Fictional Tellers: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics for Fictional Discourse

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• fiction
• fictional names
• narrative
• proper names
• semantics