Fictionality and language meaning

Language& Communication, Printed in Great Britain.

Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 285-302, 1982.

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0271-5309/82/030285-18$03.CWO Pergamon Press Ltd.

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PETER SWIGGART

I Recently there has been a good deal of interest in the logical analysis of sentences that include fictional names.’ The problematic issues have been two-fold; the kind of object to which fictive names refer and the true or false status of the sentences in which such names appear. It is obvious that names like ‘Hamlet’, ‘Sherlock Holmes’, and ‘Pegasus’ can be meaningfully used and that sentences containing such names can have the force of true or false assertions. But what is the logical status of sentences where a fictional context has robbed significant names of any clearly defined existent referent? My aim in this paper is to address the issue of fictive sentences from the perspective of what I take to be a neglected commonsense view, the idea that both the meaning and the logical content of fictive sentences are determined in large part by contextual or situational factors. On this approach, the recognition of a fictive use is a signal to the language user that the logical characteristics of a sentence are not established in a simplistic way by the juxtaposition of subject and predicate expressions; they are products, at least in part, of situational interpretation. Contextual factors can affect logical analysis in two distinct ways, depending upon the semantic situation. If the sentence appears within the context of a story or narration, the effective signal is likely to be the elimination of any truth claim, even though the sentence has the grammatical form of an assertible sentence. Take the opening sentence of Conrad’s Lord Jim: ‘He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet.’ We can replace the masculine pronoun by the name ‘Jim’, but the sentence need not be taken as making a predicative claim about a referent for the pronoun or the substituted proper name. What a reader understands when he reads a work of fiction can be described as a network of inter-related sentences that provides textual information and acts both as as determination and a constraint upon his semantic responses. The sentences found within a literary text provide a basis for true or false claims, either about the text or about abstracted characters or events, but the isolated sentences need not be regarded as making predicative claims. In effect, we can obtain information about a character, or about a fictional text, without having to regard the sentences that provide such information as claiming that what they are saying is true. The impact of contextual determination is just as pronounced in the case of fictive sentences where we recognize an assertoric purpose, for example the above sentence interpreted as a statement about Conrad’s fictional creation. Here the fictive context is a signal to the effect that neither the pronoun ‘he’ nor the associated name ‘Jim’ necessarily designates the object of logical predication. In this situation the commonsense view is that the object of assertion is provided through interpretation of the context of use. The object in question can be an idea or concept, for example the idea of a fictional character, or it can be the fictional text itself. In this respect the logical force and content of a fictive sentence 285

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cannot always be determined through analysis of the meanings of component expressions, even if we add the knowledge that we have of its fictiveness. In particular, the logical characteristics may vary according to the conventions that help us establish the objects of fictive discourse-for example our expectations concerning literary texts or the notions we have of literary objects. It is through conventions of this sort and not through the logical force of isolated sentences that the objects of fictive assertions are semantically established. This point also applies to asserted sentences where a proper name is recognizably mythic, as in the Pegasus sentences so often discussed by language philosophers. To recognize ‘Pegasus’ as a fictive name in ‘Pegasus is a flying horse’ is to pick out one of a number of background conventions-ways of talking about mythology-for a sense of what is the object of predication. Such conventions can persuade us that the sentence is about mythological records, that it concerns a cultural idea, that it is about pictures of Pegasus as in childrens’ books, and so on. The recourse to such conventions is triggered by the awareness we have of fictive use, and the convention we choose as a basis for interpretation is usually implicit in the situation of use. This is why we rarely find fictive sentences effectively ambiguous. We become aware of their fictiveness under circumstances where we are predisposed to assume one topic of discourse rather than another. We do not take a Hamlet or Pegasus sentence as making a logical assertion and then ask what the assertion is about. We normally recognize a sentence as making a fictive assertion only because we are already aware of a topic of discourse that involves fictionality, for example the discussion of a literary text or of literary characters. In this paper I will explore some formal implications of the view that fictive names do not involve an unusual type of referential relationship or a special kind of inexistent reference. Fictiveness is not a property of language expressions; it is better seen as an aspect of a language user’s situational knowledge, as that knowledge affects both meaning and logical form. Quite simply, a sentence that is recognized or believed to be fictive does not reveal its logical status by its grammatical form or by the meanings of individual words. The proper object of logical and semantic analysis turns out to be the sentence as situationally interpreted, or the sentence as understood to express such and such a statement. The meaningful entity is not the isolated sentence or sentence type, but the sentence as part of a language situation, or as already interpreted with respect to its situational role. This means that a general theory of formalization of the semantics of fictive sentences cannot be achieved in the traditional way; we cannot hope to carry out a context-free analysis of meaning and referential function. What is required is a theory that takes contextually interpreted words and sentences as the proper object of semantic analysis. in particular, an account is needed in which properties of truth and reference are themselves regarded as context dependent, or as secondary rather than primary characteristics of language meaning. The lesson of fictive use is that to speak of the fixed referent of a name or the determinate truth conditions of a sentence is to presuppose a context of use that excludes or prohibits the vagaries of fictionality. In particular, we need to reject any hard and fast distinction between what are traditionally called the levels of semantics and pragmatics. If pragmatics is defined as the study of contextual influences, then it becomes evident that considerations of truth and reference involve pragmatic as well as semantic factors. Even when proper names are taken to have fixed referents or when we assimilate

