose the former option48, then we are compelled to say

45 As acknowledged also by Castañeda: cf. (1990b:541).46 That there are inconsistent ficta is also acknowledged by Parsons(1980:184), Santambrogio (1992:311).

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that in novels, beside a small number of truths, we tell agreat many falsehoods concerning actual objects, byrecounting things never done by them in reality: forinstance, that Bonaparte kissed the Russian soil, as weread in War and Peace49. If we decide for the latter option50,this implies that novels speak of things which one wouldnot have expected them to, as their authors wrote them

47 For the distinction between immigrant objects and objects native tothe story (where real objects belong to the former group) cf. Parsons(1980:51), Zalta (1983:92-3). Unlike them, moreover, I did not applythis distinction to the case of the characters of a cycle proceedingfrom an inaugurating story either (cf. fn.36). To state it briefly, itis indeed unclear to me which criterion might conclusively establishthat an object contained in a certain story is immigrant relatively tothat story.48 As Kripke (1973:84) does.49 Zalta, who also chooses this option, replies to this problem that,since as far as fiction is concerned actual objects only exemplify"according-to-the-story"-properties (e.g. Napoleon exemplifies theproperty of kissing the Russian soil according to the story, truthsand falsehoods are predicated of them (1983:92-4). But this does notaccount for the halo of necessity a predication such as that ofkissing the Russian soil has as far as it is applies to Tolstoj'sBonaparte. Indeed, on Zalta's account Napoleon's kissing the Russiansoil according-to-the-story is a mere contingent truth.50 As partially suggested by Santambrogio (1992:318). Parsons, who onthe contrary holds that real objects occur in fiction as immigrantobjects, still admits that descriptions such as "the Napoleon of Warand Peace" introduce "surrogate objects" of the real ones. Cf.(1980:57).

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intending to speak of real things: historical novels suchas Ivanhoe, or parodies for what matters, would lose theirraison d'être if they only spoke of ficta.

We are not compelled, however, to opt for eitherposition, in that there is actually a third alternative,that according to which if a text is to be regarded eitheras historical or as fictional depends on the basic attitudewe adopt towards it. Insofar as we take War and Peace as ahistorical text, we will see it as telling truths oruntruths about real individuals. In addition, it will beseen to contain a large number of unevaluable sentences,e.g. those concerning Countess Natasha, who is neither anunactualized nor an actualized object. But if we take Warand Peace as a novel, then we see it as speaking of fictaonly, some of which more or less closely resemble realobjects while others are entirely independent of them. Inthis case, all the sentences contained in the text will beevaluated as necessary truths concerning the set ofproperties constituting the relevant ficta51. If Tolstoy'sBonaparte is taken as a fictum, his being the FrenchEmperor is a necessary truth; were he not the Emperor, hewould have been an utterly different character, and War andPeace would have been an utterly different novel. And thisis true of any fictional character. On the other hand, ifTolstoy's masterpiece is regarded as a historical text,should we discover that (an epistemic possibility)

51 According to the present analysis, the proviso which sometimesoccurs in a text "the characters in this story are wholly imaginary"must be taken as an advice to read the story only fictionally, nothistorically.

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Bonaparte was not the French Emperor, but only an impostor,this would only constitute a further falsehood told by Warand Peace. More radically, we would say the same withrespect to (7) if we discovered that Napoleon neverexisted; but were such a sentence contained in War andPeace, as long as we regarded this as a fictional text wewould take it as expressing a necessary truth, just likeany other sentence concerning the fictional Napoleon52.

6. An apparent paradox, and the way ficta are denoted

Here however it seems that we are faced with aparadox. Assuming that we find (7) in War and Peace andevaluate it fictionally, we take it as expressing anecessary truth. But when I analyzed (4), I said that itexpressed a necessary untruth, in that it predicatedeffectivity of the fictional object Santa Claus. The same,therefore, should be the case with (7) when it regards thefictional Napoleon; for no more can the fictional Napoleonbe effective. Thus, (7) is necessarily false too, just like(4). Thus, we end up with a sentence which appears to beboth necessarily true and necessarily false with regard toone and the same fictional object. How is this possible?

52 In the text, we take sentences such as (7) as having distinct tokensregarding different items, one real and the other fictional. However,nothing substantially changes if we take (7) as expressing in thecases in question different omophonic sentences, as it is oftenadviced insofar as names having different designata are concerned. Seee.g. Kaplan (1989a:562).

