Organon F

Volume 29, August 2022, Issue 3, Pages 290–326

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

The goal of this paper is to present and defend an inferentialist account of the meaning of fictional names on the basis of Sellars-Brandom’s inferentialist semantics and a Brandomian anaphoric theory of reference. On this inferentialist account, the meaning of a fictional name is constituted by the relevant language norms which provide the correctness conditions for its use. In addition, the Brandomian anaphoric theory of reference allows us to understand reference in terms of anaphoric word-word relations, rather than substantial word-world relations. In this paper I argue that this inferentialist account has many important merits over its rival theories. One important merit is that it explains why we can use fictional names to make true statements, even if they lack bearers. As a consequence, this theory allows us to use fictional names without committing ourselves to an implausible ontology of fictional entities. Another important merit is that it provides a uniform semantic account of fictional names across different types of statements in which fictional names are involved.

Fictional names; inferentialist semantics; the anaphoric theory of reference; Sellars; Brandom.

Author

Byeong D. Lee

Affiliation

Sungkyunkwan University

Address

Department of Philosophy, 25-2, Sungkyunkwan-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea

E-mail

bydlee@skku.edu 

Received

2 July 2021

Revised

12 October 2021

Accepted

1 April 2022

Published online

24 September 2022

Publishers

Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences

Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences

APA

Lee, B. D. (2022). An Inferentialist Account of Fictional Names. Organon F, 29(3), 290–326. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2022.29301

Chicago

Lee, Byeong D. 2022. "An Inferentialist Account of Fictional Names." Organon F 29 (3): 290–326. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2022.29301

Harvard

Lee, B. D. (2022). An Inferentialist Account of Fictional Names. Organon F, 29(3), pp. 290–326. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2022.29301

© Byeong D. Lee

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