Inferences, names, and fictions

ROD BERTOLET

INFERENCES, NAMES, AND FICTIONS

This paper centers around two issues concerning works of fiction. Thefirst is the matter of what a particular work of fiction implies beyondwhat it explicitly states. The second is the status of names which are, aswe often put it, names of fictional characters. While these remarks areintended to supplement a view about what speakers who use sentencessuch as 'Pegasus is a winged horse' say which I have set out elsewhere, I

the issues are of independent interest. For the purposes of this paper thispresumption will suffice: when in ordinary conversational circumstances a speaker utters the sentence 'Pegasus is a winged horse', thatspeaker makes a true assertion, says something true. What it is that isasserted, and why it is true, may be left as open questions. It willfacilitate the discussion for me to give a brief indication of my ownviews on this in Section 2, but those views need not be accepted toagree with the point of that section.

1.

In this section we shall consider the notion of what a myth or storyimplies, what in some sense follows from a myth or story.2 According tothe legend of Paul Bunyan, for example, Bunyan had an ox namedBabe. Did Babe, according to the story, have four stomachs? Oxen do,and Babe is an ox: but does that clinch it? It is difficult to deny thatsome things, while not explicitly stated in a story, in some sense followfrom it. If we are treated to a lengthy description of a policeman chasinga fleet suspect on foot, up and down garbage-strewn alleys, then even ifthe author for stylistic reasons neglects to mention that the policeman isbipedal, it will be incredible to maintain that we cannot say that thepoliceman has two legs because the story does not explicitly say that.There are, equally notoriously, things that cannot be reasonablyconcluded from stories and myths; I cannot say something true byuttering 'Santa Claus is a liberal Republican', since the story does notspeak to the old man's political persuasions, and since there is nothing

Synthese 58 (1984) 203-218. 0039-7857/84/0582-0203 $01.60© 1984 by D. Reidel Publishing Company

204 ROD BERTOLET

in the nature of philanthropy, cheerfulness, or obesity (some of his othercharacteristics) which ~ould lead us to conclude that he would (orwould not) have been in the left wing of the Republican party.

There are certainly problems here that need attention. Some takethem to be special problems concerning the interpretation of fiction.That I wimt to deny. There is no reason to think that ascertaining whatfollows from a story will be either easier or different in kind fromascertaining what follows from the work of a philosopher. We distinguish, as needed, what a philosopher wrote, from what he iscommitted to on the basis of what he wrote, from what he thought hewas committed to, from what he probably had in mind or must havereally meant (especially with figures in the history of philosophy). Wecould do the same with the commitments of stories, but do not becauseof our general lack of interest in bothering with such distinctionsconcerning mythology. Or so I shall suggest.

There are a couple of general points which should be noted at theoutset. The first is that there is a certain artificiality involved in talkingabout the implications of a particular work of fiction or the inferenceswe draw from it. Such talk may seem to suggest that we first read a workof fiction in its entirety and only then begin to make inferences aboutwhat it suggests or implies. This is of course wrong; we begin tointerpret with the first paragraph, and often need to revise ourinterpretation along the way. Thus, what an early part of a storysuggests or implies might be quite different from what a larger partsuggests, and this in turn distinct from the implications of the whole.This is, after all, what makes surprise endings possible. But whateverguides us in our construal of the whole work will be that which guidesour construal of any subsection of it, with the only difference being inthe amount of information that needs to be taken into consideration.The same sort of point holds, plainly enough, for the understanding of aphilosophical essay: what sections one and two of an essay imply will bedifferent from what section one alone implies (unless the second sectionis very boring indeed, and contains no new claims or explanations). Butagain the principles of interpretation remain constant. So while we needto remain sensitive to the fact that our attempts to understand storiesare ongoing processes, no harm should be done by dealing here justwith the implications of a finished work.

