In this paper, I defend the view that such statements can have a truth value and, moreover, such statements are not automatically false. I contend that there is a presupposition involved when such statements are made, a presupposition that allows for the possibility of such statements being either true or false.
In "Fictional Characters, Places, and Events," Laurent Stern maintains that statements containing fictional entities as subjects, when made by the author, have no truth value. He argues that fictional sentences have two functions: 1) to create fictional characters, places and events, i.e., an imaginary world, and 2) to talk about this imaginary world (Stern, Fictional Characters, Places, and Events, p.204). Both 1) and 2), in terms of an author's role, are part of the same process and often overlap, because creating the imaginary world, that is, creating fictional characters, places and events is the same as talking about this imaginary world. To talk about the imaginary world, for the author, is in fact to create the world in this process. Though function 2) appears descriptive at first glance, it is stipulative (for the author) like 1), in that talking about the imaginary world is part of the process of creating it.
Stern argues that sentences containing the names of fictional characters are neither true nor false when they are used by the author, as literary sentences are neither asserted nor believed to be true (or false), but merely employed to describe and give information pertaining to the imaginary world created by the author. Stern states, "It can be easily seen that authors cannot possibly lie about their characters and it will be admitted that he who cannot tell a lie, cannot tell the truth either." (Stern, Fictional Characters, Places, and Events, p.205).
It would seem, intuitively, that an implication of this view is that statements similar to the author's statements made by individuals other than the author will also not have a truth value. If when the author talks about his work, his statements have no truth value, it would seem that all such statements, whether made by the author or someone else, will not have a truth value. Yet, I argue, when someone utters a sentence containing the name of a fictional entity, the subject (or the fictional entity itself) should not be taken at face value, as if the person were intending to make the claim that "there is an entity X with property Y." The subject should not be interpreted as a singular referential term. Rather, there is a presupposition involved that, as I will explain, can make the statement either true or false.
Stern notes, "if in the exercise of our critical judgment we claim that a given book is a literary work and not History and Geography, we can not claim that the book claims to make statements about the world" (Stern, Fictional Characters, Places, and Events, p.207). This is true; certainly no one would claim that the prose within Hamlet expresses factual statements about the actual world. However, this does not entail that, when people make utterances containing names of fictional entities, they are not making statements about the world- when I utter "Jay Gatsby is an affluent man," I am making a statement about a character in a fictional work and, though the character doesn't exist in the world, my statement, in one sense, is about the world in that it is about an existing literary work. But do these same criteria hold for people, other than the author, making statements with fictional entities as subjects?
Bertrand Russell would claim that such statements are false, if the subjects are interpreted as referential. Russell thinks that when someone utters a statement such as "The king of France is wise," the person is asserting three propositions: (a) there is a king of France, (b) there is not more than one king of France, and (c) there is nothing which is king of France and is not wise (Strawson, On Referring, p.324). By applying these same criteria to statements with literary characters as subjects, we can see that Russell's analysis implies that such statements are always false. To utter "Emma Bovary is a beautiful woman is to assert the following: (a) there exists Emma Bovary, (b) there is not more than one Emma Bovary, and (c) there is nothing which is Emma Bovary and is not beautiful. Clearly, (a) is false, as Emma Bovary is a literary character and is non-existent. Since the conjunction of the three propositions, at least one of which is false, is itself false, the statement as a whole is false, according to Russell.
However, it doesn't seem that Russell's analysis captures the content of a statement with a literary entity functioning as subject. Most often, a speaker doesn't presuppose that the subject of such a sentence is an entity existing in the world. Moreover, Russell's analysis goes against the very reasonable intuition that people can talk about literary characters, and such statements regarding literary characters can be true.
What are people actually trying to convey when they utter statements containing fictional entities? Are they claiming that the subject of the sentence has a referent? Certainly not (unless they are delusional). Even Stern agrees that the existence of fictional entities is neither asserted nor believed. So what is the content of such statements?
Consider the following two sentences:
S2: In the literary work Madame Bovary by Flaubert, Emma Bovary was a beautiful woman.
When someone utters a statement containing the name of a fictional entity, he is presupposing the following: "In literary work A by author B, there occurs character X," with "X" denoting the subject of the sentence. Thus, an utterance of such a sentence will have the content "In the literary work A by author B, there occurs the character X, and X did such-and-such." For instance, when I utter "Claudius is the uncle of Hamlet," I am presupposing "In the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, there occurs the character Claudius." Moreover, this presupposition is sufficient to give the statement a truth value, but it is not necessary, as I will explain in a moment.
