The Road Between Pretense Theory

In this paper, I attempt to reconcile two different theoretical approaches to the philosophy of fiction, namely, the theory of abstract objects (hereafter ‘object theory’) and pretense theory. I think that the seminal insights of both theories are, for the most part, consistent with one another. To make this idea plausible, I spend a large part of what follows both correlating the basic notions of pretense theory with those of object theory and showing how pretense-theoretic notions can be systematized within the framework of object theory. At the end of the paper, I consider a point of apparent inconsistency between the two theories. This concerns the question, do names such as ‘Zeus’ and ‘King Lear’ denote objects? Object theorists believe they do, while pretense theorists think not. However, there is a way to reconcile these opposing answers to some extent, namely, by showing that the formalism of object theory has an interpretation on which fictional objects become entities that a pretense theorist already ∗This paper was published in Empty Names, Fiction, and the Puzzles of NonExistence, A. Everett and T. Hofweber (eds.), Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2000, pp. 117–147. †I am indebted to John Perry and the Center for the Study of Language and Information for supporting my research. I’d also like to thank Fred Kroon and Mark Balaguer, who offered insightful and useful comments on the manuscript. Finally, I’d like to thank the participants of the Stanford Workshop on ‘Empty Names’ for the interesting questions after the paper was delivered, many of which led to numerous improvements. 1The principal development of object theory occurs in Zalta [1983] and [1988]. 2The principal development of pretense theory occurs in Walton [1990]. Edward N. Zalta 2