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logical to grammatical form, we are assuming for the sentence a context of logically regimented use. A sentence viewed as entirely context free, a string of meaningful words, never announces its own logical force. Its proper names have at best ambiguous reference and its logical significance depends upon a situational interpretation. My approach in this paper is critical of contemporary language philosophy, but the criticism is directed only against those doctrines that make a theoretical rationale difficult to find for the above ‘commonsense’ approach to fictionality. A case in point is the sentence and statement distinction that is discussed in the next section. We can make good use of the discrimination between a sentence and the statement it expresses, but it is important to see the relationship between grammatical and logical form as dependent upon contextual factors. We cannot always look at a sentence in isolation from its context of use and see what kind of statement is being made. A similar point applies to the relationship between a naming expression and its referent or value. In most contexts of use the proper name ‘Aristotle’ can be said to designate a unique individual, the ancient Greek philosopher. But in accepting this analysis we need to make a sharp distinction between such an interpreted name and the context-free naming expression, which is undetermined with respect to reference and which can be used to name a variety of individuals. There must be a way of saying that the name ‘Aristotle’ refers to the philosopher only in the context of a type of circumstantial use-and that in other contexts it will refer to cats, to shopping magnates, to colleagues at the university, and so on. In most contexts of analytic study we can ignore or discount this distinction and treat proper names as if their referential properties applied to the naming expression and not to the name as situationally used. But we need to be more rigorous when fictionality is at issue and recognize that referential properties are always dependent upon use characteristics. Terence Parsons touches upon the above issue when he comments that many fictive sentences should be given an “according to the text” interpretation. Thus ‘Hamlet’ studied in Wittenberg’ should be read as ‘According to the text of Hamlet, Hamlet studied in Wittenberg’. But Parsons does not examine an important implication of this reading, namely that the object of predication is evidently the Shakespearean text and not something directly designated by the proper name ‘Hamlet’. Nor does Parsons consider the point that in giving such a reading of the Hamlet sentence he is acknowledging the importance of circumstances of use in determining the nature of any referential relationship, not just sentences of this type. For it is through our evaluation of the topic of discourse-what we judge the assertion to be about-that we decide whether or not to take a given proper name as designating an existent object or not. Even when we take a name to have a conventional reference we are making what amounts to a contextual recognition. For the assumption that an existential object is being named is as much a contextual presupposition as a predisposition to see a given name as fictive. On the approach of this paper the truth or falsity of a sentence is also dependent in part upon contextual factors. In general, the logical properties of truth and reference that we associate with names and sentences should be associated, in a strict sense, with expressions that have been situationally used or given an implicit semantic regimentation-language tokens rather than language types. Such a principle bears resemblance to the ‘Speech Act’ approach of Grice and Searle, but the kind of position I wish to formulate is quite different in at least one basic respect. Whereas the emphasis of Speech Act theorists is upon the intention of a speaker, or the purpose that underlies his act of using language, the focus

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of my concern is upon semantic interpretation, or the response of a language user to a given linguistic context. To my mind this is a natural emphasis to make in dealing with the logic of fictive discourse, where so much depends upon the expectations of an auditor or reader concerning the form of discourse to which he is responding. The experience of a language user in taking in an argument or description, in reading a novel or attending a play, will determine in large part his logical and semantic response. It is in the analysis of large fictive contexts that the limitations of Speech Act analysis become most apparent, for example in Searle’s unwillingness to accept literary texts as constituting speech act units.* He rejects the classification of a novel as a distinct speech act or speech activity, and he refuses to distinguish what he calls the utterance acts in fiction from the utterance acts of ordinary discourse. He argues in particular that semantic rules applicable to a sentence within a fictional text can be sufficient to determine that the ‘literal utterance of the sentence is an assertion’. This leaves him with no alternative to the analysis of sentences within a text as ‘pretended’ assertions-a view I regard as counterintuitive. Surely our awareness that a story is being told or that a literary text is under discussion will play the most significant role in establishing the logical force of a fictive sentence. II My argument in this and the following section is that the discriminations we need for an adequate account of fictive sentences are already available to analytic philosophers, but need to be shaken loose from some of the logical theories with which they are usually associated. The formal distinction between a sentence and the statement it expresses is perhaps of crucial importance, as is the discrimination between a context-free sentence type and what I shall call a situationally used sentence or sentence token. Taken in conjunction, the two distinctions make it possible to describe semantic contexts in which logical form is not conclusively indicated by grammatical structure and lexical meaning. We cannot look at a given declarative sentence, taken as context free, and speak conclusively of the statement that it expresses or of the claim it makes about the world. Correspondingly, we cannot in a strict sense describe a sentence as being either true or false; it is always the statement expressed by a sentence that has the determinate truth value. This treatment of statements and not sentences as the proper object of truth and falsity claims is required by the recognition that a sentence with potential assertoric force can have a nonassertoric meaning when encountered within a literary text. Moreover, we have to say that it is statements and not sentences that are true or false if we want to claim that a Pegasus or Hamlet sentence is about something other than existent objects or persons. The kind of sentence and statement distinction that we need is I think implicit in Frege’s sharp discrimination between the argument and predicate content of a sentence and what he describes as the import of its assertoric use. Frege is mainly concerned with sentences with a content or sense that is closely related to their assertoric import, and Fregean commentary has emphasized the connections and not the differences between the sense of an expression and the conditions in which the statement it expresses would be false or true. Yet there is strong evidence that to Frege the distinction between sentence meaning and assertoric import had a much broader significance and could be applied to situations in which the meaningful use of a sentence need not involve considerations of truth or reference. In fact, Frege makes this specific point in saying of the sentence ‘Odysseus was

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set ashore at Ithaca while sound asleep’ that it has a sense even though the proper name lacks a reference. ‘The thought remains the same’, he writes, ‘whether “Odysseus” has fictive sentence could not have a reference or not.‘3 Of course to Frege an unasserted determinant predicate and argument content; there would be no argument value for the fictive name and the predicate would have no ‘extensional’ reference. This would be more obviously the case if we took Frege’s Odysseus sentence and used it in describing what happens in The Odyssey. There would be no individual named ‘Odysseus’ to satisfy (or not satisfy) the description of having been set ashore on Ithaca while sound asleep. But we are within the spirit of Frege’s distinction in saying that the sense of a given expression is formally independent of considerations of reference. In this respect a name can have meaning or be significantly used even though it lacks a determinate reference.4 In discussing the sentence and statement distinction, we should be careful to make a parallel discrimination between the sense or meaning of a sentence and the way we come to understand the assertion made by the sentence’s use. It is obvious that our understanding of a proper name as a language expression must involve an awareness of its potential use as the name of an existent object or individual. The point is that such an understanding will apply both to fictive and to nonfictive uses of the proper name. We make sense of a fictional name because the name can be used to refer to an actual individual-because the potentiality of such a use is part of the meaning of the context-free name. A similar point applies to our comprehension of fictive sentences where proper names are significantly used. We are able to understand Frege’s ‘Ulysses’ sentence because we are familiar with sentences of this type as they are used to make predicative claims about actual people. For example, we can hypothesize the truth conditions that would obtain if the sentence were used to say of an historical person that he was in fact set ashore in Ithaca while asleep. But there is no need to maintain that the sense or meaning of the sentence depends upon the assumption of an existent referent for ‘Ulysses’ or a truth value for the sentence as a whole. My argument is that the statement and sentence distinction should be used to explain the difference between actual language assertions, conditioned by situational factors, and the idea of a sentence meaning that involves only the potentiality of assertoric use. Such a distinction resembles the traditional discrimination between a sentence token, or the situational use of a sentence, and the underlying sentence type, or the context free sentential expression. Both distinctions are important to a comprehensive semantic theory, but we should be careful not to associate the meaning of an expression with its status as an expression type. For example, the word meanings we discover through introspection or by examining a dictionary are not the meanings of context-free entities. This is because our definitions of word and sentence meaning always involve the hypothesis of normal or standard uses, in particular those uses in which reference and other logical characteristics are closely related to grammatical structure. There is an important sense in which the notion of a normal or standard use of proper names will apply to our understanding of fictive sentences, even though the potentiality for referential use remains unrealized. For example, in our response to a sentence affirming the pride of Faustus, we can be said to understand the sentence as a sentence type by our awareness of how the words could be used to assert pride of an actual person, an existent referent for the naming expression ‘Faustus’. But of course we know contextually that the sentence is about something else, a fictional character, a literary text, a cultural architect, or whatever is indicated by the particular