The presupposition that accompanies sentences with names of fictional entities as subjects resembles the presupposition that Peter Strawson suggests accompanies sentences with proper names as subjects. For a statement to have a truth value, Strawson thinks, the use of a proper name as grammatical subject must refer to an entity existing in the actual world. If the entity mentioned does not exist, then the use of the sentence has no truth value; likewise, if the entity mentioned does exist, then the statement does have a truth value. (Strawson, On Referring, pp. 325-327)
The crucial difference between Strawson's criteria for referring and my analysis, however, is that with the presupposition I have suggested, instead of proper names referring to existent entities in the actual world, names of fictional characters refer (in an informal sense) to fictional entities that are described in some literary work.
If this type of presupposition is true, then the truth value of statements containing names of fictional entities can be judged in terms of the connection between the presupposition and the content of the actual utterance. That is, if the subject of such an utterance is a name belonging to a character described in the literary work mentioned in the presupposition, then the statement will have a truth value. Looked at in another light, if the presupposition "picks out" the literary work in which the subject of the sentence is described (via the "In the literary work A by author B), then the statement will have a truth value.
If the statement is consistent with the presupposition, that is, if the subject is a character described in the literary work mentioned in the presupposition, and the description of the character accurately depicts the character as described in the literary work, then the statement is true. For instance, if I utter "Claudius is the uncle of Hamlet," the presupposition being "In the literary work Hamlet by William Shakespeare, there occurs the character Claudius," the statement would be true, as my utterance accurately describes a character occurring in the literary work mentioned in the presupposition. That is, Claudius is a character occurring in Hamlet and, in the imaginary world created by Shakespeare, Claudius is indeed the uncle of Hamlet. Also, if I were to utter "Claudius owned rollerblades," the statement is false, as the work Hamlet describes no such state of affairs. Though my presupposition is "in the literary work Hamlet by William Shakespeare, there occurs the character Claudius," and the subject of the statement is the name of a literary character that appears in the literary work in the presupposition, thereby allowing for a truth value, the statement is false. The description of the character in the statement does not correspond to the state of affairs described in the literary work. That is, the statement contains a description of a property that the character does not have. So, though the subject of the statement corresponds to the presupposition, that is, the subject is a name occurring in the literary work mentioned in the presupposition, the description of the subject is false, rendering the statement itself false.
One possible objection to this is the instance of a speaker uttering a statement containing the name of a fictional entity and either not knowing which work the character is from or, in an extreme case, not knowing that the statement contains the name of a fictional character.
In the first case, it is not problematic for the speaker to have the following presupposition: "In some literary work, there occurs the character X." The necessary and sufficient presupposition for the statement to have a truth value is of this form. The presupposition I noted initially has this form, but is more specific. The first formulation of the presupposition I noted, "In the literary work A by author B, there occurs the character X," is simply a species of this more general presupposition. For instance, if I uttered "Claudius is the uncle of Hamlet," but was unaware which work of fiction Claudius was from, yet was aware that Claudius is a fictional entity, it seems that the presupposition will make the content of the statement read, "In some literary work, there occurs the character Claudius, and Claudius is the uncle of Hamlet." Following from this, the truth value can be judged in terms of whether or not Claudius is the uncle of Hamlet in some literary work. Like the more specific presupposition, the truth value is still determinate. As long as the speaker recognizes that the statement contains a subject that occurs in a fictional work, the statement will have a truth value.
It could be objected here that with the less specific presupposition, it might happen that there are two literary works that have characters of the same name. Let's say I utter "Claudius is the uncle of Hamlet" and my presupposition is "In some literary work, there occurs the character Claudius," which means the content of the statement will read, "In some literary work, there occurs the character Claudius, and Claudius is the uncle of Hamlet." Now if there is another literary work in which there is a character named Claudius (and in this work he is an uncle of no one), it would seem that my use of the sentence was true for one literary work, but not for another. This is problematic- how can my use be both true and false?
It would seem, however, that a literal interpretation of the presupposition parries this objection. All that the presupposition is saying, in essence, is that there is at least one literary work in which the character Claudius is described, and in at least one literary work, the character Claudius is the uncle of Hamlet. The form of the presupposition can be logically interpreted as follows: Some literary work contains a description of character X. Without changing the content, the proposition expressed by the utterance can be construed as: In at least one literary work, there occurs the character X and, in at least one literary work, the character X does such-and-such.
