Abstract
Sherlock is a man of parts. He is as fully accoutred an object as Doyle is and, unlike Doyle, he is a being of two kinds. He is a man of the human kind and a human of the fictional kind. There are several other interesting things that Sherlock might or might not be.
‘Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?’ ‘To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.’ ‘The dog did nothing in the night-time.’ ‘That was the curious incident.’
Det. Gregory and Holmes in “The Adventure of Silver Blaze” (1892)
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Notes
- 1.
Sainsbury, Reference Without Referents, p. 68, n. 12.
- 2.
No planet was visible where Vulcan was supposed to be. To have tampered with Mercury’s orbits, Vulcan would have to have been so large as to be not possibly invisible. Later on the orbital oddness of Mercury would easily be dealt with by general relativity theory.
- 3.
Leaving aside Meinong’s mismanagement of the Soseinless gold mountain.
- 4.
For an affirmative answer see Shahid Rahman and Juan Redmond, “A dialogical frame for fictions as hypothetical objects”, Filosofia Unisionos, 16 (2015), 2–21. See also Matthieu Fontaine and Shahid Rahman, “Individuality in fiction and the creative role of the reader”, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 201 (2014), 539–560.
- 5.
Collected Papers, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958; 5.189.
- 6.
Following Jacquette at page 9 of Meinongean Logic.
- 7.
Notably, Parsons’ Nonexistent Objects and Francesco Berto and Matteo Plebani’s Ontology and Metaontology: A Contemporary Guide, London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
- 8.
See Robert Howell, “Fictional objects: How they are and how they aren’t”, in Woods and Pavel 1979. Howell suggests that Anna Karenina is a completed and wholly individuated product of a world imagined by Tolstoy, and some of whose products were selected by for inclusion in Anna Karenina. This suggests to me that when it came to the thinking up, Tolstoy was an all-hands-on-deck imaginer, and when it came to writing it down, he was a lazy scrivener. See also Howell’s “Literary fictions, real and unreal”.
- 9.
For difficulties with the nuclear-nonnuclear distinction, see again Fred Kroon, “Taming the existent golden mountain: The nuclear option”.
- 10.
Meinongean Logic, section 5.1.
- 11.
In “Systematically misleading expressions”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 32 (1932), 139–170, Gilbert Ryle considers how we might express the idea that “there exists” is ambiguous as between “there abstractly is” and “there concretely is”. If we said “There are two ways of existing: Existing abstractly and existing concretely”. Ryle would say that the “there are” of that saying is not a quantifier at all. More recent nominalistic developments emphasize the ambiguity of “there are” in English. In mathematical contexts it is said that “there are” is not referential. In other contexts, it carries a referential reading. See, for example, Jody Azzouni, Deflating Existential Consequence, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004; Thomas Hofweber, “Number determiners, numbers and arithmetic”, Philosophical Review, 114 (2005), 179–225; and Hofweber, “Review of Deflating Existential Consequence: A Case for Nominalism by Jody Azzouni, 116 (2007), 465–467. As far as fiction is concerned, there are two questions to distinguish: Is “there are” ambiguous in English”, and “Is nominalism right for fiction?” My answer to the first is Yes. Sometimes “there are” is existence-implying, and sometimes it is only being-implying. It is difficult to formulate this in English, but not in other languages. As we saw, “There exist lots of things that don’t exist” bears a consistent reading in English. Better to take advantage of the exists-in-reality predicate, which allows us to say unambiguously “There exist lots of things that don’t exist in reality.” As for the nominalist option for fiction, it suffices to say at this stage of the proceedings that its adoption would so sweepingly disoblige the worldwide facts of readerly and writerly experience as to trigger the problem of big-box scepticism, and the risk of paradigm-creep.
- 12.
Russell vs. Meinong: The Legacy of “On Denoting”.
- 13.
Abstract Objects: An Introduction to Axiomatic Metaphysics, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983, and Intensional Logic and the Metaphysics of Intentionality, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.
- 14.
Francesco Berto, and Plebani, Ontology and Metaontology, 2015, p. 111.
- 15.
On the Plurality of Worlds, Oxford: Blackwell, 1986, p. 1. The fictional worlds idea has a large presence in the philosophical and literary theory literatures. See, for example, Nicholas Woltersdorff, Works and Worlds of Art, New York: Oxford University Press, 1980; Kendall Walton, “How remote are fictional worlds from the real world?”, 1978; Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986; Lubomír Doležel, “Extensional and intentional narrative worlds”, in Woods and Pavel, pages 193–211; see also his Narrative Modes in Czech Literature, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973; and Ruth Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
- 16.