The second general point is that while the examples discussed willoften concern the deductive consequences of a story, what a story

INFERENCES, NAMES, AND FICTIONS 205

implies (not to mention suggests) is hardly limited to such consequences. Indeed, in the example of the police officer in the firstparagraph of this section, it need not be that the story deductivelyentails that the policeman is bipedal for it to be entirely sensible toconclude that this is an implication of the tale. What I have in mind asthe implications of a work of fiction are those things that a readerinformed of the author and circumstances of composition can reasonably infer from it. This remark is doubtless obscure at this stage, sinceits elaboration is yet to come. The point that is relevant at this stage isthat what it is reasonable to infer may be made reasonable by inductiveevidence, inferences to the best explanation, etc. There is no difference,on this score, between what is implied by a work of fiction and what isimplied by a work of history: the author has various intentionsconcerning assumptions the reader is to make and take into consideration in his construal of the work, and the reader in turn makes andworks with these assumptions partly because of the author's intentionthat he do so.

One may be led to wonder, at this point, why it would not do just aswell, if not better, to speak of what the author implies rather than what astory implies. There is indeed a sense in which what a story implies islargely up to its author, but it would be at least misleading to simply saythat what a story implies is what its author implies, or that we couldsimply drop talk about the former in favor of talk about the latter. It isnot just that there are limits on the author's authority, that a story mightimply things that the author did not intend; as we shall see there aresuch limits, but of course all of us may imply things we don't intend ordon't even notice. The problem is rather that simply identifying what astory implies with what its author implies provides encouragement forthe thought that there are some things an author asserts and otherswhich he merely implies. But the author of fiction isn't assertinganything at all - and in the sense in which this is so, he isn't implyinganything at all either. 3 What a story implies is up to its author in that thebackground against which its implications are to be judged is, withincertain limits, up to him. How this is so will become clearer as weproceed.

To return to our problem then: it seems reasonable to conclude thatsome inferences from stories are allowable, others not. Which? Whatare the rules of the game here? While I am not prepared to offer afinished story, I will point out what I take to be the relevant con-

206 ROD BERTOLET

siderations. Roughly, it seems that we can make exactly those inferences we would make about existing people, places and things,subject to a certain sort of ceteris paribus clause. That is, we maypresume that ordinary laws of nature - those in chemistry and physicsthat inform us about possible time-sequences, for example - hold, andbase our inferences on these (or rather what we take these to be) andwhat the story says. The other factors which may not be equal are at firstsight the whims of the author: a novelist may pulI the rug out fromunder us by tinkering with whatever he chooses. An example may beuseful.

A book beginning as folIows would simply suggest that we have a ramand some person (the narrator) who isn't too fond of sheep.

The old ram stands looking down our rockslides, stupidly triumphant. I blink. I stare inhorror. "Scat!" I hiss. "Go back to your cave, go back to your cowshed, whatever!" Hecocks his head like an elderly, slow-witted, king, considers the angles, and decides toignore me.

But the next passage presents a gentle tug on the rug.

I stamp. I hammer the ground with my fists. I hurl a shellsize stone at him. He will notbudge. I shake my two hairy fists at the sky and I let out a howl so unspeakable that thewater at my feet turns ice and even I myself am left uneasy.

The original supposition that the narrator is a normal person starts toslip away - and as we read on our equilibrium starts to go completely:

(It was just here, this shocking green, that once when the moon was tombed in clouds, Itore off sly old Athelgard's head. Here, where the startling tiny jaws of crocuses snap atthe late-winter sun like the heads of baby watersnakes, here I killed the old woman withthe iron gray hair. She tasted of urine and spleen, which made me spit.

The narrator, it soon emerges, is not even an exceptionalIy strongperson with cannibalistic leanings; what we have in Grendel4 is amonster (shades of "Beowulf", to be more precise). The point, ofcourse, is that the story itself may force us to drop ordinary inferences,such as speakers of English being human, by constraining the possibilities - by constraining what would have to be the case if the storywere true. To the extent that this is done, or to the extent that thepossibilities are enlarged, our ordinarily reasonable inferences fail, orbecome inapplicable. This may be done in various ways, through toyingwith the laws of nature ('The Metamorphosis", at least some science


fiction), or with normal human psychology, etc. But where there are nosurprises, we may infer and hypothesize at will; within certain limits ofcourse, those limits being set by the story,

This gives due weight to the perquisites of the author, but fails to takeaccount of the context in which the author works. If we read in aneighteenth century tale that the protagonist traveled from London toParis by the fastest available means, it will not do to conclude that hetook the Concorde. But we might well conclude that this follows fromthe very same sentence in a contemporary story. What appears toexplain this, is that the setting in which the author operates influenceswhat we take a story to imply, and reasonably so. What is currentpractice, currently available, local custom, and so on will be a functionof what these things were taken to be by the author. '

