Anthony Everett, The Nonexistent, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, viii + 246 pp. (Alberto Voltolini)
Fictionalism on fictional entities is one of the leading positions in the ontological debate on such entities. It indeed constitutes the cleverest way to be irrealist on ficta, i.e., to believe that there are no such entities. Yet fictionalism was still missing a manifesto. This has now arrived. To my mind, Anthony Everett’s book is indeed the most articulated and skillful presentation of such a position. Yet it is not only that; it also constitutes the most ingenious and sophisticated challenge to the opposite stance in this debate, realism on fictional entities. Anyone interested in this debate must consider this book very carefully; so-called fictional realists, those who claim that there are ficta, above all. For they may use this book as a test to see which kind of fictional realism may successfully face Everett’s challenge.
The book’s core claim is that appealing to pretense can explain whatever regards fiction; namely, not only the cognitive mechanisms that underlie our production of fiction, but also our fiction-involving discourse, as well as our seeming commitment to ficta. Yet, I think that this claim is only partially justified. I am fully convinced that the cognitive mechanisms underlying our production of fiction are systematic articulations of imagination, thereby determining our forms of pretense. To my knowledge, the book’s second chapter is the most systematic attempt at successfully showing how imagination works and how worlds of pretense are determined by imagination-governing principles. So, when we think and talk in doing fiction, our discourse is definitely imbued with pretense and its rules. Yet I am not convinced that our overall fiction-involving discourse, especially the discourse reflecting on our pretense play, can be explained in pretense terms. Hence, I doubt that our seeming commitment to ficta can be altogether dispensed with by claiming, as Everett does, that we only make believe that there are such entities. Its cleverness notwithstanding, I think that the book does not succeed in ruling out fictional realism. However, such a realism must be at least as sophisticated as Everett’s fictionalism in order to resist its challenge.
Let me start by considering Everett’s account of the semantics of fictional discourse. Like any deep fictionalist, Everett defends two fundamental claims. First, he says that pretense must affect any fiction-involving discourse, hence not just patently intrafictional sentences like “Sherlock Holmes is a detective”, but also seemingly extrafictional sentences like “Holmes is more famous than any other (real) detective”, “Sally admires Watson”, and “Anna Karenina is a creation of Tolstoy”. Second, he says that the serious use of all the fiction-involving sentences must be grounded on pretense only. In support of his first claim, in chap.3 Everett appeals to Kendall Walton’s idea that there are extended forms of pretense, in which we make believe not only that an individual has the features ascribed to her in a tale (say, being a detective), but also that such an individual has other features that are not so ascribed to him, like being a literary creation, being discussed by many people, and admired by some of them. (To be sure, it would be more appropriate to consider this form of pretense as a second-order pretense, in which one makes believe that, over and above ordinary individuals, there also are fictional entities. For talking of an extended pretense makes one think that this form of pretense is just a mere continuation of a previous piece of pretense, just as when an author continues a tale a previous author has made. Yet this cannot be the case. For, by embedding the previous piece of pretense taking that very entity as an ordinary individual, this form of pretense would take one and the same entity both as fictional and as non-fictional. Thus, it would be inconsistent. Granted, there are inconsistent fictions. But they are just a few! Everett acknowledges that an extended pretense works this way (p.165), yet he does not seem to see the above problem.)