However, going back to the second case, that of the person not knowing that the statement containing a fictional entity does, in fact, contain a fictional entity- this case is a bit more problematic. Let's say I overheard some people who were having a discussion and, unbeknownst to me, the people they are discussing are characters from The Great Gatsby Now let's say that I pick up on their discussion and decide to join in the conversation. I utter "Jay Gatsby was an affluent man." This does not contain either the presupposition "In literary work A by author B, there occurs the character X" or "In some literary work, there occurs the character X." So, in this instance, the utterance has no truth value, simply because I was not correlating the literary work The Great Gatsby with my actual utterance. I thought I was making a statement about the actual world and, in doing so, made a statement without a truth value, because the presupposition I made, "there exists in the actual world Jay Gatsby," is false. Using Peter Strawson's criteria for referring, if the presupposition of a statement is false, then the statement itself has no truth value. If the presupposition is true, then the statement is either true or false. And if the subject of the statement is a character described in some literary work, and the presupposition of the utterance designates this, then the statement will have a truth value. If there is no such relation between the presupposition and the utterance, then the statement has no truth value.
But let's say a member of the group, thinking I am aware of the literary nature of their discussion, decides to affirm what I said and utters "Yes, Jay Gatsby is an affluent man." His statement, simply because it presupposes "in the literary work The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, there occurs the character Jay Gatsby," is true. This is an odd implication, because the same statement seems to have a truth value in one instance and not have a truth value in another. However, one of the statements was backed by a necessary, though unspoken, addendum which recognized the true nature of Jay Gatsby's "existential" status and the statement's connection to the imaginary world created by Fitzgerald. In essence, the two statements express different propositions- the presupposition is a part of the content of what is expressed, and since the presuppositions differ, the propositions differ, too. Hence, they have different truth values.
Now let's say I made the statement "Jay Gatsby was an affluent man," still oblivious to the fact that Jay Gatsby is the name of a literary character. But in this instance, the reply by the well-read listener is not "Yes, Jay Gatsby was an affluent man," but rather, "that is correct." The utterance here is simply a response to my utterance, an utterance that lacked the presupposition necessary for the statement having a truth value. How can this response be analyzed?
It seems unproblematic to say that the listener's response is true, simply because when I uttered "Jay Gatsby was an affluent man," the listener had the correct presupposition. When I made the utterance, my presupposition was "there exists in the actual world Jay Gatsby, and he is affluent." This presupposition is false, as noted above, so the statement itself lacks a truth value. But the listener had his own presupposition. His presupposition, "in the literary work The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, there occurs the character Jay Gatsby," mentions both the literary work and a literary character that correspond to my utterance, so his reply is true. The statement "Jay Gatsby was an affluent man" is true, if the proper presupposition is cognized. The listener had the proper presupposition, so his reply, "that is correct," is also true, being simply an affirmation of a true statement. Had he taken my statement at face value (treated the subject as a singular referential term) and had a similar presupposition as mine (that "there exists in the actual world Jay Gatsby, and he is affluent"), then his statement would be false, as he affirmed as true a statement that lacked a truth value. His statement was not about Jay Gatsby, but was merely a response to what I had uttered. Regardless of my presupposition, if the listener had taken the presupposition to be "in the literary work The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, there occurs the character Jay Gatsby" then his affirmation is an affirmation of a true statement; ergo, his affirmation is true.
It is unproblematic to say that the speaker and the listener can have different presuppositions. Though the speaker may have a false presupposition, rendering his statement without truth value, the listener can have a different presupposition (regarding the speaker's utterance) and, depending on whether or not the listener's presupposition is correct, his replies may be either true or false, regardless of whether or not the speaker's statement has a truth value. The same holds for a speaker having a true presupposition (a presupposition corresponding to the subject of the statement) and the listener having a false presupposition. Each person involved in the chain of utterances can have varying presuppositions, which ultimately means that, in conversation pertaining to literary entities, one person's set of utterances may have truth values, whereas the other person's set of utterances may not contain even one utterance with a truth value, having had all false presuppositions.
It is peculiar to think that the same sentence can have different truth values. However, this notion is not so peculiar when we consider Strawson's notion that it is uses of sentences, not sentences themselves, that have truth values. In the example I mention above, there are quite clearly two different uses of the same sentence, so it needn't be the case that the uses have the same truth value.
So, it is not the case that statements containing names of fictional entities are automatically false, nor must it be that such statements lack a truth value. As I have shown, there is a presupposition involved when statements describing literary characters are made, such that, if the correct content is presupposed, statements describing literary characters can be either true or false, depending on the proposition expressed, which is a function of the presupposition and the utterance.
References
Stern, Laurent. "Fictional Characters, Places, and Events." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 26, No. 2 (December, 1965), 202-215.
Strawson, Peter. "On Referring." Mind, Volume 59, Issue 235 (July, 1950), 320-344.