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circumstance of use. It is obvious that our basic knowledge of how proper names are ‘normally’ used will affect or be a significant factor in our response to the fictive context, but this does not mean that the fictive use must be referential. Our response to the situational use of any naming expression, a name like ‘Tom’ or ‘Janet as well as ‘Faustus’ or ‘Churchitl’, will be conditioned by our awareness of conventions of univocal referential use. But this awareness is of a potentiality of meaning, a way of talking about context-free expressions, and does not prejudge our actual response. Whether or not this potentiality is realized, or how it is realized, becomes a semantic feature of the actual language situation. It is in this sense that the fact of fictive or nonfictive use should be viewed as a semantic property of the interpreted or contextually used name. We need a clearly defined strategy for dealing with this descriptive situation. What I propose is restriction of the notion of a determinate word or sentence meaning to the idea of an actual situational use or one that is hypothesized on the basis of a particular semantic convention. Whenever we speak of an expression’s meaning, we are talking about a way in which the expression is or can be used. On this approach, a sentence type is by definition without a fixed or determinate meaning. We are able to speak of the meaning of a sentence type, but the semantic properties in question are only potential; they apply to our way of understanding the sentence as a context-free entity. The meaning of a naming expression can be characterized with respect to conventions of univocal use or by the hypothesis of such a use, but in a strict sense its meaning must wait for determination of how it is in fact used. In the language of Peircean semantics it must wait for an indexical element to be added. The same point applies generally to words which, in their status as expression types, can be given either a literal or metaphorical application. We can describe the meaning of an expression, considered as context free, by hypothesizing a circumstance in which its meaning corresponds to say a dictionary example. We give the meaning of the word as if it were literally used. But in the perspective of a viable semantic theory we should say that the Iiteral meaning applies only to a literal context and does not necessariiy extend to metaphorical applications. For example, words with a common metaphorical significance can be said to have a potentiality for either literal or metaphorical use and not to possess a fixed literal meaning that is changed or transformed under deviant circumstances. The idea of semantic potentiality and not fixed meaning for sentence types is necessary if we are to have a theory that explains both the evidence of fixed meaning-when we are following one convention of use or another-and the evidence of semantic flexibility or adaptability to a given contextual signal. The type and token distinction can thus be seen as a way of distinguishing an expression’s semantic potentiality from its actual semantic function in a given context. The formal distinction that we need is between two kinds of language entities, the one without and the other with fully realized semantic properties. In the case of assertible sentences, it is evident that what has assertive meaning, and is thus capable of truth or falsity, is not the sentence type or the entity used to make the assertion. Such a meaning pertains only to the sentence as situationally understood or contextually interpreted. The notion that a sentence type has only a potential assertoric force makes it possible for us to give a formal description of fictive sentences in which there is meaning without either reference or assertion. We can also describe fictive contexts in which the force of an asserted sentence wili differ from that of a potential nonfictive use. This is certainly the case with ‘Hamlet’

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or ‘Pegasus’ sentences in which the context provides us with objects of assertion that are not literal referents for the names ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Pegasus’. The semantic potentiality of a sentence type, even when logical properties are at issue, is recognizably larger than the conventions we have for discussing its potential meaning. Although proper names can be used as freely and as meaningfully in fictive as in nonfictive contexts, we are more or less restricted to the former in the explanations we give of context free meaning. Consider how the above account applies to the sentence ‘Tom attended his own funeral’. Our understanding of such a sentence and our conventions for expressing that understanding are closely related to a grasp of how the sentence might be used to make a factual claim about someone named ‘Tom’. Our notion of what the sentence means is thus related to the presupposition of a regimented referential use for the proper name ‘Tom’. We may want to extend such analysis to fictive sentences, for example to the above sentence with the name ‘Tom’ replaced by the name ‘Tom Sawyer’. But the recognition of ‘Tom Sawyer’ as a fictive name is not just added knowledge about the sentence’s meaning. It is also a contextual recognition that blocks analysis of the sentence as a sentence type and forces us to regard it as drawing semantic force from the specialized conventions of fictive discourse. We know by such conventions that asserted sentences with fictive names in subject position cannot be real persons and are not always about referents for the fictive names. To understand such sentences as assertions, we must know the actual circumstances of use or be able to hypothesize plausible fictionality conditions. In this respect a wedge is driven between the way we explain the sentence type, where an objectual reference for ‘Tom’ is hypothesized, and what the sentence means when it expresses a statement about Mark Twain’s novel. In summary, an adequate theory of fictive sentences requires a strong discrimination between sentences and the statements they express, plus a parallel distinction between the meaning potential of a context free sentence and the actual semantic import, including claims to truth or falsity, of the sentence’s assertoric use. We also need a distinction between two sorts of language entities, sentence types with only the possibility of determinate semantic force and contextually used sentences, where that possibility is realized in one way or other. In using this distinction we should remember that semantic potentiality includes fictive as well as nonfictive applications, just as the meaning of a word type includes the potentiality for metaphorical as well as literal use. III