One needs to be careful about all this though. What is current andlocal is so relative to the time and place of the story rather than that ofits authorship. It may be that what is commonly believed is not true, inwhich case there will be a question as to whether to take what iscommonly believed or what is true as providing the proper backgroundagainst which to judge the implications of a story.~ I am inclined to optfor what is commonly believed, but notice that we might, if we cared to,make a distinction similar to the one noted early on between what aphilosopher is committed to and what he takes himself to be committedto.t> If what follows from the story plus background truths is p and whatfollows from the story plus background (false) beliefs is q, where p of q,then we may if we wish say that while the author thought that q followedfrom the story, p is what actually follows from it. We tend to ignore thelatter alternative, probably because we tend to allow an author maximalcontrol over 'his' story. But the option of appealing to it is real enough,and it could be called upon if ever there seemed a point to doing so.Still, our usual practice is that what the author takes these things to beprevails even when it is erroneous - consider a story in which whales aretaken to be fish, or one of the more offensive portrayals of AmericanIndians. 7 Another complication is that it may be necessary to considerother works by the same author, or the literary tradition in which anauthor works. Consider, for example, the various Sherlock Holmesstories by Conan Doyle, and the Sherlock Holmes stories by morerecent authors. (Compare the possible reevaluation of a philosopher'sdoctrine when we discover that he did read Hume after all.)

Two points concerning tinkering with laws of nature deserve a bit

208 ROD BERTOLET

more attention. One is that it is possible to enlarge or constrain thepossibilities not by altering the laws of nature but by, say, allowing thegods to suspend them every so often to work a miracle or two.s Wherethese intrusions are predictable, they can be systematically integratedinto our understanding of the work. Otherwise they need to be added inan ad hoc fashion, with our construal of the work being similarlyrevised. The second point emerges once we notice that some lawswould presumably go on the heels of others, notably those that entaillaws explicitly altered. Take as a quite simple-minded example twogeneralizations concerning planetary motion, one of which subsumesthe other. Were the mathematical relationships postulated by thelower-level generalization altered, those described by the higher-levelgeneralization would certainly require suitable revision. This sort ofadjustment would presumably need to be made whether the authorintended it or not, just because of the logical relationship between thetwo generalizations.

Other cases will be more difficult. On the basis of current scientifictheory dropping the law of conservation of energy would likely promptus to drop (or at least leave us without a good reason to maintain) thelaws of electromagnetic induction. But this is relative to certainassumptions about what else would and would not remain constant:there is simply no telling in advance what readjustments would be madewere so fundamental a principle to require rejection. If such a principlewere expli~itly rejected in a work of fiction, we could only be guided bythat work in attempting to ascertain what further readjustments tomake. Fortunately, the more fundamental principles of physical theoryare seldom relevant to the proper construal of stories. In case the pointis not already clear, part of the problem is that when I speak of laws ofnature I have in mind the lawlike generalizations of which most of usare aware. These are seldom granted the status of laws in scientifictheories, and those principles which are accorded that status arefrequently unknown to authors and their audiences. In this caseignorance is blissful. Because author and audience are unaware of theseprinciples they play no role in either's understanding of a story, and theconsequences of altering the lawlike generalizations which are appealedto for these fundamental principles are similarly irrelevant.

Finally, we must remain sensitive to the point about the author'sprerogatives. If an eighteenth century author explicitly writes that theprotagonist made the London to Paris journey in thirty minutes in a


flying machine, then the fact and the belief that there are no flyingmachines are both overridden. There is in all this great potential forunclarity, uncertainty and downright confusion in stories and ourattempts to understand them. If nothing else, the account is on thispoint true to experience.