As to his second claim, Everett appeals to the phenomenon of piggybacking (as Mark Richard labeled it). Piggybacking prototypically consists in the fact that pretense-nested utterances that are fictionally true, i.e., that are true in a world of pretense, are made so by facts obtaining in the real world; thus, one can make such utterances in order to convey that there are such real facts. In the typical example, an utterance of “there are three cakes”, which is fictionally true in the world of the pretense nesting that utterance, is so true because it is really the case that there are three mud globs, the real items counting as cakes in that piece of pretense. Yet for Everett piggybacking also
includes the case in which one makes pretense-nested utterances yet in order to communicate the real fact, obtaining out of the scope of the pretense, that such utterances are true within that scope. Everett labels this form of piggybacking pretense-orientated (PO) piggybacking (p.38). For him, PO piggybacking nicely accounts for the fact that we have the intuition that all fiction-involving sentences (i.e., not only the patently intrafictional, but also the seemingly extrafictional ones) are not only fictionally, but also really true. This intuition, he says, can be just partially vindicated. For, unlike their metafictional counterparts (e.g., “In the Doyle stories, Holmes is a detective”), those sentences (e.g., “Holmes is a detective”) are not really asserted when metafictionally used, they are still asserted within the pretense; hence, they are not really true, they just convey something true. Thus, those metafictional counterparts have real truthconditions to be given in terms of the fictional truthconditions of their embedded fiction-involving sentences – in conformity with the schema “in the story S, p” is true iff “p” is fictionally true – hence, they have real truthvalues as well. Yet when metafictionally used, the fiction-involving sentences have just pragmatic correctness conditions that make them felicitous. When so used, a fiction-involving sentence “p” does not say something (for it has no real truthconditions), it merely conveys something; namely, that it is fictionally true, i.e., true in the world of the pretense (pp.47,51-2).
This proposal is certainly better than the traditional fictionalist one Mark Crimmins e.g. defends; namely, the proposal claiming that a metafictional sentence of the form “in the story S, p” is really true iff its embedded fiction-involving sentence “p” is really true iff “p” is fictionally true. To be sure, the proposal is still implausibly committed to the idea that the metafictional sentence is really true iff its embedded fiction-involving sentence is fictionally true. This seems wrong. For being a sentence true in an unactual world, as a world of pretense is, can hardly be a sufficient condition for another sentence to be really true. Yet the idea that a fiction-involving sentence can convey a real truth even if it is not really true sounds very sensible. Isn’t this the case with metaphorically used sentences, as Everett himself remarks (pp.83-4)? Yet the problem remains that for one and the same sentence, being true in an unactual world (as it happens for a fiction-involving sentence when uttered in the scope of a pretense) is
not enough even in order for it to convey a real truth (which would obtain outside of that scope in the case of a fiction-involving sentence). Suppose that a sentence is uttered within a dream so as to be oneirically true, i.e., true in the world of the dream. This would hardly bring about that the sentence conveys a real truth outside of the dream. In a nutshell, sentences uttered in dreams make no real communications; why things should be different as to sentences uttered in pretense? (This is just a symptom of a general worry I have with Everett’s position. I accept that our pretense practices are necessary conditions in order for fictional characters to have their own features, as Everett himself holds (p.123). But I don’t accept that they are also sufficient conditions, so that, as Everett synthetically puts is, “the fictional supervenes upon the real”, i.e., the reality of such pretense practices (ib.).)
Independently of the above considerations, moreover, a suspicion arises that fiction-involving sentences cannot merely convey real truths; rather, they are (when metafictionally used) really true. Take a seemingly extrafictional sentence such as “Holmes is a fictional character”. Everett rightly says that it must not be read as “In the (relevant) fiction, Holmes is a character”, for this is not its intended reading. Yet he goes on saying that the sentence is true in an extended pretense containing fictional characters. Thus again, even if it cannot be really true, it conveys a real truth outside the scope of that pretense (pp.64-7,69-70). Yet it is not clear to me why that sentence cannot be really true. As it becomes manifest once we reformulate it as “Holmes is a fictional entity”, so as to leave aside any reference to characters. For this reformulation lets one clearly see that this sentence is a categorical sentence; namely, a sentence that concerns the metaphysical nature of the item it is purportedly about, Holmes in this case, just as “the number 3 is a mathematical entity”. Surely, one might also give a fictionalist reading of this latter sentence, as e.g. in Hartry Field’s fictionalist approach to numbers. Yet one cannot obviously give such a reading to all categorical sentences. For, as many claim from Gareth Evans onwards, pretense presupposes reality: one can make as if this and that were the case, for there ultimately is something else that is really the case. Thus, there must be some categorical sentence that we take at face value, i.e., as really saying that so and so is the case, not as merely make-believedly
saying it. Hence, it can be really true, rather than conveying some real truth or other. Thus, the problem becomes: what justifies a mere fictionalist treatment of a categorical sentence seemingly about ficta, instead of the seemingly correct realist treatment according to which that sentence truly predicates of a fictum its fictional nature?