The above account of fictionality and of language meaning in general is compatible, as I have tried to show, with the broad sweep of modern analytic philosophy. But a number of methodological presuppositions often associated with the analytic tradition require change or modification. Three such doctrines are the assumption of referential univocity for proper names, the treatment of predicates as having a definitive extensional meaning, and the notion that the truth or falsity of a sentence depends ultimately on the meaning of component expressions. Some of these issues have already been touched upon, but in this and the following sections they will be discussed in greater detail, beginning with the issue of proper names. The analysis of proper names is of special importance to a semantics of fictive sentences, in particular the issue of univocal reference. Natural language conventions define a proper name as referring to a unique individual, and traditions of twentieth century language

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analysis follow this same convention-with only occasional references to evidence of multivocal use or the possibility that there may be other Aristotles or Winston Churchills. Earlier theorists were not so committed to the treatment of reference as a context-free semantic property. For example, Peirce focuses his analysis of proper names on the necessary influence of indexical elements, or what he describes as the demonstrative circumstances in which names are actually used. According to Peirce’s account we could never speak of a name’s referential function without taking account of what he calls the circumstances by which the name comes to be attached to the referent.’ Consider the practice in logic classrooms of citing sentences including names like ‘Tom’ or ‘Sally’ as if such names had a unique reference, even though no specificiation is possible of who Tom is or which Sally is meant. In ordinary language situations such common names will pick up referential meaning from the situation of use, as in my telling a friend that Bill, whom we both know, has a new job in White Plains. But if I give ‘Bill has a new job in White Plains’ as an exemplary use of ‘Bill’ as a proper name-in what can be called a ‘blackboard’ sentence-then I am using the name as an idealized entity and upon the presupposition of an indexical use that provides it with a unique reference. There is a hidden regimentation, or reliance upon contextual reinforcement, in all uses of proper names where unique reference is presupposed. Normally we can discuss names as if they simply named-as if their references were supplied by natural conventions. But this hidden regimentation emerges as an important semantic issue when questions involving fictive names are raised. When I discuss before a class a blackboard sentence like ‘Sally lived on Baker Street’ there is no difficulty with the presupposition of a single reference for the name ‘Sally’. If we replace ‘Sally’ by a recognizable nonfictional name, say ‘Virginia Woolf’, the assumption of reference is likewise supported, although in this case by our contextual knowledge and not merely through awareness that a proper name has been used. But if the sentence I give is ‘Sherlock Holmes lived on Baker Street’ the contextual knowledge is of a different sort, namely our awareness of a fictive reference, and this knowledge acts to block or even to contradict our predisposition to take such names as having an objectual use. In effect, we have chosen to respond to the proper name according to conventions based on referential use, but where the potentiality for such a use remains unrealized. In fact the fictionality signal supplied by the actual context of use will point us towards conventions that emphasize other semantic potentialities. Two examples will help explain the interplay of semantic conventions in our response to the use of proper names. A reader of the Princeton Alumni Weekly will learn that Joseph N. Norton ‘18, a real estate investor often mentioned in class notes, recently died in Tierra de1 Fuego.’ According to The New York Times Norton happens to be fictional, the product of a class secretary’s creative imagination. But the reason for Norton’s appearance in Princeton’s class notes hardly seems a sufficient basis for distinguishing the meaning of ‘Joseph N. Norton’, as a proper name, from the names of genuine 1918 graduates as they appear in the Alumni Weekly. The important difference consists of the presuppositions that language users bring to their understanding of such names, in this case whether they know or do not know that Norton is fictional. Consider the difference between our saying ‘Norton died in Tierra de1 Fuego’ and ‘Holmes lived on Baker Street’. When a fictional text is insufficiently developed as in Norton’s case (although faithful PA W readers might disagree) we have no viable basis for interpretation of such a sentence as an assertoric claim, or as expressing a true or false statement. By contrast, we have a basis in our

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knowledge of the Holmes stories, or in our knowledge that they exist, for treating Holmes sentences as expressing meaningful predications-claims about the stories or about a developed personality description. Our intuition that ‘Holmes lived on Baker Street’ is a meaningful statement is traceable to confidence that in a given use situation we will know what sort of effective predication is being made and what evidence would apply to its confirmation. The other instance is that of the fictive person, Bernard J. Ortcott, that Quine invents in his well known paper “Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes”.’ Whereas the point to Joseph N. Norton is his creation as a fictive Princetonian, the point to Ortcutt is the role he plays in Quine’s hypothesis of an actual situation of conflicting beliefs. We must assume that the name is referentially used in order to appreciate Quine’s argument concerning logical reference. The descriptions of Norton and Ortcutt are both fictive in that no such person in fact exists, but the circumstances of fictive use establish different presuppositions for interpretation of semantic function. To borrow (and distort) a Marianne Moore line, Ortcutt is a real toad in an imaginary garden whereas Norton is an imaginary member of a real Princeton class. If the complexities of fictive use are realistically confronted, it never makes sense to base semantic analysis of proper names upon referential facts that are presumed to be independent of pragmatic considerations. The second notion that needs to be critically examined is the view that predicative expressions are unaffected, at least in their expression of predicative claims, by the nominative phrases to which they are grammatically attached. It is a cornerstone of modern programs for language form~i~tion that the extensional meaning of a predicative expression is independent of its grammatical context. But this notion that predicates express their own logical force is counterintuitive for the broad range of sentence use in which contextual interaction is crucial to expressed meaning. If a semantic theory is to be comprehensive, either of two strategies seems to be required. One strategy, explicitly endorsed by Frege, is to admit the necessity for semantic regimentation if natural sentences are to be accepted as objects for logical analysis. We must make certain, he writes, that naming expressions in fact name and that predicates are determinate for all arguments.* In modern terminology we would say that a subject and predicate natural sentence must be given a regimented meaning such that naming expressions in subject position will designate objects of logical predication and expressions in predicative position will directly state the sentence’s predicative force. If a fictive sentence like ‘Pegasus is a flying horse’ is regimented in this way, we can assume for purposes of logical analysis that ‘is a flying horse’ has its actual predicative meaning-its idealization as an independently meaningful expression-and that to use the sentence assertorically is to predicate of the entity named by ‘Pegasus’ that it is in fact a flying horse. It is obvious that fictive sentences cannot be effectively assimilated into such a formalization scheme. The recognition of a fictive name in subject position forces us to view the predicative expression as influenced in its semantic force by the fictive context. Even if the argument of the sentence is taken to be something named by ‘Pegasus’, it is evident that the predicative expression cannot be given a literal interpretation. For example, if ‘Pegasus’ is seen to designate an imaginary object, then the predicate will have the sense of ‘is an imaginary flying horse’. The awareness of a fictive use of the name ‘Pegasus’ amounts to a recognition that the contextual determination in question will also apply to the sentence predicate. We expect the logical predicate expressed by ‘is a horse’ to be appropriate to the

