Philosophy
The Semantics of Fictional Names and Truth in Fiction
Quick fact
Philosopher Saul Kripke famously argued that fictional names are not abbreviations for descriptions—'Holmes' does not simply mean 'the detective who lives at 221B Baker Street'—because descriptions can be false in the story.
Why this is interesting
We all know Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective, yet we confidently say 'Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street.' How can a sentence about a person who never existed be true?
Read the full explanation
Understanding The Semantics of Fictional Names and Truth in Fiction
When we talk about fiction, we seem to refer to characters like Harry Potter or Sherlock Holmes, but these characters do not exist in the real world. This creates a puzzle: what makes a name like 'Harry Potter' meaningful? How can we say true things about him? The answers fall into several camps. One camp, inspired by Bertrand Russell, says that fictional names are actually disguised descriptions. For example, 'Harry Potter' means something like 'the boy wizard with a scar.' Then, a sentence like 'Harry Potter is a wizard' is true because it says: there is a unique object that satisfies the description 'boy wizard with scar,' and that object is a wizard. But since no such object exists in reality, the sentence would be false or meaningless—yet we still want to say it's true in the story. To fix this, some philosophers introduce the idea of a fictional world—a realm where fictional characters exist and where their stories are true. Just as we talk about how things are in the real world, we can talk about how things are in the fictional world. Another camp, following Saul Kripke, argues that names like 'Harry Potter' are directly linked to the character via a chain of uses that began when J.K. Rowling created the story. The name refers to the fictional character, even though that character has no real existence. This view treats fictional names as referring to abstract objects—like characters in a story—rather than ordinary physical entities.
A deeper explanation
The deeper issue is about how reference and truth work when the objects in question do not exist. In standard logic, a name must refer to something to be meaningful, and a sentence is true only if its parts refer correctly. Fictional names seem to violate this. To handle this, several sophisticated theories have emerged. Descriptivism, as noted, treats names as shorthand for descriptions, but this fails because the descriptions could be wrong (e.g., if Arthur Conan Doyle had written that Holmes lived on a different street). The causal-historical theory of reference, championed by Kripke, argues that a name's reference is fixed by an initial 'baptism' (e.g., the author's act of naming the character) and then transmitted through a social chain of uses. This works even for fictional names because the chain is anchored in the act of storytelling, not in a real object. For truth in fiction, philosophers like David Lewis propose that sentences like 'Holmes is a detective' are true if the proposition holds in all possible worlds where the fiction is told as known fact. Others prefer a pretense theory: when we say 'Holmes is a detective,' we are not actually asserting a truth about the real world but are engaging in a pretense—pretending that the story is true. Under this view, fictional statements are true only within the game of make-believe. Each theory has strengths and weaknesses, and the debate continues, but the puzzle illuminates how language can handle non-existence and how our talk about fiction is a remarkable extension of our ordinary semantic abilities.