One further problem concerns fictions which are contradictory. Thiscan be relatively innocuous, as in the various placings of Watson's warwound in the various Conan Doyle stories, or can involve wholesaleincoherence, as in the time travel tales told by eighth graders. (If thosephilosophers who think that time travel is logically impossible arecorrect, then even the most beguiling tale of this sort is inconsistent.)The problem is what to say is implied by such a story. There is a clearand familiar sense of 'follows from' on which anything at all followsfrom a contradiction. As we remain reluctant to conclude, from ConanDoyle's slips about where Watson's war wound was, that SherlockHolmes was (and was not) a Martian, we apparently must blockdeductive consequences of this sort, despite our desire to appeal tological connections that do not stem from contradictions. This is nodoubt a problem,lJ but is it a problem peculiar to fiction?

Consider a philosopher, McLocke, who in the course of a lengthydiscussion affirms and denies some claim. Anything is deducible fromMcLocke's view. It remains absurd to claim that according toMcLocke, a person is (and is not) identical with whomever he claims tobe identical with on Thursdays. Now noting this does not make it anyeasier to deal with McLocke's tendency to contradict himself, or informus on how to settle a $5 bet on the location of Watson's war wound. Butit does once again suggest that the thought that there are specialproblems posed by fiction is by no means clearly correct. In the extremecase a particular fiction may be so horribly confused that we do notknow what to make of it. But so too with a lamentably typical discussionof induction by a beginning philosophy s~udent. In a more minormatter, we might say what we say of a historian who locates a battle indifferent years - that he contradicts himself on this point - and leave itat that. (Save, of course, for who collects on the $5 bet. I recommenddeclaring it void.)

There remains, however, another possibility, which is that the authorcould simply have made a mistake, and be willing to be corrected on thematter. This may seem incompatible with the control we are inclined toallow an author over 'his' story - what is there that he could be mistaken

210 ROD BERTOLET

about? - and hence may seem to raise a special problem for fictions. Ishall suggest no such problems arise, but we do need to allow for suchcorrections, if only because real persons, places and so on figure inworks of fiction. An author who puts a demonstration in Lafayette Parkacross the street from the Lincoln Memorial rather than the WhiteHouse may well confess to error, and someone who writes that lead canbe transmuted into gold will, in some stories, have erred. (Not,obviously, in alchemical fancies.) And I shall suggest a similar treatment for the various placings of Watson's war wound, which we maypresume to have been an unwitting contradiction on Conan Doyle'spart. But we hardly have a clear enough version of the claim yet toworry about extending it.

What we need is an account of when a story may be legitimatelycorrected which distinguishes such corrections from genuine revisionsin or rewritings of a story, an account which preserves the author's'control'. What I suggest is that we be guided by certain counterfactualsabout the author, concerning whether he would change a claim if hewere to learn it to be false. This captures the correctability of the claimthat Lafayette Park is across the street from the Lincoln Memorial, andthe uncorrectability of the exploits of the imagined protagonists of thestory of the demonstrators assembled there. The deeper explanationconcerns the degree to which an author intends the story to be aboutactual persons, places, events and so on, and this will vary from fictionto fiction. It is when the story is to be in part about e.g., a real event thatan author would change comments which are not true of that event,were he to learn of their falsehood.

The extension to Watson's war wound and other unintentionalcontradictions involves appealing to the conjunction of the claims inconflict. It seems reasonable to presume that authors intend not toviolate the laws of logic. Were the author in question to note that he hada war wound located in two places, he would then retrench, banningone of the locales. The analogue with a philosophical essay on this pointis our reaction to a successful reductio argument - we reject one ormore of the assumptions that led to the contradiction. This ought tohandle any case of contradictory claims; were the author to learn of thecontradiction, he'd retract it, by retracting one or more of the contradictory conjuncts. (I suppose an author could deliberately indulge incontradictions or other violations of logical truths. Setting aside thespecial problems concerning poetic uses of language, I am left with

INFERENCES. NAMES. AND FICTIONS 211

nothing, or at least nothing polite, to say here about the author of prosewho deliberately contradicts himself.)

