A Critical Introduction to Fictionalism

Frederick Kroon, Jonathan McKeown-Green, Stuart Brock

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781472513946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

A Critical Introduction to Fictionalism provides a clear and comprehensive understanding of an important alternative to realism. Drawing on questions from ethics, the philosophy of religion, art, mathematics, logic and science, this is a complete exploration of how fictionalism contrasts with other non-realist doctrines and motivates influential fictionalist treatments across a range of philosophical issues. Defending and criticizing influential as well as emerging fictionalist approaches, this accessible overview discuses physical objects, universals, God, moral properties, numbers and other fictional entities. Where possible it draws general lessons about the conditions under which a fictionalist treatment of a class of items is plausible. Distinguishing fictionalism from other views about the existence of items, it explains the central features of this key metaphysical topic. Featuring a historical survey, definitions of key terms, characterisations of important subdivisions, objections and problems for fictionalism, and contemporary fictionalist treatments of several issues, A Critical Introduction to Fictionalism is a valuable resource for students of metaphysics as well as students of philosophical methodology. It is the only book of its kind.

1

Existence Examined

Scientists, philosophers, explorers, investigative reporters, speculative novelists and other curious types care about what reality is like, sometimes only certain parts of it, but sometimes reality as a whole. They ask questions about how various sorts of things interact and change, how much of this activity can be summarized or explained by general laws, where various sorts of things can be found, which features they have and so on. However, questions about what kinds of stuff exist and which objects exist can seem more central to the exploration of reality than those others. This might be because of a perennial tendency to construe the universe, not as a single complex field or network, but as composed of entities of various kinds. Perhaps this outlook encourages us to think that questions about what stuff there is are more basic than questions about which features are had by which stuff and how different things interact: first we list the things and kinds of which reality consists; only then can we investigate their natures and interactions. Contemporary physics problematizes this picture somewhat: it presents us with a four-dimensional manifold throughout which matter and energy are distributed (or, on some interpretations, with a kind of multi-dimensional fabric that is warped, curved or shaped in ways that we describe in terms of the effects of matter and energy). The equations that describe how matter and energy are distributed and how its distribution evolves arguably make no reference to entities or to kinds of stuff; physics, in its most general, pristine presentations talks about matter and energy, but not about entities and kinds. So although we conceive of the world in terms of entities and kinds, they might not belong in our most general, systematic, predictive and explanatory accounts of how things are. Yet relativistic physics can no more stop us from speculating about whether there are minds or yeti than it can stop us from asking where we left our wallets or what the time is. Even if there is something impoverished about conceiving of the world as containing objects of various kinds (and there might not be), an important task for metaphysics – perhaps its primary task – is to make sense of the ordinary ways in which we identify, re-identify, classify and manipulate things. Metaphysics must explain our allegiance to the objects and kinds of stuff we think and talk about, even if only to explain some or all of it away. Hence, we do ontology; we ask what there is.

In this chapter, we muse about what it means to ask what there is. Here we will have nothing directly to say about fictionalism, although it is a familiar enough fact that squabbles and worries about ontology underlie much of what goes on under the name of ‘fictionalism’. Moreover, the reasons and motivations for adopting a fictionalist stance presuppose a Quinean view of ontology. In this chapter we look at, among other things, an alternative Carnapian way of thinking about ontological questions. In the first section of the chapter we explain why there is something tricky to muse about when we ask ontological questions and subsequent sections outline some of the standard answers to the tricky question. The main contrast that will emerge is between the idea that existence is demystified by quantification (so that everything exists) and the competing idea that existence is a feature had by some things and lacked by others. We will also consider scepticism about the intelligibility of the kinds of existence questions that philosophers ask.

1.1 Asking what there is: Traps for naïve ontologists

Is there a nose on your face? That seems easy to answer, but many existence questions are more taxing than this one seems. For example: Are there yeti? Is there a subatomic particle that is not an assemblage of yet smaller particles? Such items are unfamiliar, but fortunately, our community can say helpful things about what they would be like if there were any, what would count as evidence for their existence and how they would interact with other stuff.