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To find a way out of this paradox, we have to take astep backwards. We saw earlier that reference to possibiliacan be qualified as a particular case of direct reference,according to which we can directly refer to a possibleobject provided perhaps we are able to discriminate it fromany other object by means of its individual essence. Now,what about reference to ficta? Were a set what we aredealing with a fictional object, I might indeed say that aname such as "Santa Claus" turns out to be equivalent to anobstinately rigid description of the form: "the thing whichalone has (=is constituted by) nothing but the followingproperties: ... (and here follows the list of the thingsdone by Santa Claus in the myth)", once such a descriptionis interpreted in a strict Russellian way. In other terms,I hold that a reference to a set is always a descriptivereference, insofar as the relevant description is anobstinately rigid description, one which singles out thesame subsistent denotation in all worlds, i.e. the sameset. However, as I have to deal even with cases of fictawhich share the same set of properties (see Section 3), Imust complicate matters and reformulate the abovedescription as follows: "the result of publicly thinkingn[where the subscript stands for the relevant (type of) actof public thought] a set which has nothing but thefollowing properties: ... as a concretum". Such adescription will no longer be an obstinately rigiddescription, but rather one de facto rigid in that itdesignates the same individual, i.e. a certain fictum, inevery possible world in which this individual F-subsists,

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that is, in all worlds in which this turns out to begenerated.

Thus, the different ontological nature of possibiliaversus ficta accounts for the different semantic behaviorof the names used to denote them: in the former case adirect designator, in the latter a rigid description. Now,that a name works as a description in the latter case seemsto run counter to intuitions regarding the way it isemployed within the relevant story; in it, characters usenames, for instance "Santa Claus", to refer to anindividual, not to a set. But this, as we have seen, shows(among other things) that the story is fictional, or that itsimulates reality by means of what its characters are saidto do or to be qua imagined concrete individuals. True, inConan Doyle's stories Watson uses "Holmes" to refer to anindividual, not to a set, insofar as he mimics the ordinaryact of referring to individuals performed by ordinarysubjects; if Watson used it within the story to refer to aset, he would not ask Holmes to solve crimes, as this isone of the actions Doyle intends that Holmes should mimic.Nevertheless, what is done with a certain name, say "SantaClaus" within the story has no bearing on its semanticevaluation. Thus, we can replace it by another name whichdoes not figure within the story and which has the samesemantic import, that is, that of a rigid description suchas that indicated above53.

One might however doubt that ontology influencessemantics in such a way. One might say, be that as it maywith the ontological nature of an entity, what semanticsmust account for is that this entity is referred to by a

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name, that is, it must investigate the semanticrelationship which obtains between names and theirreferents in general. Thus, if this relationship is adirect one, it is such no matter what entity is involved54.But the point is that, as I outlined above, the semanticinterpretation of "Santa Claus" I have here put forwardcontributes to account for the semantic evaluation ofsentences such as (4) and (6). We can see how it doescontrapositively as it were, by first analyzing how ithelps to explain why a sentence such as:

(10) Santa Claus lives at the North Pole

contains a necessary predication. The point is that (10)can be paraphrased as the following, strictly analyticallytrue, sentence:

(10') The result of publicly thinkingn a set which has (=is

constituted by) nothing but the following properties: F,G,H...,living at the North Pole, as a concretum, has (=is constituted,among other things, by) the property of living at the NorthPole55.

53 The same point is made by Santambrogio (1992:315). Moreover, if thecharacter is explicitly described within the story as having beenlabeled with a certain name, say "Santa Claus", or at least if thisname is used within the relevant story by other characters as the nameof the character involved (as is the case with "Holmes" we pointed outin the text), then, but only then, being called "Claus" is anotherproperty of the set which constitutes it.54 Cf. Fine (1982:100,116).

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As soon as we know that this is the analysis of (10), I canprovide corresponding analyses of both (4) and (6) asnecessarily false statements, which explain that thedenotation (if any) of the relevant description, i.e. afictional abstract entity (a set-correlate in our sense),can neither exist, that is, being effective, nor be, in astrict analytical sense, constituted by a property whichdoes not constitute the set to which it is correlated.

Within the Meinongian tradition, a distinction hasbeen drawn between the internal, i.e. the analytic, and theexternal mode of predication of a property to an object. AsI have already done with the Meinongian notion of(essential) incompleteness, I accept it only as far asfictional entities are concerned56. The "mode ofpredication"-distinction indeed permits a convincingsolution of the apparent paradox concerning (7)57. The fact

55 On the "analyticity" of the way in which the characterizingproperties are predicated of a certain fictum, see Bonomi (1979:46-8).Such a way is equivalent to the internal mode of predication theorizedby Castañeda; cf. e.g. his (1985/6:58). The doctrine of fictionalpredication as analytic is criticized by Carney (1977:32) as"counterintuitive". On the contrary, it seems to me plausible enough,once one distinguishes between the reader's perspective while readinga novel and his, or anybody's for what matters, perspective on thenovel as a whole. The impression of informativity which one has whilereading a sentence belonging to the novel is dispelled when the samesentence is considered while standing, so to say, in front of thenovel taken as a whole; that is, when one is acquainted with a certaincharacter in its entirety qua a certain set of properties.