There are of course epistemological problems involved in evaluatingthe truth of such counterfactuals, especially for long-dead authors. Butthese problems are not peculiar to fiction. Consider the examplesphilosophers present for or against theories: some of these are entirelymade up, whereas others are derived from (and sometimes cruciallyturn on) the results of scientific theories. That an example of the firstsort does not correspond to the actual world is of no interest for thequestion of whether it can underwrite a philosophical criticism or view.That an example of the second sort is wrong on empirical grounds is onthe other hand cause for revision; its author would upon learning of itsfalsehood revise it. The point is that the problem of deciding whether aphilosopher would change an example if he were to discover it is wronginvolves the same epistemological problems as those we face with theauthor of fiction. In the case of the philosopher the question is to whatextent facts about scientific theories or experiments are to figure in hisphilosophical story. It will often enough be hard telling, but thedetermining factor, the intentions of the author, is the same in the caseof the philosopher and the essayist, and the problems in figuring outeither's intentions are of the same kind. There are many sources ofpossible error here, including our failure to recognize that an authorwants to relocate a park or building in his tale. But there is no reason tothink such problems special to fiction and its construal.

I should like to turn briefly to the related topic of what constitutes a

story. There are, I am told, differences between the Santa Claus story Ilearned and the one Dutch children hear (e.g., differences as to whetherpresents are left in stockings or wooden shoes), and one can imaginesimilar differences with tales of greater literary value. Do we have onestory here, or two? Consider also the same words (or at any rate mutualtranslations) being produced in different cultures, or a hundred yearsapart in a given culture. One or two stories? I suspect that we shouldrefuse to give a straight answer here, adopting our ordinary terminology of variants of a single story. III Thus the American and DutchSanta Claus stories are variants of a single story, one stating that the oldguy drops presents in shoes, the other that he deposits them in stockingshung by the mantle with care. Similarly, we may find various versions ofa legend, or a particular tale of unrequited love. There is, once again, asimilarity with philosophical or other theories here. The answer to a

212 ROD BERTOLET

question about whether X and Hume have the same view is notuncommonly 'Sort of; the views are alike in these ways, but X's versiondiffers from Hume's in that .. .'. In matters fictional, historical orphilosophical, there will be some clear cases and some very messy casesof versions of the same tale.

There are, then, difficult questions concerning what constitutes astory, and what a story implies as well as explicitly says. Consequently itwill sometimes be difficult to determine whether what someone says byuttering a sentence 'about a fictional character' is true. But this issometimes quite hard, and it is not obviously a defect in a view that itpreserves this difficulty. Indeed, I should rather take it to be a defect ina view that it gave clear and unhedged answers to these questions whenwe are unclear and anxious to hide in the hedges. What is implied by apiece of fiction is a matter as complex as what is implied by any otherpiece of discourse. But whatever principles of interpretation areappropriate to fiction are not different from those suitable to otherforms of discourse. That we do not have a smoothed out account ofwhat those principles are is hardly to be denied, but we can deny thatfiction poses special problems.

2.

I should like to turn now to a different matter, the status of namessuch as 'Pegasus'. One could hold that the story of Pegasus, in whole orin part, gives the meaning of the name 'Pegasus'. Or one could hold thatit is somehow part of the meaning of 'Pegasus' that it is the name of afictional horse. In either case one might conclude that competentspeakers would, by virtue of knowing English, know these facts aboutthe meaning of the name. I do not think one should hold any of theseviews however, and this section is designed to argue against doing so.

It will be useful for me to briefly indicate my own views on whatspeakers who use sentences such as 'Pegasus is a winged horse' say, butI stress that you do not have to believe this to accept the subsequentargument. (It is consistent with that argument that 'Pegasus' is indeedthe name of a nonexistent object.) My own view of the correct accountof how we say something true by uttering such sentences involvespostulating speaker's presuppositions which are not presuppositions ofthe sentences used by the speaker. For a speaker to presuppose that p isfor him to take it to be understood that p, or to take p for granted. 11 I

INFERENCES, NAMES, AND FICTIONS

claim that in the usual cases in which someone utters

(1) Pegasus is a winged horse

he presupposes

(2) There is a myth in which Pegasus figures

and (roughly)

(3) There is no individual which the Pegasus myth is about

and asserts

213

(4) According to the myth, Pegasus is a winged horse.

These claims do not apply to someone who is actually telling the storyof Pegasus, since he is not asserting anything at all, still less anythingtrue: they apply only to those who are as it were reporting the content ofthe myth of Pegasus. I shall not undertake to defend these claims here.What I shall do instead is argue against taking (2) and (3) to bepresuppositions of the sentence (1) itself. So taking them would, ofcourse, be one way of endorsing the claim that part of the meaning of'Pegasus' is that it names a fictional horse.