Everett’s first response to this question is: for, as any layman intuitively holds, ficta do not exist (pp.118-9). Yet laymen’s intuitions are hardly decisive. For one may prompt one and the same person to say exactly the opposite. On the one hand, she may well say, Holmes does not exist; yet on the other hand, she may also say, unlike Folmes, Golmes and Iolmes, Holmes does exist (where “Folmes”, “Golmes” and “Iolmes” are just made-up names that refer to no entity whatsoever). In point of fact, fictional realism has the resources to interpret this seemingly bizarre behavior. When asked what (fictional) entities they are ontologically committed to, people give the second answer: (only) Holmes exist. Yet they give the first answer, Holmes does not exist, when what is at stake is the metaphysical nature of the entity they are committed to. Properly speaking, in fact, what is truly meant by saying that Holmes does not exist, or even that there is no Holmes, is that there is someone, namely Holmes, who does not spatiotemporally exist; “exist” is here elliptical for a first-order predicate standing for the property of spatiotemporal existence. (Incidentally, this is why we may legitimately say, with Everett (p.132), “Fictional characters exist in stories, not [in] the real world”.)
To be sure, Everett criticizes this way of putting things. For him, we do not employ such restrictions when we baldly utter, say, “there are no numbers”; no mathematical realist accepts such an utterance as true (p.147). Moreover, there is no legitimately restricted utterance of “there is no Holmes” that is both bald and true; true legitimately restricted utterances of Existential There-Be (ETB) sentences, as he calls them (p.144), are just non-bald ones, as when we truly say “there is no beer” meaning that there is no beer in the fridge) (pp.146-7).
To my mind, neither reply is correct. In point of fact, I am unclear as to what the difference between bald and non-bald utterances of ETB sentences really amounts to. If it is the difference between utterly non-contextual utterances (hence, as applying to the overall domain of what there is) and utterly contextual utterances (hence, as applying
just to a subdomain) of ETB sentences, then the fictional realist may say that an utterly non-contextual utterance of “there is no Holmes” is straightforwardly false, just as for the mathematical realist is the corresponding utterance of “there are no numbers”. Yet why cannot such a difference be meant as the difference between covertly contextual and overtly contextual utterances of ETB sentences? Then the fictional realist may say that, once she means an utterance of “there is no Holmes” restrictedly, the utterance is true just as a corresponding overtly contextual utterance, like that occurring in “Unlike Obama, there is no Holmes / Holmes does not exist”. Just as the mathematical realist may do with an analogous utterance in her own field.
Yet Everett’s second response to the above question is trickier and raises a deep trouble to fictional realism that is independent of questionable treatments of ordinary language (existential) sentences. Indisputably, pretense practices may involve indeterminacies as well as inconsistencies, even in the strong sense that in the world of pretense, not in its mere description, there are individuals that are vague and/or violate logical laws. Trivially, there are no limits to the imagination. Yet, he proceeds, this does not mean that there are vague and illogical ficta. However, for him the fictional realist is committed to such entities insofar she must appeal to a principle that for Everett is extremely intuitive, (P2), reread as (ID’): “If a fiction f is such that, (1) in that fiction a exists and b exists, and (2) no real thing is identical to a or b, then (i) it is true that fictional character a is identical to fictional character b iff in fiction f it is true that a=b, (ii) it is false that fictional character a is identical to fictional character b iff in fiction f it is false that a=b” (p.205).
Yet I question whether a realist must appeal to (P2)-(ID’), which probably is not so intuitive (if there is a drawback in this book, it is just Everett’s reliance on intuitions, which notoriously are shaky or hardly shared, especially on the present matter). For even if I agree with Everett that what happens in (the world of) a pretense, even as regards identity, provides necessary conditions for how fictional entities have to be featured, it hardly provides sufficient conditions. (For reasons of space, I assume that the indeterminacy problem also covers the further existence problem (where “existence”, as Everett seems to acknowledge (p.226n.5), must be meant as occurrence
in the overall domain) that arises once one appeals to a further similar principle (E) (p.226). In fact, if there is vagueness in the identity of something, there hardly is something one is committed to.)