Are there coloured objects? Are there morally obligatory actions? Such items are familiar, but puzzling. If we think hard about the way light reflects off surfaces and affects our mental life, it becomes unclear whether objects themselves possess colours, or whether the fact that we attribute colours to objects actually says more about human perceptual apparatus than it does about the objects we perceive. And once we notice that a right action seems to be one that should be performed, we might wonder how prescriptions of this sort can be part of a description of the world.

Are there properties? Are there numbers? These items seem familiar at first. We routinely speak not only of a black sheep and a right decision, but also of the blackness of the sheep, or the rightness of the decision and of blackness and what is right generally. If there are three black sheep, we think that three is the number of sheep there are and that it is prime. Yet properties and numbers are puzzling: they apparently lack locations in space-time and it is unclear whether they have causal powers. Apparently they are abstractions from concrete, physical things. Could they – do they – have an existence independently of the things that instantiate them? If not, do they exist at all?

Does Hogwarts exist? Are there vampires? These items are familiar to fans, who customarily assume that they do not exist. Yet they too have puzzling aspects that incline some theorists to think again. For starters, we can state what appear to be facts about them: the school song at Hogwarts does not contain the word ‘virtually’; vampires fear garlic. We can have disputes about, for instance, the life cycle of a vampire and even about how vampires would repel zombies. Material from fiction can be used to resolve, or at least inform, these disputes, and sometimes they do get resolved. Also, fictional objects are apparently created, in some sense, by story-tellers and one might think that a full account of reality requires a full account of what people create. A knowledgeable person traditionally knows not only her history and science, but also the contents of myths, plays and novels, ancient and modern. Perhaps, therefore, facts about what happens in fiction really are facts about entities in the real world, just like facts about any other human invention.

Are there physical objects: animals, asteroids or atoms? Is there in fact a nose on your face? Having waded through the earlier cases, we might not be so sure anymore. Consider three sorts of denier. First, various people at various times have held that whenever we interact with what we take to be physical objects, we are interacting merely with the mental – perhaps with our ideas, perhaps with God’s ideas, perhaps with sense impressions, but certainly not with stuff that is underlyingly physical. The word ‘idealist’ is often applied to those who hold such a view. You could be an idealist, but also think that if there really were animals, noses and so on, these would have to be physical objects and that if there were physical objects, these would not be made from the mental. A subscriber to this package of positions would deny the existence of all the things we standardly regard as physical.

Our second group of deniers regard all physical particles and objects as illusory artefacts of our perspective on reality. Reality, they say, is more accurately described by contemporary physics or something like it and such physics, properly understood, does not admit of particles or objects. This might be because the mathematics of quantum mechanics describes a world where quantum entanglement is ubiquitous – where inconsistency beckons if we try to square all of the experimental results with the hypothesis that there are objects. Or it might be because, as conjectured above, relativistic theory countenances only a manifold throughout which matter and energy are distributed.

Our third denier, the rejectionist reductionist, rejects only composite physical objects, ones with physical parts, but these include everything physical except the most fundamental particles. A reductionist about the macro-physical thinks that ordinary physical items like animals and their noses are mere assemblages of much tinier physical items. Rejectionist reductionists note that, in general, one does not proclaim that there is a single object, every time one has an assemblage. If I push my garden rake up against my desk and stick a guitar on top of the desk, I do not claim to have a single object, unless something special – perhaps artistic – is going on. So the rejectionist reductionist sees no obvious reason for thinking that macro-physical objects, as we normally construe them, exist; they are mere assemblages.