The standard notion of a sentence presupposition is that a sentence 5presupposes another sentence 5' just in case both 5 and its negationimply 5'Y Thus, to take an overused example,

(5) John has stopped beating his wife

is said to presuppose

(6) John has been beating his wife

since both (5) and its negation entail (6). This relation is taken, quiteexplicitly, to be a semantic relation, one involving the meaning of (5)and (6). And this is what is not true of sentences such as (1)-(3).

Suppose that the circumstances of a speaker's utterance of (1) are notthe usual ones, but that this speaker thinks the Pegasus myth is true (heregards it as part of ancient history). This speaker cannot be said topresuppose (2) and (3); he by hypothesis thinks that the story is true andabout a certain flying horse. He presupposes that there was a certainflying horse, and that this tale is history. More to the point, though,neither set of presuppositions - neither those given by (2) and (3) northose last mentioned - is, from a purely semantic point of view, more

214 ROD BERTOLET

appropriate than the other. So either both sets of presuppositions arepresuppositions of the sentence or neither set is. If both are, then (1) hasor can have contradictory presuppositions. If these presuppositions aresomehow traceable to, or represented in, the meaning or deep structureof the sentence (as semantic presuppositions are held to be) then theremust be something inherently inconsistent about (1). This is absurd.

A way of urging that despite this argument the presuppositions inquestion are presuppositions of (1) would be to claim that they aresomehow generated by the lexical item 'Pegasus', by the meaning ofthat name. The short way with this proposal, it might seem, is to pointout that names do not have any meaning, or at least any meaningsufficient to generate (2) and (3) as presuppositions of (1).1 endorse thiscriticism,l3 and see no reason at all to make an exception of 'Pegasus',etc. The view that Shakespeare's play gives the meaning of the name'Hamlet', along with its curious consequence that every 'truth aboutHamlet' is analytic, has been defended, 14 but 1 at least am not anxious toaccept it, or variants which make some subset of the descriptions in theplay the meaning of the name. Notice, though, that we now need anexplanation of how it can be at all sensible to claim, as 1 do, that thespeaker presupposes (2) and (3). If 1 reject the Meinongian's claim thata certain fictional horse is in the extension of 'Pegasus' and reject theclaim that certain descriptions are part of the meaning of 'Pegasus', howcan 1 explain how the speaker is rationally entitled to the presuppositions which 1 claim he has? Another answer is possible, and 1believe preferable. (I think it remains preferable even if the Meinongianis right after all.)

What rather seems to be correct is that 'Pegasus' was used as if itwere the name of such a creature - where this means no more than,'Pegasus' occurred in a certain way in the sentences which constitutethe myth. Is That is what every moderately well educated speaker'knows about Pegasus' and it is quite sufficient to entitle the speaker tohis presuppositions. As one need not deny, in endorsing the Kripkeancritique of description theories of names, that speakers do in factgenerally associate descriptions with the names they use, one need notdeny that speakers associate with 'Pegasus' the story of a flying horse.But this hardly entails that the story, or some portion of it, is themeaning of the name 'Pegasus'.

There is I believe an illuminating analogy begging to be drawn herewith reading comprehension tests. We have all been assaulted, from


elementary school to the Graduate Record Examination, by passageswhich we are instructed to read followed by multiple choice questionsregarding the content of those passages. Consider this example, and theinstruction to give the best answer. "that is, the one that does notrequire you to make what are by commonsense standards implausible,superfluous, or incompatible assumptions":

All members of the advisory committee, appointed by eachmayor to serve during his or her term, must belong toregistered political parties,The only registered political parties in town are the Progressive and Monarchist parties.The present mayor is a Monarchist noted for her strongparty bias.

On the basis of the evidence above, which of the following conclusionsis most likely to be true?