Let me start with the inconsistency case. Even if we allow that the antecedent of (ID) is true, its consequent is false, for its first conjunct is false; hence, (ID’) is false as well. Let me show the falsity of that conjunct. It may well be the case that in a certain fiction, i.e., in the relevant piece of pretense, it is true that the individual a is identical with the individual b, hence that a=b in the world of that fiction. Yet this does not mean that the fictional character A is identical with the fictional character B. For, if that world of fiction is inconsistent, it may also be such that ab. If this is the case, outside of that fiction, one may generate a fictional character that is constituted by (inter alia) not only by the property of being identical with B, but also the property of being distinct from B. Yet one may also generate a fictional character that is still constituted by the first property but not by the second one. Given this difference in constitution, these characters are different fictional characters.
Mutatis mutandis, the same holds true of indeterminacies. The fact that in the world of the pretense it is indeterminate whether a certain individual is identical with another one does not entail that there is a fictum that is indeterminately identical with another such entity. Besides, the same holds true when pretense involves an indeterminate plurality of such entities: pace Everett, who appeals to an analogous further principle (P) (p. 228), such an involvement does not entail that there are indeterminately many such entities. I hold that the clearest case of an indeterminacy in the world of a pretense is that whose description involves quantifiers like “most Fs” and “many Fs”. (For whenever singular terms are involved in such a description, one may say that there is indeterminacy in that description that does not however occur in the relevant pretense worlds corresponding to the description.) If in playing along with Tolkien’s tale of The Lord of the Rings one merely pretends that many uruk-kai die, it is not the case that outside of that pretense one generates a fictum that is an uruk-kai and dies, another fictum that is an uruk-kai and dies and so on, by ending up with having a
host of such entities that are such that it is indeterminate whether they are the same fictum or not. Simply (as Everett himself seems to intuit: p.227n.36), one generates no such entity. For over and above the property of being a dead uruk-kai, there is no property to rely on as to ficta’s constitution in order to assess whether just one and the same fictum is generated or different such entities.
Clearly, appealing to the idea that ficta are generated out of a make-believe process entails defending an artefactualist form of realism: ficta emerge outside of pretense qua (pace Everett: p.188) motivated creative reflections on the properties a make-believe process mobilizes. Thus, the above reply is hardly shareable by other forms of fictional realism. Moreover, speaking of properties in a constitutive role (to be obviously contrasted with a non-constitutive role) is remindful of the distinctions between either kinds of properties (nuclear vs. extranuclear properties) or modes of property predication (the internal vs. the external mode) that Meinongian fictional realists appeal to and yet Everett dislikes. For he finds that such distinctions are linguistically problematic. Yet, once one accepts a contextualist position as to the semantic-pragmatic divide, Everett’s putative linguistic counterexamples to those distinctions, particularly to the second one, no longer work. As I said elsewhere, co-predication of a property may occur even if it is unarticulated that the property is predicated of the items involved in their respective mode. For that unarticulation occurs even in other cases in which different ways of determining a property are understood. Pace Everett, moreover (p.175), the effect of that unarticulation must not be punny. So, one may say “Arnold Schwarzenegger and Pippi Longstocking are both very strong” (p.176), meaning that they are strong in their own mode, just as one may say “both Arnold and Grace Kelly opened the door”, meaning that they opened it in their own way (a rude door smashing on the one hand, a gentle door unlocking on the other).
Yet, Everett implicitly replies to the above remark, how can a defender of the ‘mode of predication’- distinction understand this continuation of the Arnold-Pippi sentence, “between them they could lift a battleship”, which predicates the non-distributive property of being able to lift a battleship of a plural subject (p.176)? Well, for unlike the previous sentence, this continuation implicitly mobilizes not a disjunction,
but a conjunction of predication modes, in the ascription of the property in question. Just as when one says “both the baby and his Mum cut the apple”, meaning that the conjunction of two ways of cutting, slicing and peeling, produced the shared action of suitably manipulating the apple.
