Existence, ontological commitment, and fictional entities

Peter van Inwagen

doi:10.1017/CBO9781107111004.006

Chapter 4 - Existence, ontological commitment, and fictional entities

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014

Peter van Inwagen

Show author details

Peter van Inwagen: Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame, Indiana

Book contents

Get access

Summary

Meinong has famously (or notoriously) said, “There are objects of which it is true that there are no such objects.” What could have led him to make such an extraordinary statement? He was, or so he saw matters, driven to say that there were objects of which it was true that there were no such objects by data for which only the truth of this extraordinary statement could account. These data were of two sorts: linguistic and psychological. The linguistic data consisted of sentences like the following and what seemed to be obvious facts about them:

The Cheshire Cat spoke to Alice

The round square is an impossible object

Pegasus was the winged horse captured by Bellerophon.

The obvious facts were these: first, each of these sentences is or expresses a truth; secondly, the result of writing ‘There is no such thing as’ and then the subject of any of these sentences is, or expresses, a truth. (I so use ‘subject’ that the subject of ‘the Taj Mahal is white’ is ‘the Taj Mahal’ and not the Taj Mahal. I use ‘there is no such thing as’ to mean ‘there is no such thing as, and there never was or will be any such thing as’.) Thus, for example, it is true that the Cheshire Cat spoke to Alice, and it is also true that there is no such thing as the Cheshire Cat. We have, therefore, the following general truth:

There are true subject-predicate sentences (i.e. subject-predicate sentences that express truths when uttered in appropriate contexts) such that the result of writing ‘there is no such thing as’ and following this phrase with the subject of any of these sentences is true.

Type: Chapter
Information: Existence
Essays in Ontology
, pp. 87 - 115

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107111004.006 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Meinong, Alexius, “Über Gegenstandstheorie,” Alexius Meinong Gesamtausgabe, ed. Haller, Rudolf and Kindinger, Rudolf in collaboration with Roderick M. Chisholm [Graz: Akademische Druck und Verlagsanstalt, 1969–73]), p. 490Google Scholar

Chisholm, Roderick M., “Beyond Being and Non-Being,” New Readings in Philosophical Analysis, ed. Feigl, Herbert, Sellars, Wilfrid, and Lehrer, Keith (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1972), pp. 15–22, at p. 15Google Scholar

Walton, Kendall L., Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 416–419Google Scholar

Lewis, David, “Noneism and Allism?”, Mind 99 (1990): 23–31Google Scholar

I refer the reader to “Why I Don't Understand Substitutional Quantification,” Philosophical Studies 39 (1981): 281–285

Ontology, Identity, and Modality: Essays in Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press, 2001)

Routley, Richard, Exploring Meinong's Jungle and Beyond: An Investigation of Noneism and the Theory of Items, monograph 3, Philosophy Department, Research School of Social Sciences (Canberra: Australian National University, 1980)Google Scholar

Parsons, Terence, “A Meinongian Analysis of Fictional Objects,” Grazer Philosophische Studien 1 (1975): 73–86CrossRef Google Scholar

Non-Existent Objects (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980)

Castaneda, Hector-Neri, “Fiction and Reality: Their Relations and Connections,” Poetics 8 (199): 31–62CrossRef

Howell, Robert (“Fictional Objects: How they Are and How they Aren't,” Poetics 8 [1979]: 129–77, at 130)CrossRef Google Scholar

Plantinga, Alvin, The Nature of Necessity [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974]Google Scholar

Crittenden, CharlesUnreality: The Metaphysics of Fictional Objects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991)Google Scholar

van Inwagen, Peter, “Creatures of Fiction,” American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1977): 299–308Google Scholar

“Fiction and Metaphysics,” Philosophy and Literature 7 (1983): 67–77

“Pretense and Paraphrase,” The Reasons of Art, ed. McCormick, Peter J. (University of Ottawa Press, 1985), pp. 414–422

Quine, classic essay “On What There Is,” in his From a Logical Point of View, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 1–19Google Scholar

Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960)

Church, Alonzo, “Ontological Commitment,” Journal of Philosophy 55 (1958): 1008–1014CrossRef Google Scholar

Cartwright, Richard, “Ontology and the Theory of Meaning,” Philosophy of Science 21 (1954): 316–325CrossRef Google Scholar

Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 1–12

, David and Lewis, Stephanie classic paper “Holes” (Australasian Journal of Philosophy 48 [1970]: 206–212CrossRef Google Scholar

Lewis, David, Philosophical Papers, volume I [Oxford University Press, 1983], pp. 3–9)Google Scholar

Gellner, Ernest, “The Last Pragmatist, or the Behaviourist Platonist,” Spectacles and Predicaments: Essays in Social Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 199–208, at p. 203Google Scholar

“Creatures of Fiction,” American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1977): 299–308

Ontology, Identity, and Modality: Essays in Metaphysics [Cambridge University Press, 2001], pp. 37–56

in van Inwagen, Peter, “The Nature of Metaphysics,” Contemporary Readings in the Foundations of Metaphysics, ed. Laurence, Stephen and Macdonald, Cynthia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998), pp. 11–21Google Scholar

Wolterstorff, Nicholas, Worlds and Works of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980)Google Scholar

Thomasson, Amie I., “The Artifactual Theory of Fiction,” paper presented at Empty Names, Fiction, and the Puzzles of Non-Existence, CSLI conference, Stanford University, 1998, and Fiction and Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press, 1999)Google Scholar

Zalta, Edward, Abstract Objects (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983)CrossRef Google Scholar

Intensional Logic and the Metaphysics of Intensionality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988)

Salmon, Nathan in “Nonexistence,” Noûs 32 (1998): 277–319CrossRef Google Scholar

Lewis, David marvelously subtle “Truth in Fiction,” American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1978): 37–46Google Scholar

Wolterstorff, Nicholas, Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983): esp. 187–188