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is that, according to whether "to exist" is necessarilyfalse or necessarily true of one and the same fictum, saythe fictional Napoleon, it will be differently predicatedof that fictum, though retaining the same meaning i.e.denoting the very same property of being effective. Thus,in the first case (7) can be analyzed as externallypredicating existence of the fictional Bonaparte, which isprecisely the sense in which existence is predicated ofClaus in (4). When "to exist" is so predicated of a fictum,however, and not of a possible object, the resultingsentence, say (7), must turn out to be necessarily false.On the other hand, in the second case the predication ofeffectivity is one of constituency, in that existenceallegedly figures among the constitutive properties of thefictional Napoleon. Thus, it is internally predicated ofhim. Hence, insofar as War and Peace asserts the existenceof (the fictional) Napoleon by means of sentences like (7),

56 Cf. fn.39. As we have there already outlined, a parallel distinctionhas been drawn in the Meinongian tradition between nuclear andextranuclear properties. However, the "mode of predication"-distinction seems to be more correct insofar as ficta are concerned.The point indeed is not that there are two absolute kinds of property,but rather that a property is relatively nuclear or extranuclear,insofar as it does or does not belong to the set which constitutes thecorresponding fictum. This is tantamount to saying that it either isor is not internally predicated of such a set-correlate. As Fine(1984:98-9) has also noted, the two distinctions match each other, the"mode of predication"-one being preferable insofar as nonexistentobjects are at issue.

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we can paraphrase this sentence in terms of the following,analytically true, sentence:

(11) The result of publicly thinkingn a set which has (=is

constituted by) nothing but the following properties: P,Q,R...,being effective, as a concretum, has (=is constituted, amongother things, by) the property of being effective.

We may now treat in the same vein all the similar problemswhich can be raised against the conception of ficta as set-correlates. For instance, suppose we had a logico-phantastic one-sentenced story allegedly concerning astrange character Paraob by merely saying of it:

57 As Castañeda has already noted regarding his "guises" (1989b:247-8),this "mode of predication"-distinction vindicates Meinong's (1975)reply to Russell's (1905a,b) objection that objects beyond being andnon-being contravene the Principle of Non-contradiction, in that theexistent present King of France both does and does not exist. This isnot to say that within the "property"-distinction framework one cannotattempt to counter the objection. This is precisely what Parsons hasdone, by distinguishing between the extranuclear property of existenceand its 'watered-down' nuclear variant (something like "to exist inthe story") (cf. (1980:42-4)). But why should there subsist such avariant for properties like existence only, and not for all theproperties that are predicated of ficta within fictional contexts?Parsons' answer seems to be as problematic as Meinong's originalreply. In point of fact, Parsons seems to admit that, in a case suchas the present one, a distinction should be drawn between including aproperty and having it (1980:171), which seems to me tantamount to thedistinction between internal and external predication.

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(12) Paraob has no property internally predicated

(of course, to change the odd story simply substitute to(12) any other paradoxical sentence you like58). The pointis that we may well apply the above analysis in terms of"mode of predication"-distinction to a sentence such as(12). Insofar as (12) is taken as constituting a story, istaken as internally predicating of Paraob the internalproperty of having no property internally predicated, andhence it is trivially true: the publicly thought-ofn thingwhose correlate set is constituted by the property ofhaving no property internally predicated is constituted bysuch a property. Insofar (12) is taken as externallypredicating of Paraob the having of no property internallypredicated, however, it is necessarily false: Paraob doesinternally have a property, viz. the property of internallyhaving no property59.

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Castañeda, H-N., 1989a, "Fiction and Reality: Ontological Questionsabout Literary Experience", in Thinking, Language, and Experience, Universityof Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 176-205.Castañeda, H-N., 1989b, "Thinking and the Structure of the World", inThinking, Language, and Experience cit., 235-261.Castañeda, H-N., 1990a, "Individuals, Reference, and Existence", in K.Jacobi and H. Pape eds., Thinking and the Structure of the World, de Gruyter,Berlin-New York, 459-472.Castañeda, H-N., 1990b, "Individuals, Idealism, and the Realism ofThinking", in Thinking and the Structure of the World cit., 523-546.Cocchiarella, N.B,, 1982, "Meinong Reconstructed Versus Early RussellReconstructed", Journal of Philosophical Logic 11, 183-214.Cocchiarella, N.B,, 1989, "Conceptualism, Realism, and IntensionalLogic", Topoi 8, 15-34.

58 For a host of such examples, see Fine (1982). In my opinion, thecase presented by (12) cannot be treated à la Parsons, which observesof a similar case that the character in question has also the propertyof being called so (in our example, "Paraob") (cf. (1980:198)), forthe simple reason that the story does not explicitly say that theobject has this, nominal, property. Although the name literallyfigures within the story, as we have seen it is semanticallyequivalent to a certain definite description, so that the story wouldnot have essentially changed if another name, or another singular termfor what matters, had been used in it.59 Preliminary versions of this paper were read at the ECAP 1993meeting in Aix-en-Provence, France, and at the 1993 Venice workshop onfictional entities; I thank all the participants for their usefulremarks and criticisms. I would also like to thank Michele DiFrancesco, Danilo Suster, Tim Williamson and Ed Zalta for theirenlightening comments on a previous draft of this paper.

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