Yet, proceeds Everett, even if there were a way to make the kinds of property / modes of predication distinctions more palatable, no committment to ficta might arise from sticking to a kind of metaphysics that appeals to properties mobilized in the relevant narrations in order to individuate such entities. For not only such a metaphysics is implausible, but it also yields unpalatable consequences, especially as regards the metaphysics of fictional works.
To begin with, Everett remarks that to individuate ficta in terms of the properties they possess in the relevant story is not sufficient. For there are cases in which two ficta are intuitively different and yet the properties they possess in the relevant story are the same. If this is the case, he adds, it is useless to appeal to other individuation tricks such as the make-believe process underlying their creation. For in the problematic cases, that process is the same. Consider the following tale: “Our hero met two men named ‘Peter’, bla bla bla”. Since in this tale these two men share all their properties, the corresponding ficta cannot be distinguished by their possessing different properties in the relevant story (a fortiori, they cannot be distinguished by the relevant make-believe process either, since this is also the same) (pp.190-1).
Yet pace Everett the two ficta do not share all their properties in the relevant story. For in that story the first Peter does not possess the property of being identical with (the second) Peter that the second Peter possesses, and vice versa. To be sure, the two ficta share all the properties that are explicitly mobilized in that story. Yet these are not all the properties that are mobilized in such a story; the above implicitly mobilized properties also count, and these differ. As such ficta are constituted also by such different properties, they are not even indiscernible (pace Everett, p.194n.75). (As to the other putative counterexample Everett presents (pp.192-3), since it deals with a putative plurality of entities generically referred to by quantifiers such as “most Fs” and the like, I don’t take it as a genuine counterexample. For, since in such a case there is no
generation of any fictum whatsoever, there is no generation of qualitatively identical ficta either.)
Yet according to Everett, this way of individuating ficta provides no necessary conditions either. For a fictum might have possessed slightly different properties in the relevant story while remaining the same entity (p.195).
Let me discuss this problem in the context of the analogous problem for the individuation of fictional works: a fictional work might have been slightly different semantically while remaining the same work. Actually, Everett raises this further problem while criticizing the ontological argument for fictional entities I provided elsewhere. So, addressing this critique helps not only to solve that problem, but also to strenghten the motivation for committing to ficta.
According to Everett, this argument contains a premise, (Viii), “any adequate identity condition for fictional works will need to make reference to fictional objects”, which is in turn entailed by an underlying premise, (V), “fictional works x and y are identical iff they share both their exact syntactic structure and their exact semantic content”. (V) is precisely the counterpart of the thesis that fictional objects x and y are identical iff they contain both their make-believe process type and the same set of properties (which he rightly ascribes to me, p.190). Yet for him, the sub-argument leading from (V) to (Viii) is doomed to an unhappy alternative: it is either merely valid or utterly invalid. Thus, it does not ground premise (Viii) of my ontological argument. Hence, this argument fails as well (pp.126-30).
Let me start by considering the first unhappy option: the sub-argument’s mere validity. For Everett, (V) is false. If a fictional work had contained a sentence different from the one it actually contains, it would have still been the same work. (I consider Everett’s objection in a modal variant rather than in the epistemic variant Everett actually presents it. For if it merely turned out that a fictional work contains a sentence different from the one we believed it contained, that work would be the fictional work whose nature we would be entitled to ask what it is; our answer would have to consider modal alternatives.)
Perhaps according to our intuitions Everett is right: how can such a slight difference count in a fictional work’s individuation? Yet let us suppose that the work were just a one-sentence work, such as Giuseppe Ungaretti’s poem Mattina. If instead of writing “I flood myself with the light of the immense” Ungaretti had written “I am obscured by clouds”, I think our intuitions would lead us to the opposite conclusion that the work would have been a different one. Thus, intuitions are shaky. So, it is better to run theoretically and to take an independent choice between a loose and a tight criterion of identity for fictional works. To my mind, the tight criterion has its own merits. For it considers a fictional work as an entity of a certain kind; namely, an entity cum-meaning, viz. an interpreted representation. All such entities are individuated in terms both of their syntax and of their content. Thus, unless Everett provides a more convincing criterion of identity for fictional works, (V) seems to me independently justified.