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kind of object taken as the logical argument. A good interpretive rule is that when the literal reading of a predicate is rejected, on the basis of a fictive signal, we must look to actual or hypothesized contexts of use for an indication of predicative force. To give adequate formal descriptions of the resulting complications we need to indicate whether or not the sentence is given an idealized meaning on the basis of its potentiality for object4 use. The assumption of fixed meaning for a sentence thus becomes a categorization within language theory and not a presupposition upon which the theory as a whole must rest. On such an approach the indication that a sentence is fictively used is a signal that its exact predicate and argument function is contextually determined and will vary somewhat from one situation of use to another. The effort is abandoned to give an exact formalization of whatever statement the sentence expresses, although it is still implied that the potentiality of a standard or literal use is of central importance to semantic analysis. The point at issue applies even more dramatically to sentences that make predicate and argument claims by the use of metaphorical predicates. A sentence like ‘John’s candidacy is getting up steam’ calls for a contextual interpretation sufficient to provide us with an understanding of precisely what is being claimed of John’s candidacy. Here the metaphor is relatively dead and the deviation is from semantic conventions that tells us the literal meaning of ‘is getting up steam’ to conventions that govern its standard metaphorical use. In the case of original or more complex metaphors we have to know more of the situational context. The same analysis applies to sentences where predicative force is more subtly affected by the object of predication. For example, we generally use ‘Shakespeare’ sentences to make predications about Shakespearean plays and not about the referrent of the proper name. An asserted sentence like ‘Shakespeare hates ambitious women’ usually calls for restatement as a claim about the plays or about portrayals of women in the plays. There is no problem in taking such a sentence to have a fixed predicate and argument meaning as long as we assume conventions that determine in a precise way how such a meaning is yielded by the original sentence. The third important analytic issue is that of truth functional determinacy for natural sentences. The challenge posed by fictive sentences is the need to explain our intuition that such a sentence can be true or false even though the statement it expresses can only be grasped through contextual interpretation. To deal effectively with this issue we must examine differences between the notion of sentence truth and that of statement truth, and understand why most language philosophers either assimilate the two concepts of truth or regard sentence truth as primary. It is both customary and natural that our notions of sentence meaning and sentence truth be focused on expressions that are presupposed to the best way to understand the idealized have a fixed idealized meaning. Moreover, meaning of a sentence is to take the sentence as directly expressive of a predicate and argument-a statement whose logical form can be indicated by a quotation of the sentence. We understand the meaning of a sentence like ‘Kani studied at Kiinigsberg’ by presupposing semantic conventions that provide the name ‘Kant’ with a definitive reference and that interpret the predicate ‘studied at K8nigsberg’ as making a predicative claim that is true or fails to be true of the name’s reference. On such an approach there is no practicai need to distinguish the truth of the sentence from that of the statement it expresses. When such sentences are taken to be idealized semantic entities, then we can rightly point out, with Donald Davidson, that ‘a satisfactory theory of meaning must give an account of

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how the meanings of sentences depend upon the meaning of words’.’ Nevertheless, this approach is limited to sentences where the sentence and statement distinction is unimportant; nor does it take account of contextual influences upon the determination of a sentence’s logical force. This limitation becomes evident when we begin to speak of the conditions that determine a sentence’s truth or falsity. We can give Davidson-type statements of truth conditions for many natural sentences, arguing that ‘Kant studied in Kdnigsberg’ is true if and only if Kant studied in Konigsberg. But natural sentences resist such a representation of their truth conditions if there is any reason to look beyond idealized meanings to an actual context of use in order to understand what is being said about what. This is certainly the case with fictive assertions. We cannot say that ‘Fortinbras is a soldier’ is true if and only if Fortinbras is a soldier; we have to say something like ‘Fortinbras is a soldier’ is true if and only if the characterization of Fortinbras is that of a soldier. In effect we need more information than what is provided by idealized word and sentence meaning in order to give a realistic argument and predicate analysis. What is needed for language theory is a way of indicating just those cases in which contextual influences are important in the determination of a sentence’s assertive content. A sentence so designated will not be deprived of truth functional significance, but that significance will depend upon the situational interpretation. By this means we can begin to give effective explanations both of metaphorical and fictive meaning, when significant assertions are clearly being made. In both cases we can speak of a determinate truth or falsity that lies aslant the sentence’s literal meaning and depends upon how the sentence is contextually evaluated. There is always a sense in which the import of a fictive or metaphorical assertion can be differently interpreted. Yet in practice the recognition of a fictive name is usually accompanied by a contextual knowledge that controls the logical interpretation. For example, to recognize ‘Pegasus’ as a fictive name is in most cases to have a good grasp of the speaker’s intended meaning. It can also be pointed out that in understanding fictive assertions we rarely have a need to interpret the object of predication in any precise way. We know that ‘Pegasus’ sentences require contextual interpretation but in most situations of use the logical object could be taken either as the mythological record or the cultural idea. The practical criterion for understanding such a sentence will be whatever interpretation renders the statement both true and pertinent to our sense of what the speaker has intended to say. Of course if we encountered such a sentence in a semantics or logic classroom we might expect it to be an illustration of nonsense or vacuous description, and our semantic interpretation would vary accordingly. However, in this latter case the presupposition of meaningful assertive use will itself fail. We cannot treat a sentence as nonsensical, or as lacking referential force, and at the same time regard it as having predicate and argument content.

