Volume 43, Issue 1-2 - Fictional Names in Psychologistic Semantics

Fictional names pose a difficult puzzle for semantics. How can we maintain that Frodo is a hobbit, while admitting that Frodo does not exist? To dissolve this paradox, I propose a way to formalize the interpretation of fiction as ‘prescriptions to imagine’ (Walton 1990) within a psychologistic semantic framework in the style of Kamp (1990). In the context of an information exchange, the interpretation of an assertion triggers a dynamic update of a belief component in the interpreter’s mental state, while in the context of a fictional narrative, a statement like Frodo is a hobbit triggers an update of an imagination component. In the computation of these updates, proper names – referential, empty, or fictional – are uniformly analyzed as presupposition triggers. The possibility of different attitude components in a single mental state sharing discourse referents and thereby referentially depending on each other ultimately allows us to account for the central paradox of fictional names and related puzzles.