Our cursory glance at existence questions about various alleged kinds of stuff has uncovered disagreement: about whether relational properties (like being coloured) are truly properties of objects; about whether prescriptive, as well as descriptive, facts can bequeath properties to an object; about whether abstract things are less obviously real than concrete ones; about whether stuff that turns up only in fiction is included among the stuff that exists; about whether there are physical objects; about whether composites are less obviously real than their primitive components; and about how much weight our unreflective intuitions about what there is, as opposed to scientific theory, carry when we consider the evidence bearing on these issues. We didn’t even touch on such contentious individuals as God and the Loch Ness Monster. One might be prompted by these disagreements to wonder what is at stake when we ask which things exist and even to become a sceptic about the intelligibility of existence questions, or, at least, about the possibility that there is a single notion of existence-being-reality powering all of them. One might hanker after a philosophical analysis of existence or at least a test that only existents can pass. (Peter van Inwagen [1998] offers a careful discussion of these two projects, which he dubs meta-ontological.) In the next section, we summarize a famous attempt at addressing these worries and in subsequent sections, we note various ways of responding to it. This will serve as an introduction to contemporary views and ongoing enquiry about what we are asking when we ask what there is.

1.2 Quine on what there is

In a 1948 article, ‘On What There Is’, Willard van Orman Quine presented the following position. By having a theory of what the world is like, each of us is committed to the existence of certain things. These are not always the same things, since different people endorse different theories and our theories change. Our theories of the world are the net result of our observation of, and interaction with, the world. They are implicit in our beliefs and partially made explicit when we make assertions.

How do we isolate the ontological commitments that our theories impose on us? According to Quine, we must look to explicit statements of commitment like ‘There is a house in New Orleans’ or ‘There are dragons’, or to claims that entail such statements. More precisely, we must first regiment our theory by expressing it clearly and precisely in an appropriate artificial formal language and then recover the items to whose existence our theory commits us by looking at the analogues in that language of ordinary ‘there is … ’ and ‘there are … ’ statements. According to Quine, an appropriate formal language will be a first-order language of the sort one learns in an elementary logic course. It will contain predicate symbols, an identity predicate constant, individual variables, an existential and a universal quantifier to bind these variables and some truth functional connectives. (It might also contain individual constants, function symbols, a predicate constant representing set membership and other refinements.) The appropriate analogues in such a language of ordinary ‘there is … ’ and ‘there are … ’ statements are existentially quantified sentences of the form ‘∃x Φ(x)’, where Φ(x) is an open sentence containing ‘x’ in one or more unquantified positions.

When discussing logic aloud, we often pronounce the existential quantifier ‘there is’, ‘there are’ or ‘there is at least one’, but unlike these English counterparts, its interpretation is rigorously defined. Regardless of what linguists may tell us about the meanings of ‘There is a dragon’ and ‘There are dragons’ in English, it is laid down that ‘∃x Φ(x)’ is true if and only if the open sentence Φ(x) is true of some (existing) item in the world. (Here we assume, with Quine, the objectual construal of the quantifiers.) Existentially quantified sentences are a way – the way – of saying in a first-order language that one of the objects to which our theory commits us exists. This is because the items over which the variables of a first-order language range, once that language has been given an interpretation, are the items about which the language can make claims – the items that one can ‘talk about’ by using the language. When we bind the individual variable ‘x’ with the existential quantifier and then write an open sentence that means, for instance, x is a coloured object, we have a formula like this: ‘∃x (Coloured-Object (x))’, which can be translated into English as: There exists at least one coloured object (among the things we can talk about).

