LanCog Workshop on Fiction and Imagination
Stacie Friend (Heythrop, London)
Creating nothing
Although realists about fictional characters often admit that imagination must play a role in how we think and talk about such characters – we imagine that Anna Karenina is a person, for instance, rather than an abstract object – they usually take talk of the creation of a fictional character literally. By contrast I propose an account of fictional creation consistent with irrealism, according to which imagination plays a central role. In the paradigm case, an author institutes a genuine convention for using a name and thereby originates a practice of thinking and talking ‘about the same thing’ – a notion network, in the terminology of John Perry. Authors then invite readers to imagine, of the notion network, that it originates in a real individual. This account contrasts with other irrealist approaches according to which authors and readers merely pretend to participate in a practice of using a name.