Gospel truth

In my last post, I mentioned two fundamental differences between the account of fiction I have defended here, and the account given by Peter van Inwagen in "Creatures of fiction". The first is that, according to me, sentences in fiction have a truth value. They are typically false (although works of fiction may contain many true statements, such as that Napoleon was short, that Paris is a city in France, that Baker street is in London etc). The second is that fictional names refer. Van Inwagen, by contrast, holds that (i) sentences in fiction typically assert nothing at at all and (ii) fictional names do not refer.

Taking the first point first. Van Inwagen's position is essentially the neo-Fregean view of assertion, namely that the same thought or proposition may occur now asserted, now unasserted, that I have criticised in many places, particularly here, arguing that assertion is part of the semantics of a sentence, and that every complete sentence (i.e. one that is not a subordinate or noun clause) can be analysed into a sign for the content of the sentence - that which it states or expresses, usually signified by a 'that' clause, and a sign for assertion or denial.  Thus "Snow is white" = "It is the case / that snow is white".  If this is correct, then even fictional sentences contain an assertoric component, and hence are capable of truth or falsity, independent of what the narrator means or intends when he or she utters them.  This is exactly what Van Inwagen denies, and it is, of course, why he calls sentences vehicles of assertion. 

The same view is defended by Alvin Plantinga (The Nature of Necessity, Oxford, 1974, Ch. VIII, pp. 153-163 especially), who cites a famous passage by the English poet Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586).

Now for the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth. For, as I take it, to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false; so as the other artists, and especially the historian, affirming many things, can, in the cloudy knowledge of mankind, hardly escape from many lies. But the poet, as I said before, never affirmeth. The poet never maketh any circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he writeth. He citeth not authorities of other histories, but even for his entry calleth the sweet Muses to inspire into him a good invention; in troth, not laboring to tell you what is or is not, but what should or should not be. And therefore though he recount things not true, yet because he telleth them not for true he lieth not; without we will say that Nathan lied in his speech, before alleged, to David; which, as a wicked man durst scarce say, so think I none so simple would say that Aesop lied in the tales of his beasts; for who thinketh that Aesop wrote it for actually true, were well worthy to have his name chronicled among the beasts he writeth of.

This is not right. For it is not true, as Sidney implies, that there is absolutely no gap between saying something false, and lying. There are at least two things in between. The dictionary definition of ‘to lie’ is ‘to utter something that is false with the intention to deceive’. Thus (1) in the case of stories, the narrator utters something he knows to be false, but with no intention to deceive. There is a compact between the narrator and his audience. The audience knows that these are falsehoods, the narrator knows that they know this, and both sides agree the same. This does not change the fact that the things said are (typically) falsehoods. And (2) in many cases a person uttering falsehoods does not know they are false, but rather believes sincerely in their truth, and so does not intend to deceive either. For example, a story about some miracle that (we will assume) cannot be true, but which the teller genuinely and sincerely and believes, and which, to paraphrase Sidney “he telleth for true”.

Someone who is not a Biblical fundamentalist must deal with the possibility that some or all of the events recounted in the Gospel are not literally true. If so, then according to Inwagen’s neo-Fregean view of assertion, one who recounts the Gospels is not asserting anything, and is not saying anything true or false. Clearly not: the fundamentalist, for one, will strenuously defend the literal truth of everything that is stated there. The ‘truth’ of the Resurrection is fundamental to Christian belief, and is even something a Christian has to publicly state they believe in.

Nor can Van Inwagen exclude such texts from his account. For his account is designed to explain the truth and falsity of statements of textual criticism, in which Biblical criticism must be included. For example, in “Discipleship and minor characters in mark's gospel” Joel Williams writes.

The main character groups in Mark's Gospel are the disciples, the opponents of Jesus, and the crowd. In addition to these groups, a number of individual characters are included in Mark's narrative. Some of them, such as Andrew or Peter, are disciples, while others, such as the high priest or Pilate, oppose Jesus. Also a number of minor characters function neither as Jesus' disciples nor as His opponents.

The statements are clearly true, and they include the sort of quantification (“some of them … others…”) that Inwagen’s account is designed to explain. But they are inconsistent with one of his key assumptions, which is that ‘textual criticism’ statements are vehicles of assertion, whereas the sentences in the texts they are criticising are not.

I will discuss the second point about 'reference' later.

Vehicles of assertion

I read Creatures of Fiction* more carefully over the break, and I now see I have fundamentally misunderstood Inwagen's position. I had assumed that he saw no fundamental difference between sentences like this

(i) She was a fat old woman, this Mrs. Gamp, with a husky voice and a moist eye, which she had a remarkable power of turning up, and only showing the showing the white of it (Martin Chuzzlewit, XIX)

and sentences like this:

(ii) Mrs. Sarah Gamp was, four-and-twenty years ago, a fair representation of the hired attendant on the poor in sickness (From Dickens's preface to an 1867 edition of Martin Chuzzlewit)

The first is a sentence from the novel itself, and so belongs in English literature. The second is from an essay about the novel, and so belongs in English literary criticism.  It turns out (p. 301) that while Van Inwagen regards the second type of sentence, i.e. the sentence belonging to the genre of literary criticism, as being the vehicle of assertion and thus capable of truth and falsity (the second one is probably true, for example), he does not regard the first type as being a vehicle of assertion.  He writes:

There is no point in debating what sort of thing Dickens was writing about when he wrote (i) or debating what sort of fact or proposition he was asserting, since he was not writing about anything and was asserting nothing. Sentence (i) does not represent an attempt at reference or description.

He mentions (in a footnote) that this is an important point and that the reader who does not concede it will get little out of reading further.  He says that the arguments establishing it will be found in Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford, 1974) Ch. VIII, pp. 153-163 especially, and J. O. Urmson, "Fiction," American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 4 13 (1976), pp. 153-157.  Much of what Plantinga says is visible on limited preview here.

Thus the two positions that I have defended in many places here, namely (a) that sentences in fiction are the vehicles of assertion, and that what is asserted is mostly false and (b) that proper names refer even in a fictional context, are inconsistent with Van Inwagen's position.  For he says in the passage cited above that an author of fiction asserts nothing, and he says that there is no attempt at reference. And later (p.307) he says that we can only denote fictional characters, by means of descriptions which are true only of them.

How it is we are able to use the proper name "Mrs. Gamp" to refer to a certain creature of fiction ? Normally, an object gets a proper name by being dubbed or baptized. But no one ever dubbed or baptized the main satiric villainess of Martin Chuzzlewit "Mrs. Gamp."There is no corresponding problem about how it is this creature of fiction is denoted by "the main satiric villainess of Martin Chuzzlewit," for this is a quite straightforward definite description that names what we also call "Mrs. Gamp" for the same reason that "the tallest structure in Paris in 1905" names what we also call "the Eiffel Tower" : in each of these cases, a definite description denotes a certain object in virtue of a certain property that that object has uniquely. I think that if we are to have a satisfactory theory of how it is that we manage to refer to particular creatures of fiction, this theory will have to treat such descriptions as "the main satiric villainess" as the primary means of reference to these objects, and proper names as a secondary (though more common) means of reference.

 In subsequent posts, I will clarify and add to my earlier views on the two positions (a) and (b) above.

* Page references that follow are to American Philosophical Quarterly 14, October 1977.

To have and to hold

Thanks to the link that Peter van Inwagen sent, I was able to look at his paper “Creatures of Fiction”* which has a much clearer explanation and justification of his thesis that fictional characters can be such and such without having the property of being such and such. Caution: the paper was written in 1977, 34 years ago, and I don’t know if van Inwagen still holds the views expressed there.

The distinction is motivated by the problem of sentences such as “Some fictional characters are witches”. Van Inwagen holds that such sentences are true, and because he is an anti-Meinongian (or rather, as I have argued, because he holds Brentano’s Thesis), he holds that it is equivalent to ‘Fictional characters that are witches exist’, and so implies ‘Witches exist’. But witches don’t exist. Inwagen gets round the difficulty by asserting that predication has different senses. “Witches don’t exist’ has the conventional sense, meaning that nothing has the property of being a witch.  But “Some fictional characters are witches” has a non-standard sense, and does not imply that anything does have the property of being a witch, and so is consistent with "witches don’t exist".

He justifies this by an argument from analogy. His example is a Cartesian who holds that people are immaterial substances. Hence Jake, who is a person, is an immaterial substance. But the sentence “Jake is 6 feet tall” can’t be literally true, for an immaterial substance is unextended, and can’t be 6 feet tall. The Cartesian can get round this by claiming that in ordinary speech we often say "is" when strictly speaking we should say "animates a body that is": the predicate ‘is F’, when predicated of a person, really and strictly means "animates a body that is F". Thus what looks like predication in ordinary speech is not always predication. And so “Alexandra Medford is a witch”, said of the witch played by Cher in The Witches of Eastwick, does not imply that anyone has the property of being a witch. Thus (as I interpret Inwagen) there is no inconsistency between his view that Alexandra Medford exists, but that witches do not, for the following syllogism is invalid:

No one is a witch
Alexandra Medford is a witch
No one is Alexandra Medford

It is invalid because ‘is’ is equivocal in the major and the minor. In the major, it means ‘nothing has the property of being a witch’. In the minor, it is not the ‘is’ of predication, and thus is not equivalent to “Alexandra Medford has the property of being a witch”. Fallacy of equivocation. Thus we can consistently claim that Alexandra Medford exists, i.e. that someone is Alexandra Medford, that she is a witch, although she does not have the property of being a witch, and that no one has the property of being a witch.

My only reply to this (although I am sure there will be more to say), is to invoke Ockham’s other razor, which I discussed some time ago. To one who claims that the verb 'to be' is ambiguous in certain arguments, he objects that this is completely irrational, he says "for it amounts to destroying every argument form. For whenever it pleases me, I will say that 'to be' is equivocal in the premisses, and I will ascribe at will a fallacy of equivocation to every syllogism".

* American Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 14, Number 4, October 1977

More papers by van Inwagen

Peter writes to me to say that a lot of his papers are online here.  His most comprehensive paper on fictional entities is in "Existence, Ontological Commitment, and Fictional Entities.", which is not on that site.  But the site does contain two older papers: "Fiction and Metaphysics" and "Creatures of Fiction."

Van Inwagen on existence

I had a brief correspondence with Van Inwagen earlier this week, but he came up with nothing that resolved some of my other puzzles about his theory.  Here is one. From what he says, Inwagen seems committed to the following:

(1) 'Some x is A' is equivalent to 'some x-that-is-A exists'. 

(2) 'Holmes does not exist' is equivalent to 'no one has all the properties Sherlock Holmes holds'.

(3) Someone, namely Holmes, holds all the properties held by Sherlock Holmes

(4) No one has all the properties held by Holmes.

But this leads to a contradiction, as follows.

(5) Holmes does not exist (from 2, 4).

(6) Someone, namely Holmes, who holds all the properties held by Sherlock Holmes, exists (from 1, 3).

(7)  Holmes exists (from 6, elimination)

(8) Contradiction (5, 7)

Spelling it out.  Van Inwagen is trying to get over the problem of 'someone' having the properties ascribed to Holmes, through his distinction between 'having' and 'holding'.  No one has the properties that Holmes holds, and so Holmes does not exist.  But this does not evade the problem.  By the very same reasoning, someone holds the properties that Holmes does not have.  And there is still 'someone', and so Holmes does exist.  Van Inwagen can evade this by dropping his commitment to the equivalence of 'some thing' with 'some existing thing'.  But that would commit him to the variety of Meinongianism to which he is so fundamentally opposed.

More facts about fiction

There is a nice preprint of a paper here by Inwagen where he discusses different theories of being, and particularly the 'neo-Meinongian' theories such as those held by Terry Parsons and Colin Mcginn.   He writes

When I say that everything exists and the neo-Meinongian denies that everything exists, we’re not talking past each another—not, at any rate, because we mean different things by ‘everything’. It is precisely because the neo-Meinongian knows that I mean just what he does by ‘everything’ that he indignantly rises to dispute my contention that everything exists.

This is not a hundred miles from what I argued here.  Maverick philosopher also discusses Inwagen's paper here, though I confess I don't understand his objections to it.  The force of Inwagen's paper is neo-Meinongianism is a theory about the meaning of 'exists', rather than a theory about what exists.

I also found a paper by Amie Thomasson about fictional entities.  She mentions, but rejects, the explanation of discourse about fiction by the use of a 'fiction operator'.

Internal discourse by readers can still be held to be true even though it involves non-referring names, since these claims are plausibly held to be implicitly prefixed with a fiction operator, where “According to the fiction, Holmes solved his first mystery in his college years” may be true even if the simple claim “Holmes solved his first mystery in his college years” would be false. Cross-fictional statements can be handled similarly by taking them to fall in the context of an ‘agglomerative’ story operator that appeals to the total content of the relevant stories, taken together, e.g. “According to (Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary [taken agglomeratively]), Anna Karenina was more intelligent than Emma Bovary”

Fictional operator theories are attractive, and I will try to discuss them next week.

Do fictional characters exist?

David Brightly asks whether there is really any problem with Van Inwagen’s position that Sherlock Holmes ‘holds’ the property of being a detective rather than ‘having’ such a property. Surely there is. Inwagen’s position is inconsistent with the three main theses he puts forward in the paper. First, he holds that certain kinds of statements about fiction are true. For example, ‘There is a fictional character who, for every novel, either appears in that novel or is a model for a character who does’, or just ‘there are fictional characters’. Second, he holds that ‘there is’ is equivalent to ‘there exists’. Thus, it is true that fictional characters exist. Finally, there is a simple correspondence between the predicate calculus and ordinary language. For example, ‘There are fictional characters’ translates to ‘for some x, fictional_character(x)’ and back.


This is inconsistent with his position that ‘Sherlock Holmes does not exist’ is true, and that he holds, but does not have, the property of being a detective. If it is possible to translate between ordinary language and predicate calculus and back, it follows that any valid inference in predicate calculus is also valid for the corresponding ordinary language statements, and conversely, and that anything true we can say about the predicate calculus statements, is true of the ordinary language ones. So take ‘Some fictional characters are detectives’, which Inwagen (presumably) holds to be true. Thus at least one fictional character is a detective, and thus has, rather than holds that property. Furthermore, if the corresponding predicate calculus statement ‘Ex, fictional_character(x) & detective(x)’ is true, there must be at least one object a in the domain such that fictional_character(a) & detective(a). For example a = sherlock Holmes. But the predicate detective() expresses the property of having, not holding the property of being a detective, so Inwagen’s claim that Holmes (or whatever x satisfies the predicate) does not have that property, is false.


Furthermore, Inwagen holds that 'All fictional characters exist’ is true, and clearly holds that Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character. And he holds that these can be simply translated into predicate calculus, so – according to him - the following are true.


(x) fictional_character(x) implies exist(x)
fictional_character(Holmes)


But these together imply exist(Holmes). This translates back into ‘Holmes exists’, and so his claim that ‘Holmes exists’ is false is contradictory.

Does Sherlock Holmes exist?

Earlier I discussed Peter van Inwagen's view of quantification in fiction. Van Inwagen holds that the existential quantifier expresses the meaning of 'there is' and 'there exists' in ordinary English. Since he holds that some existentially quantified sentences involving fiction are true, including 'Ex, x is a fictional character', it follows that he holds the paradoxical thesis that fictional characters exist. But what, he asks (p. 246), about our firm conviction that Tom Sawyer and Sherlock Holmes do not exist?

