Abstracts

Abstract for: Fictionalism and the Lure of Surrogacy

Fred Kroon University of Auckland

There are successful theories, folk or otherwise, whose posits many want to question on philosophical grounds despite the evidence favouring the posits: mathematics and modal metaphysics comes to mind. Fictionalism, revolutionary or otherwise, has offered the questioners a way out: play along with the theories, just as one plays along with a novel one is reading, but don’t make the mistake of thinking one must therefore also believe its claims. There are other sorts of posits that should strike those of a fictionalist temperament as suspect on rather different grounds. Thus consider the claim that once we have Napoleon and the novel War and Peace we also have another Napoleon — Napoleon as he is in War and Peace, a fictional surrogate of the real Napoleon and someone who has different properties from both Napoleon and other surrogates of Napoleon (for example, Napoleon as he is in Benét's story The Curfew Tolls). Such objects seem to be generated on the basis of an a priori kind of multiplication strategy that seems almost too good to be true

In this paper I argue that those who use such a strategy are right to insist that there is linguistic evidence for such posits (contrary to a popular argument used by, among others, Kripke in Reference and Existence), but that they misconstrue the ontological import of this evidence. By considering the logic and semantics of the sentential connective ‘as’, I argue for a hermeneutic fictionalist account of such nominals and variations on such nominals, including, for example, ‘Wittgenstein as he was in his early period’ [the early Wittgenstein], ‘things as they appear to us’ [appearances], and so on.