“A completeness theorem in modal logic”, Journal of Symbolic Logic, 24 (1959), 1–14, “Semantic analysis of modal logic I: Normal propositional calculi”, Zeitzschrift für Mathematische Logik und Grundlagen der Mathematik, 8 (1963), 113–116, and “Semantical analysis of modal logic II: Non-normal modal propositional calculi”, in J. W. Addison. Leon Henkin and Alfred Tarski, editors, The Theory of Models, pages 202–220, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1965.
- 17.
“Foreword”, in Guido Imaguire and Dale Jacquette, editors, Possible Worlds, p. 14.
- 18.
“[Q]uestions of the existence of fictional characters, and other fictional objects, are empirical questions like any other, and sometimes have affirmative or negative answers. They depend on what fictional works exist. Thus there certainly was a fictional detective, widely read about at the time he was described to exist, living on Baker Street, and so on.”(“Vacuous names and fictional entities”, p. 72 of Philosophical Troubles.)
- 19.
In “The Man with the Twisted Lip” (1981), Mary Watson née Morstan addresses her husband as “James”. Either this was a slip by Doyle or an intended greeting which Doyle never got around to explaining.
- 20.
Let’s also note that if Simchen’s claim were true, then in naming his fictional character “Sherlock”, Doyle made it the case that no one else could be named him. This clearly raises questions for later fictionalizations of the Holmes oeuvre, in which that self-same being would be fictionalized as having properties that Doyle’s Sherlock couldn’t possibly have.
- 21.
It might interest readers to know that according to the Fandomania website, the greatest fictional character is Batman, not least on account of his moral influence on his followers.
- 22.
I expand on this in “Quine’s ‘Two dogmas of empiricism’”, Topoi, 30 (2011), 87–97.
- 23.
It is interesting to note that Bueno’s mathematical fictionalism is an adaptation of Thomasson’s artefactual account of fiction. See Amie L. Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
- 24.
Concerning which see Francisco Berto, How to Sell a Contradiction, 2007.
- 25.
“The semantics of first degree entailment”, Noûs, 6 (1972), 335–393.
- 26.
A dyadicity is called into question by, for example, Nathan Salmon, “Logic of what might have been”, Philosophical Review, 98 (1989), p. 19.
- 27.
Hans Burkhardt, “From Origen to Kripke: A history of possible worlds”, in Imaguire and Jacquette, pages 23–54. Origen’s dates are c.185-c. 254. Leibniz’s are 1646–1716. Kripke arrived in 1940.
- 28.
Counterfactuals, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973; p. 85.
- 29.
“Worldly woes: The trouble with possible worlds”, in Guido Imaguire and Dale Jacquette, editors, Possible Worlds: Logic, Semantics and Ontology, with a Foreword by Kit Fine, pages 219–244; Guido Imaguire, “Modal reasoning without possible worlds”, in Imaguire and Jacquette, pages 245–274; and John Woods, “Making too much of worlds,” in Imaguire and Jacquette, pages 171–217.
- 30.
Ontology and Metaontology, pp. 86–87. Yablo 2005 is “The myth of the seven”, in Mark Eli Kalderon, editor, Fictionalism in Metaphysics, pages 269–295, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005.
- 31.
Ways a World Might Be, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; p. 38. See also his “Modalities and possible worlds”, in Jaegwon Kim and Ernest Sosa, editors, A Companion to Metaphysics, pages 333–337, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995; p. 333: “The possible worlds representation of content and modality should be regarded, not as a proposed solution to the metaphysical problem of the nature of modal truth, but as a framework for articulating the problem.”
- 32.
“Semantik”, in J. Spech, editor, Handbuch wissenschaftstheoretischer heoretisches Begriffe, volume 3, pages 568–378, Berlin: Vandenhock and Rumprecht, 1980; pp. 572–573.
- 33.
Dale Jacquette rightly notes that the distinction between that the distinction between possible worlds and these set-theoretic structures are “sometimes blurred in expositions of modal logic, as in Alvin Plantiga’s The Nature of Necessity, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 174, esp. 44–8, and G. E. Hughes and M. J. Cresswell, An Introduction to Modal Logic, London, 1972: 75–80.” See Jacquette, “The logic of fiction and reform of modal logic”, in Kent A. Peacock and Andrew D. Irvine, editors, Mistakes of Reason, pages 48–63, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.
- 34.
Concerning which, see Edward Mares, “Who’s afraid of impossible worlds?” Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 38, 1997, 516–526.
- 35.
There may be an etymological connection between “sites” and “situations”, but situation semantics does little, if anything, to steer the ship of sites into the better-lit waters of the situation calculus of John McCarthy and P. J. Hayes, “Some philosophical problem from the standpoint of artificial intelligence”, in B. M. D. Mickie, editor, Machine Intelligence 4, pages 463–502, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1962. See, also, Jon Barwise, The Situation in Logic, Stanford: CSLI, 1989.
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Woods, J. (2018). Other Things Sherlock Isn’t. In: Truth in Fiction. Synthese Library, vol 391. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72658-8_8
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