Far more intensive work has been done on analyzing fictional discourse than fictional experience. As in the case of intentionality, most of this work has been done in pursuit of the idea that there really are no fictional objects to which we can refer and so has been driven by a desire to avoid reference to fictional objects at all costs. But again the issue properly should not be conceived as whether we can get away without referring to fictional characters, but rather as whether we can offer a better theory of language by occasionally admitting reference to fictional characters. I argue that we can.

Many problems in speaking of fictional characters parallel those for thinking of them. Sentences such as “all parties to the discussion are speaking of the same character” express the tacit assumptions behind all critical discourse about how to understand and interpret literary characters. It seems that attempts to understand such sentences without referring to fictional characters, whether by appealing to the senses involved, the context of reference, or some combination of these, would run into problems parallel to those described above. Yet giving up the idea that such sentences could be true in a robust sense (not just that they were alike in thinking of nothing at all) would be to give up a great deal.

But rather than rehashing those problems for the case of language, I wish to focus on the problem that brought discussion of fiction into analytic philosophy: How to analyze statements apparently referring to fictional characters.