IV There are two types of fictive sentences, not yet examined, which can help test the adequacy of the above account. One is a kind of sentence which appears to make a predicative claim about a fictional object, but where the predication in question seems inappropriate. Examples are ‘Hamlet had type-0 blood’ and ‘Sherlock Holmes was seven stories tall’. The former sentence seems anachronistic in that we cannot imagine Shakespeare making such a discrimination. Nor does it seem viable to generate a subject and predicate reading of the sentence on the basis of a situational interpretation. In the second example we have

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a sentence which involves an apparent category mistake, or a disparity between what is implied by subject and predicate locutions. If there were no signal indicating fictiveness, we could say of such a sentence that the predicate does not match the object of predication. But the recognizable fictiveness of the sentence is already an indication that we must look forward toward the verbal and situational context if an object of predication is to be found. The second type is one that includes reference to a real person or place in addition to the use of a fictive name-sentences like ‘Kingsley Amis admires James In the former case the predication is clearly Bond’ or ‘Hamlet studies in Wittenberg’. about Kingsley Amis, an existent person, even though the claim made about Amis seems to involve a fictive reference. In the second example the nonfictive name ‘Wittenberg’ is part of a fictive predication. One of the more significant characteristics of the first type of example is the difficulty we have in excluding metaphorical interpretation or a reading in which the predication is seen to be appropriate to the conceptualization we have of the object of predication. This is because our instinct is to interpret sentences as meaningful, or as pertinent to the context of use, rather than to interpret them as deviant. Consider the claims that Sherlock Holmes visited America, had an aunt named Alice, disliked oysters, often wore mismatched socks, and so on. If the utterance context convinces us that the claims are about the text of Holmes’ stories, then we have a basis for logical analysis. Presumably any such predication not supported by textual evidence would be false, no matter how appropriate to Holmes’ character the predication might be. On the other hand the context could indicate that the claims are about a conceptualization of Holmes as a realistic person. The criterion for truth or falsity would thus be the characteristics of a hypostatized existent person. Each such claim would be determinately true or false if the predication were true or false of an actual human being. In this perspective we can treat ‘Hamlet had type-0 blood’ as a possibly true statement, even though there is no way to examine our conceptualization of Hamlet to find out if the claim is accurate. The point at issue is perhaps better illustrated by a sentence claiming that Holmes wears mismatched socks. If we have textual evidence that Holmes is absentminded or sloppy in his personal habits, then the notion of his fitting such a description becomes proportionately viable. Of course, ambiguity and uncertainty are inescapable on such an approach to the truth functional status of fictive sentences. But the ambiguity is always that of semantic interpretation of predicate and argument content. The truth or falsity of a fictive sentence may seem to depend upon interpretive readings that are highly subjective, but in the perspective of logical theory the subjective origin of the conceptualization is irrelevant to truth functional status. When the import of a fictive assertion is unclear, the semantic properties of the situationally used sentence are likewise unclear, and in this respect we fail to have a viable object for detailed logical analysis. The point is that in taking a sentence to have assertive meaning, we presuppose objective semantic properties, even though it may be impossible to specify what these properties are. Once we assume the existence of a determinate meaning for the situationally interpreted sentence we have likewise assumed objectivity for the semantic properties of the statement that the sentence expresses, including the property of being either true or false. Similar points apply to the notion of a category mistake fictive sentence, but here the circularity of fictive interpretation is even more apparent. We cannot assume from the grammatical structure of a sentence like ‘Hamlet is seven stories tall’ that a predicative

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claim is being successfully made. Yet if we take the sentence to be assertorically used, we are in the position of having presupposed a definitive argument and predicate structure for the expressed statement. In the case of the above sentence, and as long as we give a literal reading of ‘seven stories tall’, the assertion in question would be manifestly false. Yet the threat of such falsity is in most contexts a signal for metaphorical interpretation. And in suppl~ng a metaphorical reading we would quite likely be guided by the desire to render the statement true-to link ‘seven stories tall’ with a predication that would fit our characterization of Hamlet as a fictive person. Such cases remind us of the methodological point that to interpret a sentence as involving a category mistake is normally to regard the sentence as nonsensical and lacking assertoric meaning, thus begging the question of logical status. It is obvious that the same sentence string can be given entirely different semantic readings, depending upon the context of interpretation. But on the semantic approach proposed here we do not have to choose between alternative readings of the ‘same’ sentence. The effective choice is between different conceptualizations of the language object, the ‘sentence’ for which definitive logical and semantic properties are proposed. In effect, we do not look first at a sentence and then recognize it to be semantically odd on the basis of its fixed meaning. If the context of use does not permit a literal reading of the sentence, and an easy interpretation of its assertive impact, then we must choose between regarding the sentence as meaningless, or semantically deviant, and conceptualizing it as having a metaphorical import. In practice, the reading we give a possibly deviant sentence is more or less guided by the desire to locate a context that will render it meaningful. This is why our instinct is normally to take a potentially odd sentence as having a metaphorical sense, and not to regard it as nonsensical. The second type of problematic sentence, one that involves both fictive and nonfictive names, can be given a parallel analysis. The signal that admits contextual factors, the recognition of fictiveness, will apply to any holistic context, whether it is a given sentential assertion or an entire novel or story. In the case of ‘Kingsley Amis admires James Bond’ the recognition of the sentence as in some sense about James Bond, a fictional character, does not prohibit our giving the name ‘Kingsley Amis’ its usual existential reference. What happens situationally is that we take the real Kingsley Amis to be the object of the predication ‘admires James Bond’. At the same time the appearance of the fictive name within the predicate signals the need for flexibility in our underst~ding of what is being said about Kingsley Amis. As in the previous example, our ability to make sense of the predictive claim is similar to our ability to understand metaphor. In taking the name ‘Kingsley Amis’ to have an existent referent we impose a kind of literal interpretation. The name is interpreted objectually not because there exists a Kingsley Amis but because we take the name to be used in reference to an actual person. The same analysis would apply to the sentence ‘My cousin admires James Bond’ if we took the speaker to in fact have a cousin and to be referring to that individual. Correspondingly, the signal to interpret ‘admires James Bond’ as a fictive predication, or one that requires contextual determination, is generated by our recognition of the name ‘James Bond’ as fictive. There is no problem with our applying the fictive predication to an existent person; for there is no essential difference in the type of interpretive response we make to the subject and predicate expressions. Both responses are contextual. We see the name refers to a person and not say to a fictive conceptualization, and we see that the predicate

