Fictional Names and Fictional Concepts: A Moderate Fictionalist Account

Abstract

The main thesis I want to defend in this essay is that a fictional name refers to an individual concept, understood as a mental file that stores information, in the form of different descriptive concepts, about a purported individual. Given there is no material particular a fictional name could be referring to, it will be construed as referring to the concept of a particular, with which many descriptive concepts are associated, in the context of the set of thoughts constitutive of a fictional narrative. A fictional narrative will be thus characterised as a conceptual world, namely, a set of sentence-types semantically correlated with a set of thought-types.

Keywords

• fictional name
• fictional narrative
• fictionalism
• fictive
• parafictive and metafictive uses
• mental file
• singular thought