As Everett himself concedes, it may be the case that (V) is true. Yet, he says, it does not entail (Viii), for the latter is false anyway. Consider, he adds, the thought experiment that should prove (Viii) by showing that fictional works differ just because of the different ficta they involve. The alleged moral of the thought experiment is that two causally-intentionally unrelated authors write syntactically identical fictional works that just differ for their content, for such content merely involves different yet qualitatively indiscernible ficta. Yet for Everett the thought experiment has no such moral, hence it does not prove (Viii). Let us suppose for argument’s sake, says Everett, that those fictional works differ. Yet they may differ because of a) their enlarged syntax (they contain different merely homonymous names), or b) their different general, non-ficta involving, propositions, or c) the authors’ unrelatedness (pp.128-9 and n.17); hence, not because they involve different ficta.
Let me begin with b). The thought experiment sketches a situation that may ultimately be a Twin-Earth situation: two twins living on different yet indistinguishable planets who bring about two indistinguishable works. (Incidentally, it is hard to deny that the situation mobilizes distinct fictional works, as Everett on the contrary thinks (p.128). For, insofar as they are the outcome of an invention rather than of a discovery, fictional works differ from mathematical works on the one hand while being on the
same boat with pictorial works on the other. We may say that Twin-Pythagoras discovered the same theorem as Pythagoras. Yet we do not say that Twin-Leonardo painted the same painting as Leonardo. Would the situation change if Leonardo and Twin-Leonardo had respectively brought about two indistinguishable stories called “La Gioconda”?) If this is the case, then ex hypothesi only the purportedly singular reference may differ in such fictional works; as to their predicative content, the works coincide. Thus, no difference in general propositions may occur in such works.
To be sure, Everett may reply that appearances notwithstanding, even in such a situation the two works differ syntactically. For, in an enlarged sense of “syntax”, the names they respectively involve are different, since they admittedly purport to refer to different things.
This is the criticism option a) prospects. Yet first of all, it is inessential for the works involved to contain names. They may contain indexicals, where an indexical is such that it syntactically remains the same expression even if it purportedly refers to different things. Moreover, even if they contained names, one may dispute whether they typologically differ from indexicals (I for one do not believe that, as I said elsewhere). Besides, even if one accepted that the two works in question are syntactically different (in this enlarged sense of “syntax”), one may wonder whether this difference brings about two different fictional works. Let us suppose, first, that the two names in question respectively referred to two different non-fictional entities (say, two ordinary individuals). By starting in the thought experiment with two tales imbued with different acts of pretense, we would have that such tales globally have different fictional truthconditions, i.e., that they are fictionally true iff things stand in certain different ways in the respective worlds of pretense. Yet this situation would not bring about different fictional works; at most, it would bring about different historical works (perhaps both actually false). Second, let us suppose that the names in question referred to no entities at all. By starting again with two tales imbued with different acts of pretense, we would have that, again, such tales globally have different fictional truthconditions, i.e., that they are fictionally true iff things stand in certain different ways in the respective worlds of pretense. Yet again, this situation would not bring
about different fictional works; at most, it would bring about two different historical works (surely both actually false). If this is the case, a fortiori option c) fails as well: difference in unrelated authorship is not enough to make two different fictional works.
Everett might reply that if the tales in question are imbued with different acts of pretense, this is enough for him in order for such tales to constitute two different fictional works. Yet this reply brings back to where we started. For it entails that such tales have different real pragmatic contents over and above their different fictional truthconditions. Let me put aside the fact that a pragmatic individuation of a fictional work sounds odd. The real problem is that, as I have said, there is no guarantee that by having different fictional truthconditions such tales also have different real pragmatic contents. Thus, the intuition that such tales are really true over and above their being fictionally true cannot be so explained. Rather, it must be explained by ascribing their sentences real truthconditions. Yet this precisely means that they must bring about different ficta that contribute to determine different fictional works.
As anyone can see, the replies that a fictional realist has to find in order to face Everett’s challenges have to be at least as sophisticated as these challenges are. Quite likely, only some forms of realism may face them. As I said, this already shows how this book deserves a great consideration.