(A) The present mayor has been a Monarchist all her life.(B) All members of the advisory committee have usually

belonged to the party to which the mayor belonged.(C) The present mayor's advisory committee has some Monar

chists appointed to serve only during her term.(D) Everyone in town professes loyalty to either the Progressive

or the Monarchist party.(E) The Progressive and Monarchist parties recommend to the

mayor candidates from the advisory committee. 16

Now in order to arrive at the correct answer, which is supposed to be(C), we have to do various things, such as treat 'Monarchist' as if itreferred to a political party, indeed the same political party in both of itsOccurrences in the passage, and to treat anaphoric pronouns as if theyreferred to the same person as their antecedent noun phrases. Butneither we nor the authors of the question need think there is anyMonarchist party referred to, nor of course need there be any suchparty at all. What we know, and so what is true, about 'Monarchist' isnot that it is the name of a political party, imagined or otherwise, butthat it is used as if it were the name of a political party. I? Similarly with'Pegasus', with the major difference being that more people are familiarwith the facts about 'Pegasus' than with those about 'Monarchist'.

So I think little needs to be conceded to the objector who suggests

216 ROD BERTaLET

that the presuppositions I have mentioned are generated by the lexicalitem 'Pegasus'. There have probably been lots of pets named'Pegasus', It! but let us suppose that 'Pegasus' has null extension, but hasbeen used as if it did have something in its extension, in particular as if awinged horse captured by Bellerophon ... were named by it. Thequestion is, Is this a semantic fact about 'Pegasus'? It seems to me thatthe answer is no; at least the mere fact that the name has been so used isnot a semantic fact about it. Since there is not at present a great deal ofagreement on what semantics comprises it is difficult to attempt aconvincing argument for this claim, but an analogy may be at leastsuggestive. I'! That 'Pegasus' has been so used in mythology is, I think,no more a semantic fact about the word 'Pegasus' than it is a semanticfact about the word 'love' that it can be found embodied in a certainsculpture by Robert Indiana, or that a depiction of that embodiment ofthe word subsequently appeared on an 8¢ U.S. postage stamp. I see noreason to suppose that the story concerning Pegasus constitutes ameaning for the word 'Pegasus', or that linguistic competence with thatword requires knowledge of that story. Someone who thinks Pegasus isa real horse, or who has simply never heard of Pegasus, might have hada better education, and may suffer some false beliefs, but this does notramify into his linguistic competence.

That 'truths about fiction' give us special complications in ourtheories of language, metaphysics and epistemology is a view I oncefound rather attractive. I hope that this paper makes some contributionto a rejection of it.

NOTES

1 In 'Reference, Fiction, and Fictions', forthcoming in Synthese. I am grateful to thereferees and editors for suggesting that I extricate an earlier version of the presentdiscussion from the midst of that paper, and for a number of subsequent suggestionswhich have led to improvements in the final version. I have found helpful, in thinkingover these matters, David Lewis' 'Truth in Fiction', American Philosophical Quarterly 15(1978), pp. 37-46, and Terence Parsons' Nonexistent Objects (Yale, 1980). I have ratherfreely borrowed examples from these works when they seemed appropriate; on the otherhand I would often dispute the treatment of the examples, and would certainly dispute thegeneral approach advocated in these works.2 I do not make any claims in this paper about the interesting question of what speechacts the author of a story is performing in telling the story. My concern is with theimplications of the story told, rather than with how to analyze or explicate the telling of it.J So long as one kept this in mind, it would not be wrong to speak of the implications of