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It should be added that the intimate connection between fictionality and metaphorical use is obscured for modern language analysts by the assumption that a literal meaninga meaning recognized as in some way customary or standard-must be completely present or realized in a given context of use. This is why we hesitate to regard the idea of having some sort of existent reference, though it remains unspecified, as a semantic characteristic of a proper name’s use. Yet there is a concrete sense in which the meaning of a proper name, under normal conditions of use, is not its reference to such and such an object but simply the fact that it is referentially used. A comparable instance would be our assuming that the pronoun ‘he’ is being used to refer to a male individual and not say to an inanimate and sexless entity. We can postulate literalness for names and pronouns without knowing anything further about their use and in this respect with their situational meaning incompletely realized. An example would be overhearing a speaker using declarative sentences involving the use of common names like ‘David’ or ‘Karen’. Our semantic response would in most cases involve the presupposition of assertoric use for the sentences in question and referential use for the individual names. We would be surprised to learn, possibly through internal signals, that the speaker was discussing fictional characters, or quoting from or reading a literary text. The shift in semantic anticipation would be like a shift from the expectation of literal use to a recognition of metaphorical signals-a shift that could take place whether or not we had a correct understanding either of the speaker’s literal or metaphorical intentions. Finally, some attention should be given to the example, ‘Hamlet studied in Wittenberg’, where the predication about a fictive object seems to involve a nonfictive name. The contextual approach developed above applies easily to this type of sentence. But the comment can be made that the fictive use of a name in subject position is usually a signal that we need a situational analysis in order to grasp the force of the predicative claim. The operation of such a signal is independent of whether or not an incorporated proper name has its usual referential meaning. In the case of the apparent claim that Hamlet studied in Wittenberg, we can take ‘Wittenberg’ to refer to the actual university town without inhibition of our contextual understanding of the predicate as a whole. Obviously the objectual reference to Wittenberg is semantically distinct from any claim that the university rolls of the period would contain Hamlet’s name. V

Finally, a point can be made about the troublesome issue of fictional worlds. When we deny the status of assertoric claims to sentences within a fictional text, we dissipate the need to speak of the text as constituting a private world or specialized reality about which such claims are made. Certainly, the modern notion of a possible world is not required for an understanding of literary constructs. Yet it is obvious that we can speak intelligibly of a fictional place or milieu, for example of Balzac’s Paris, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, or the Jansenist world of Racine’s tragedies. Most such references can be given a metaphorical reading; but we are still left with the problem of determining what it is about a literary work that can be the object of such a metaphorical comparison. In dealing with this issue, the most important discrimination we need to make is that between sentences of a text and sentences uttered about a text or about a fictional entity.

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The declarative sentences that are found within a literary work are nonassertive in the sense outlined earlier, and they require analysis on the basis of grammatical form and their potentiality for assertive or otherwise meaningful use. The semantic role that they have in the fictional context should be seen in the perspective of the ability of a reader to make sense of what he reads-perhaps to describe and interpret the characters and events of the story. The point to make about literary meaning is that the semantic unit, what it is that is meaningful, is established by the reader’s mode of understanding and interpretation, and is determined only partly by grammatical form. What is seen by a reader to be directly meaningful is likely to be clusters of sentences, or paragraphs of narration and characterization, rather than individual sentences. In this respect the individual sentences of a literary work should be viewed as sentence types that have only a potentiality for meaningful use. As elements of a fictional text they have a meaning that emerges only when the text is holistically read. As sentences experienced in the context of a literary work they provide for the reader a reservoir of linguistic evidence that he, at any given point, can use as the basis for a textual understanding. A person who reads a work of fiction will be aware of connections and associations between names and descriptions; he will have textual evidence as a basis for the thoughts and images that come to mind as he reads. But any specific connection between the expressions that constitute the text and subsequent ‘meaning’ will depend upon actual reading experiences, including the ideas and preconceptions brought to bear upon what is read. In a formal sense the meaning of a literary work will vary from reader to reader; the reason is that the meaning in question will rest upon a semantic construction that involves the nature and personality of particular readers. However, literary meaning is not altogether dependent upon personal responses, if only because it will be constituted in large part as a process of textual comprehension. Inasmuch as our understanding of a literary work is itself a verbalization, the interpretations we make will incorporate actual words and sentences of the text. We understand a text in part of conceptualizing fictive objects, for example the characters and events of a novel, and by using textual language as a means of thinking about such hypostatized objects. Thus the words of a Conan Doyle text that appear to describe Sherlock Holmes’ appearance can become the linguistic vehicle, so to speak, of a reader’s understanding of the character, or how he would express that understanding. Often the reader’s conceptualization of a fictive character is little more than taking descriptive sentences out of a given text and interpreting them as having assertive force. That is to say, the notion of conceptualizing a fictive entity is implicit in the activity of making assertions by the use of fictive sentences. Two points should be added in explanation of the above account. One is that the apparent equation between understanding a fictional text and making assertions about its characters and events is only a way of dealing with the verbal expressions we give, or can give, of our literary experience. Such an ‘understanding’ can be defined arbitrarily, for the purpose of this analysis, as the ability to describe or interpret a literary work, to paraphrase its language, and in general to construct a verbal interpretation. This notion of the relationship between understanding and verbalization is circular, but it speaks to the methodological point that any concrete evidence of an interpretive understanding of a text will be verbal evidence or what some reader in fact says about his reading experience. The second point is that when we attribute assertoric import to sentences of a text-when we make the sentences our own-we are not taking the sentences in question to constitute