A representation of our theory of the world in a natural language is not such a reliable guide to its ontological commitments, because it is not obvious that the rules governing uses of expressions like ‘there is … ’ connect them so tightly with a class of objects. A striking illustration of this comes from claims that can be paraphrased so as to bypass any apparent commitment to the existence of things. People often complain that honesty is in short supply nowadays, or that honesty is hard to come by. They lament this, since honesty is a good thing, perhaps even the best policy. Not everybody who thinks these things expresses them verbally. Still, they seem to be thinking and maybe talking about honesty, especially, given Quine’s story, if they say something like: ‘There is honesty, but not nearly enough!’ If you deny the existence of properties, you need not be ashamed of this superficially existential form of words, says Quine. You deny the existence of honesty as such and a formal regimentation of your theory of the world allows you to translate every claim about honesty into a claim that is only about honest people. Maybe you are really saying: ‘There are honest people, but not nearly enough.’ If such a successful paraphrase is available, we can conceptually reduce honesty to honest people; that is, we can show simply by analysing our commitments that alleged ascriptions of the alleged property of honesty are just cases where we claim that there are honest people. Wherever a conceptual reduction is available, there would seem to be the option of claiming that the reduced posit, honesty, in this instance, does not exist.

The conceptual reduction of honesty can probably be expressed in English, but if you want to explain away your apparent commitment to numbers, as many do, the formal apparatus of quantification and predicates might be useful to make the reduction precise. If, however, a conceptual reduction of some troublesome posit is not available, one must grudgingly accept that one is committed to its existence. If, for instance, one cannot find a way to show that thought and talk about Hamlet, Gandalf and other fictional characters is merely complex thought and talk about less contentious stuff, one is stuck with them. Similarly,

when we say that some zoological species are cross-fertile we are committing ourselves to recognizing as entities the several species themselves, abstract though they are. We remain so committed at least until we devise some way of so paraphrasing the statement as to show that the seeming reference to species on the part of our bound variable was an avoidable manner of speaking. (Quine 1948: 13)

To find the ontological commitments imposed by a theory, then, one first expresses it formally, paraphrasing away where appropriate. One then seeks the sentences beginning with an existential quantifier and looks for the bound variables that follow. An existentially quantified sentence of the theory that says there is something x that is F commits an endorser of the theory to the existence of Fs. So does any sentence that entails it. For instance, the sentence ‘Fn’ which we shall suppose translates into English as ‘Nigel is forlorn’, entails ‘∃x Fx’. If one endorses the former, one is thereby committed to the existence of forlorn things. (Quine supports classical logic, but one might prefer an alternative if one feels that classical consequence sometimes makes the wrong calls about which existential quantifications are entailed by which sentences. For example: classical logic tells us that an inconsistent theory entails every sentence, but one might deny that a theory that happens to be inconsistent commits me to the existence of everything of every kind.) Meanwhile, the denial of an existentially quantified sentence ‘∃x Fx’, or of anything entailed by it, commits us to the nonexistence of Fs. It says: it is not the case that there is something x such that x is F. (This circumvents the worry that, given a quantificational account of existence, denying the existence of something commits me to a contradiction of the form: there exist Fs that do not exist. There is no such problem, if a denial of existence is the negation of an existentially quantified sentence.)

None of this tells us yet what there is. ‘We look to bound variables in connection with ontology’, writes Quine, ‘not in order to know what there is, but in order to know what a given remark or doctrine, ours or someone else’s, says there is’ (Quine 1948: 15). What there is could, though, be read off the bound variables of a theory that corresponds to reality. In seeking such a theory, lack of commitment to superfluous entities is prized, as are the predictive and explanatory power of the theory:

Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physics: we adopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged. (Quine 1948: 16)

Quine hints that there may be more than one theory that satisfies all the criteria for offering a full account of what reality is like. He compares one kind of idealism, the kind (usually called ph...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Preface
• Introduction: Fictionalism and Metaphysics
• 1. Existence Examined
• 2. Supplementing Existence: Objectivity, Mind Independence and Realism
• 3. Relegating Existence: Prefixing, Prefacing, Reducing and Nonfactualism
• 4. From Fiction to Fictionalism
• 5. Fictionalism: A Confusing Past and a Divided Present
• 6. Fictionalism about Fiction
• 7. Fictionalism: Why, Where, How?
• 8. Objections to Fictionalism
• 9. Close Cousins
• Notes
• Extended Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint