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Are fictional characters real?Over in

Are fictional characters real?

Over in my favorite philosophy blog, Brian Weatherson has mentioned wo's weblog review of Fiction and Metaphysics  a couple of times. wo, in turn, read Amie Thomasson's Fiction and Metaphysics   because of "Brian's puzzling remarks about fictional characters being real but abstract."

Now, I'm not sure what exactly is meant by "real but abstract" (because I'm not sure exactly what abstract in this context conveys), but it certainly seems plausible. I certainly think that Sherlock Holmes is real; I just think that he's a real fictional character (if that introduces a new ontological category I'm not sure that I see why that's a problem). The difficulty with realism about fictional characters seems to be that if you look at statements such as "Sherlock Holmes was a detective; he lives at 221B Baker Street; he is human" and "Holmes was invented by Arthur Conan Doyle; he doesn't really live at 221B Baker Street; he is what the Sherlock Holmes stories are about" while both sets express propositions that we would regard as true under appropriate circumstances, they both can't literally be true since they contradict eachother. Without going into detail about wo's summary of Amie Thomasson's theory, or his objections to it (read his post--it's interesting), it seems to me that the difference between the two sets of statements is that the first are only true in a manner of speaking,  while the second are true literally speaking. What can we say about this manner of speaking? Well, one possibility is that it postulates as true everything that is asserted to be true within the story, plus whatever is true in the real world (if you can say that in metaphysics) that is not contradicted by anything in the story. Moreover, it seems to me that this manner is the default when we speak of fiction: it raises no eyebrows among competent speakers of the language when we simply assert "Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street", even when they know that Holmes is a fictional character. When we wish to speak literally, and deny the truth (or at least emphasize the fictionality) of the facts in the story, we have to signal our intent to change modes; in my view this is what the word "really" is doing in the sentence "Holmes doesn't really live at 221B Baker Street." Thus "Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street but did not really live at 221B Baker Street" is not a contradiction, since what's being asserted is something like "Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street in the default manner of speaking which accepts the facts in the stories as true, but did not live at 221B Baker Street when we speak literally."

I think that using "in a manner of speaking" and "really" or "literally" as operators signalling an intended mode gets around the problem that wo pointed out with Thommasson's attempts to divide statements into "fictional" and "serious", namely statements that seem to cross the barrier. For instance (from his examples):
1) Arthur Conan Doyle invented a detective who is always lucky in his hazardous inductive inferences.
2) The hero of the Sherlock Holmes stories consumes drugs that are illegal nowadays.
3) Daniil Charms used to dress and behave like Sherlock Holmes, whom he admired much.
4) The Sherlock Holmes stories are not about a ghostly, invisible character who lives at no place in particular and never does anything.

Prepending "In a manner of speaking," to mean "taking the facts of the stories as true", 1, 2 and 3 certainly appear to true and not problematic, although emphasizing it appears a little odd, as if you might be implying that it's only in a manner of speaking that Doyle created Holmes, rather than that Doyle created a character who is only in a manner of speaking a detective who is always lucky in his hazardous inductive inferences. I think, though, that may be just a result of making explicit what would ordinarily be the implicit default assumption. It's also possible that in order to be precise when mixing modes you ought to mark where in the sentence the mode shift occurs as in the clause above following "rather than that". 4 is simply true under this interpretation, without need for any signals (it's true whether you take the facts in the story as given or explicitly reject them). I suppose you also might say that 4 is false in a manner of speaking, where that manner implies that you are taking wo's characterization of the consequences of Thommasson's position as the fiction you are endorsing--but I don't think we use language that way when talking about theories rather than fiction.

"At the time of Sherlock Holmes, 221B Baker Street didn't exist, although since then it has been created to house a Holmes museum." At first glance, this seems to be a perfectly plausible, even true, utterance that the mode-shift theory doesn't resolve. If we add "in a manner of speaking" to signal that we were taking the facts of the stories as true even where contradicted by the real world, then 221B most certainly did exist, but without it "At the time of Sherlock Holmes" doesn't seem to have literal meaning (or if it does it includes the present-day when we are reading the stories). Upon further reflection, though, I think that it just calls for more precision in applying shift indicators to the relevant clauses: At the time, in a manner of speaking, of Sherlock Holmes, 221B Baker Street didn't really exist, although since then it has been created....

There still may be a problem when the stories themselves contain contradictions: even in our manner of speaking is it John H. Watson's war-wound in the shoulder or the leg? (This example is briefly mentioned in The Seven-Percent Solution  as part the relevant fiction, No if you rely only on Doyle's stories. I think that in the ordinary course of things, we would not regard the truth of that sentence as indeterminate, but simply as a matter of which fiction you are endorsing for the purposes of the current conversation. Posted by joshua at May 21, 2003 07:24 AM