Fictional names and individual concepts

fictional names

fictional names have been one of the most important and serious topics in the contemporary philosophy of language and metaphysics.several questions such as “do fictional names refer to any objects?” “are fictional characters existent objects?” have resulted in a considerable literature of philosophy. in this essay, we will follow two objectives. first we will describe and elaborate the ideas ...

Unravelling Names of Fictional Characters

In this paper we explore the correlation between the sound of words and their meaning, by testing if the polarity (‘good guy’ or ‘bad guy’) of a character’s role in a work of fiction can be predicted by the name of the character in the absence of any other context. Our approach is based on phonological and other features proposed in prior theoretical studies of fictional names. These features a...

Using Theory Formation Techniques for the Invention of Fictional Concepts

We introduce a novel method for the formation of fictional concepts based on the non-existence conjectures made by the HR automated theory formation system. We further introduce the notion of the typicality of an example with respect to a concept into HR, which leads to methods for ordering fictional concepts with respect to novelty, vagueness and stimulation. To test whether these measures are...

Individual Concepts / 1 INDIVIDUALS AND THEIR CONCEPTS

Demonstratives as individual concepts

Using a version of situation semantics, this article argues that bare and complex demonstratives are interpreted as individual concepts.