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independent semantic units. We are reading them in a fictive context and our choice as readers to accept them as having assertoric impact is a contextual decision, or one that reflects a holistic response. In a situation of fictionality we always have the choice of reserving judgement, or of waiting to see if the author’s words about his character are correct descriptions of our conceptualizations of that ‘same’ character. If our interpretations of a literary text are often restatements, so to speak, of the author’s own words-restatements that amount to assertive uses-then what do we say of the comments and evaluations that an author will make about his own characters? Their semantic role will vary according to the response of a reader, whether or not he takes the author’s words as playing an assertoric role. If taken as an author’s claims about his characters, then they cease to be part of the text and should be regarded as critical interpolations. The author’s comments thus have a truth value that depends on how the reader, not the author, has conceptualized the characters in question. This is why any novelist who inserts comments upon his own characters can make false claims or even misunderstand his own fictional creations. When fictive entitites become proper objects of factual claims they assume a fictive life that is independent, at least in part, of the author’s control. But this is because their constitution as objects will depend upon the reader’s semantic activity-not because the characters inhabit an independent albeit fictive world. It is only at this level, that of the reader’s semantic response to a text, that it becomes appropriate to raise the issue of a fictional reality. It is entirely natural for the reader of a novel or story to imagine or conceptualize narrative action as if the events in question were taking place in the real world or as having realistic characteristics. In this respect the construction of a fictional world is parallel to what was described earlier as the conceptualization of a fictional character, the idea of Hamlet or the pictorial notion of a unicorn. When we regard a figure as a cultural archetype-Faustus and Santa Claus would be examples-then we assume that the salient details of our hypostatized projections are culturally shared. To a degree, the notion of being a cultural image is a property of conceptualization. When we are reading a fictional work for the first time, and have no cultural presuppositions, then the character we imagine or the event that we ‘see’ in our mind’s eye will lack archetypal status. Consider how this analysis applies to the words ‘Your noble son is mad’ that are spoken by Polonius in Hamlet (II, ii). If we regard this sentence as a sentence type, we can speak of a meaning that is derived from the potentiality of an assertive use. But the sentence does not itself have assertoric force. In its literary context we see that the name ‘Hamlet’ can be substituted for the naming expression ‘Your noble son’, but we are still unable to interpret the sentence as making the claim that Hamlet, a fictional character, is in fact mad. What happens is that the fictive context deprives the sentence of any direct declarative force, even though we might use the underlying sentence type, the same word string, as a means of passing judgment upon Hamlet as an idealized fictive object. In this case the words in question are seen in their literary context as expressing an assertion that Polonius makes concerning Hamlet. But this assertive function is part of our understanding of the play’s action and should not be viewed as an assertive meaning that the sentence is itself contextually given. Such a meaning is drawn from our contextual evaluation of the play’s action, in particular the relationship between Polonius and Hamlet’s mother; it does not stem from any independent status of the sentence uttered by

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Polonius, or by any actor representing Polonius on stage. This is why we could give the meaning of Polonius’ lines not as the assertion that Hamlet is mad, but as his effort to persuade the Queen that Hamlet is mad. The meaning in question applies to whatever context is taken to be a primary semantic unit, in this case the dramatic situation in which the words are uttered. Of course we can interpret Polonius’ words as constituting an assertion about some kind of fictional object, but the semantic situation generated by such a reading is sufficient to distinguish the sentence from the circumstances of the play; the words no longer belong to Polonius and the assertion is no longer his. Assertions that are internal to a literary work should be seen as aspects of the way in which we conceptualize fictional action and circumstances. The fictional worlds thus generated can be said to belong to us as readers and students of literary works rather than to the works that generate such conceptualizations or serve as objects of study. It is by this approach that we can best deal with the question of a metaphorical status for the notion of a fictional reality. Whenever we talk about a given fictional world it is almost always the case that our words can be metaphorically interpreted. The reason is that when we conceptualize large or in some way total literary or mythological realities-say the social background of a play or novel-our imagination does not operate with the concreteness or the attention to detail that might characterize our notions of Hamlet or Sherlock Holmes. It can be useful to speak of the Denmark of the one or the London of the other in order to imagine a physical environment in which our more detailed conceptualizations, so to speak, can live and move. In the one case the notion we have of a fictive environment is likely to remain vague and in the other case we are likely to import the idea of a real London in which our fictive characters move. Both strategies yield analysis as metaphor; we are describing the characters of a play or story as if they were real people living in a real country or city. The vagueness of the one environment is appropriate to the vagueness of any fictive setting when we try to generalize beyond our immediate reading experience. And the specificity of the other involves an obvious importation from nonfictive experience. In neither instance have we conceptualized a milieu that is like an actual city but is fictive and not real. At the same time there is a logical need for the notion of a fictionalized reality, if only as a way of describing in a comprehensive way the distinct conceptuali~tions that will constitute an individual reader’s semantic experience. In a sense these conceptualizations or ways of responding to literature serve as the fictional entities, the potential objects of predication, that we metaphorically compare to the objective world. The important point is to regard both fictional objects and the world that contains them as creations of our cultural and literary experience and not as objects with a fully independent status.

NOTES i For example, see David Lewis, ‘Truth in fiction’, American ~~ffo~o~~fc~f QuarterZy 15 (1978); Nicholas Woiterstorff, ‘Worlds of works of art’, JAAC 35.1 (1976); Terence Parsons, Nonexistent Objecis (Yale, 1980); and John Woods, The Logic ofFiction (Mouton, The Hague, 1974). * John Searle, ‘The logical status of fictional discourse’, New Literary History 6, (1974-75). 3 Gottlob Frege, ‘Uber Sinn und Bedeutung,, translated by Geach and Black in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, p. 62. (Oxford, 1960).

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4 Frege’s analysis of fictive names as lacking referential force seems related to his general analysis of names as having a meaning that is distinct from referential function, as in the association he makes between proper names and definite descriptions. 5 For example, in CoNected Papers 4, p. 544 Peirce says of proper names that they should be regarded as indices, since it is the ‘actual connection’ of the name with the object that brings about the denotative relationship. He goes on to state that ‘no proposition can be expressed without the use of Indices’. Peirce’s example is of a man’s words ‘Why, it is raining’ where it is the circumstances say of his standing by the window that makes the specific reference possible. But Peirce intends his example to apply to statements involving proper names where to modern analysts there would be no obvious indexical element. 6 The New York Times, 23 February ’ Quine,

W. V. ‘Quantifiers

(1979).

and prepositional

s See ‘On sense and reference.’ of Gottlob Frege, p. 70. Oxford

attidues.’

In The WaysofParadox.

In R. Beach and M. Black (Eds), Translations (1960).

9 Davidson, Donald ‘Truth and meaning.’ Reidel, Dordrecht (1969).

In Davis, Hackney

New York (1966). from

the Philosophical

and Wilson (Eds), Philosophical

Logic,

Writings p. 1. D.