ESPES (Dec 2021)
Some Remaining Problems for Fictional File Theory. A Short Reply to Eleonora Orlando
Abstract
Mental file theory has recently attracted growing interest among philosophers of mind and philosophers of language. Some experts are of the opinion that the insights of file theory may also be helpful in understanding the problems of fictionality. Orlando (2017) offered a specific version of fictional file theory to which she added later certain clarifications and corrections. In this paper I will first try to show that while Orlando’s updated account of fiction is original and inspirative, it still suffers from some problems. Then I briefly delineate an alternative view, which is linguistic rather than mentalistic in its orientation. But, instead of arguing for the superiority of that view, I will conclude that the main challenge for the theory of fiction is to find an explanatory level where the mental and linguistic aspects of artworks can be treated simultaneously.
