Organon F

Volume 28, February 2021, Issue 1, Pages 76–106

ISSN 2585-7150 (online) ISSN 1335-0668 (print)

This essay proposes a dissolution of the so-called ‘semantic problem of fictional names’ by arguing that fictional names are only fictionally proper names. The ensuing idea that fictional texts do not encode propositional content is accompanied by an explanation of the contentful effects of fiction grounded on the idea of impartation. After some preliminaries about (referring and empty) genuine proper names, this essay explains how a fiction’s content may be conveyed by virtue of the fictional impartations provided by a fictional teller. This idea is in turn developed with respect to homodiegetic narratives such as Doyle’s Holmes stories and to heterodiegetic narratives such as Jane Austen’s Emma. The last parts of the essay apply this apparatus to cases of so-called ‘talk about fiction’, as in our commentaries about those stories and that novel.

Fiction; fictional names; narrative; proper names; semantics.

Author

Stefano Predelli 

Affiliation

University of Nottingham

Address

Institute of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy. University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, United Kingdom

E-mail

stefano.predelli@nottingham.ac.uk

Received

4 February 2020

Accepted

4 May 2020

Published online

28 February 2021

Publishers

Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences

Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences

APA

Predelli, S. (2021). Fictional Tellers: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics for Fictional Discourse. Organon F, 28(1), 76–106. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2021.28105

Chicago

Predelli, Stefano. 2021. "Fictional Tellers: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics for Fictional Discourse." Organon F 28 (1): 76–106. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2021.28105

Harvard

Predelli, S.  (2021). Fictional Tellers: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics for Fictional Discourse. Organon F, 28(1), pp. 76–106. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2021.28105

© Stefano Predelli

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