His answer involves distinguishing between properties that fictional characters 'hold', and those which they 'have'. Sherlock Holmes 'holds' the property of being a detective. He does not 'have' that property. The only properties that fictional characters have are existence and self-identity. Thus one interpretation of 'Sherlock Holmes does not exist' is 'no one has all the properties the fictional character Sherlock Holmes holds'.

This is not a comfortable solution for a few reasons. Here are two. (i) The distinction between 'have' and 'hold' is arbitrary and the only reason for making seems to be to avoid a serious difficulty with his theory. (ii) The primary motive for Inwagen's theory was the principle that formal logic is simply a regimentation of ordinary English. But then it turns out we cannot express perfectly arguments in ordinary English such as

Fictional characters exist, Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character, therefore, Sherlock Holmes exists

by any simple translation or 'regimentation'. Indeed, according to Inwagen, the argument above should not even be valid.

Meinongians who aren’t Meinongians

To explain the apparent paradox of the title, there are at least two senses of the term ‘Meinongian’. In the first sense, a Meinongian affirms the reality of fictional characters (by saying for example that there is such a person as Sherlock Holmes, or Sherlock Holmes exist). In the second sense, a Meinongian denies Brentano’s thesis and thus drives a wedge between ‘thing’ and ‘existing thing’: some things are fictional characters, but those things do not exist.

Peter van Inwagen is an example of the first kind of Meinongian, but not the second. He argues* (p. 237 ff) that the correct way, and the only way, to understand the use of variables and quantifiers is to show how they can be translated into expressions of ordinary English that we already understand. He gives a few examples to show how it is clear that the formal predicate calculus is simply a regimentation of the ‘all’ and ‘there are’ of ordinary English. He concludes (p.239) “The existental quantifier therefore expresses the sense of ‘there is’ in ordinary English. (As an opponent of any form of Meinongianism, I would say that the existential quantifier is appopriately named – for the reason that, in expressing the sense of ‘there is’ in English, it thereby expresses the sense of ‘exists’ in English).” To the objection (p.242) that this account of the meaning of a sentence containing quantifiers does not tell us the conditions under which it would be true, he neatly replies that “the conditions under which a sentence would be true, are not the first thing about the meaning of a sentence. The first thing about the meaning of a sentence is what the sentence means” – which is just what his account tells us about sentences containing quantifiers, he says.

This has an important consequence for fictional discourse (meaning not the discourse you find in works of fiction, but rather what is spoken or written about works of fiction, such as found in literary criticism). Such discourse can potentially include complex quantification. Inwagen’s example is

(1) There is a fictional character who, for every novel, either appears in that novel or is a model for a character who does.

This involves apparent existential quantification and a complex quantificational structure, as well as the ability to generate all the inferences licensed by quantifier logic. For example, we can deduce

(2) If no character appears in every novel, then some character is modelled on another character.

If the quantification is real, and given Inwagen’s rejection of the second kind of Meinongianism (i.e. the kind that accepts existential quantification but not existential commitment) then we must accept the reality, indeed the real existence, of fictional characters. If the quantification is not real, we must explain (p.244) how to paraphrase the two sentences above, show whether the second sentence follows from the first, and if not, why it does not. In summary:

*The existential quantifier expresses the sense of ‘there is’ and ‘there exists’ in English.

* ‘For some x, x is a fictional character’ is true.

* There are fictional characters, i.e. fictional characters exist.

Thus Inwagen is a Meinongian in the first sense. He affirms the reality of fictional characters in the most direct way, claiming that they exist. But he is not a Meinongian in the second sense. For he upholds the Brentano thesis - ‘For some x, x is a fictional character’ = ‘There are fictional characters’ = ‘Fictional characters exist’.

Van Inwagen recognises he must explain the apparent truth of sentences like ‘Sherlock Holmes does not exist’. I will discuss his explanation tomorrow.

* "Quantification in fictional discourse", in Empty Names, Fiction and the Puzzles of Non-existence, Stanford 2000, pp. 235-247.