Fictional Names without Fictional Objects
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Abstract
In this paper, I criticize Mark Sainsbury’s proposal concerning the semantic analysis of fictional discourse, as it has been put forward in chapter 6 of his Reference without Referents. His main thesis is that fictional names do not refer, and hence statements containing them are genuinely false and must be interpreted in terms of true paraphrases, arrived at on a case-by-case basis. In my opinion, the proposal has a problem derived from the fact that the relation between some problematic examples —“Holmes is a detective”, “Tony Blair admires Holmes”— and their suggested paraphrases needs to be clarified and further elaborated.
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References
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