the author (in a different sense), but the terminology would almost surely invitemisunderstanding. Incidentally, in claiming that the author is not asserting anything, I donot mean to deny that the author has a point to make, a view to propound, and so on. Imerely mean to deny that any of this is asserted in the telling of the story."' John Gardner, Grendel (Ballantine Books, 1971). All quotations are excerpted from thefirst two pages of the novel., I tend to individuate stories by the content of the sentences which constitute them, andthen to speak of the implications of a story-against-a-particular-background. One mayinstead, with Lewis, individuate fictions as stories "told by a storyteller on a particularoccasion" ('Truth in Fiction', p. 39), and speak of the implications of a particular fiction.While the approaches differ, I think each can be made to preserve all the relevantdistinctions, and that the verdicts they deliver will be the same.t, Something like this distinction underlies the distinction between Lewis' Analysis 1 andAnalysis 2 in 'Truth in Fiction', pp. 42 and 45.7 A somewhat more subtle question is whether only commonly held beliefs should count,or whether we must allow any quirky belief held by an author, no matter how privatelyheld, to influence what we take a story to imply. I am inclined to think that Lewis is rightto disallow any influence to the quirky, private beliefs ('Truth in Fiction', p. 44), but wemight distinguish what it would be reasonable to take a story to imply from what its authortook it to imply. That there is any practical point to such a distinction in the study offiction is highly dubious.k It might be thought that we could suppose that the laws of nature still hold, but that theysomehow, inexplicably, suffer exceptions. I don't know what this might mean other thanthat those laws do not hold.') The difficulty is probably most acute for those who wish to analyze 'truth in fiction' byappeal to possible worlds semantics but who remain hostile to the impossible possibleworld. See Lewis, 'Truth in Fiction', pp. 45-46, and Parsons, Nonexistent Objects, p. 182.I() It does not follow, from the fact that (as noted earlier) we might draw differentconclusions from an eighteenth and a twentieth century rendition of the same sentences,that the stories differ. We draw those differing conclusions from the sentences of the storytogether with the presumed background truths.II See Section 3 of 'Reference, Fiction, and Fictions' for further discussion. I haveoversimplified the presentation of my view here to save space. The presupposition labeled(3) is given in an especially compressed form. A variant on (4) could be 'The myth saysthat Pegasus is a winged horse'. See Section 4 of 'Reference, Fiction, and Fictions' for amore thorough (and more subtle) discussion of (2)-(4).12 See, among other places, pp. 62-63 of Gottlob Frege, 'On Sense and Reference', in P.Geach and M. Black (eds.), Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Goltlob Frege(Blackwell, 196(»), pp. 57-78; P. F. Strawson, Introduction to Logical Theory (Methuen,1952), p. 18; Bas van Fraassen, Formal Semantics and Logic (Macmillan, 1971), pp.152-163; and pp. 45-47 of Edward Keenan, 'Two Kinds of Presupposition in NaturalLanguage', in C. Fillmore and T. Langendoen (eds.), Studies in Linguistic Semantics(Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1972), pp. 45-52." The critique is that given in Saul A. Kripke, 'Naming and Necessity', in D. Davidsonand G. Harman (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language (Reidel, 1972), pp. 253-355 and736-769, and in Keith S. Donnellan, 'Proper Names and Identifying Descriptions', pp.

218 ROD BERTOLET

356-379 of the same volume. A view which is due to Russell on which names would havesome meaning, but none sufficient to generate (2) and (3) as presuppositions of (1), is mostrecently discussed in Kent Bach, 'What's in a Name?', Australasian Journal of Philosophy59 (1981), pp. 371-386.14 By Robert M. Martin and Peter K. Schotch, in 'The Meaning of Fictional Names',Philosophical Studies 26 (1974), pp. 377-388. They claim that 'Hamlet' is a concept wordrather than a referring word, and that it has a definition, but no denotation (p. 384), andthat Hamlet "amounts to a collection ... of stipulative definitions" (p. 386).15 There is I gather a bit of overlap between my view and Kripke's, but (aside from thevery brief remarks in the Addenda to 'Naming and Necessity') I know his work on thesematters only second-hand, and the overlap certainly does not extend to our conclusions.What I understand to be his conclusions that 'Hamlet' is not a name but a pretend name,and that Hamlet could not have existed, are not ones that I share. 'Hamlet' is no lessgenuine a name than 'Kripke', but I gather that this claim is not consistent with Kripke'sposition.16 The example is taken from the 1976-77 Law School Admissions Bulletin.17 It is, incidentally, for these reasons that I find arguments for nonexistent objects basedon anaphoric data unconvincing. Such arguments are given in Gerald Vision, 'Referringto What Does Not Exist', Canadian Journal of Philosophy 3 (1974), pp. 619-634, andParsons, 'Referring to Nonexistent Objects', Theory and Decision 11 (1979), pp. 95-110.18 This is itself an objection to the meaning claims about 'Pegasus' noted in the firstparagraph of Section 2. There is no semantic impropriety in naming a dog 'Pegasus'. Itmight be odd to name one's child 'Pegasus', as it is odd in various ways to name one'schild 'god', 'China', 'Chastity', or 'Aloyshious', but there is no particular reason to see asemantic oddity here. Still less would there be reason to declare 'Pegasus' ambiguousbetween a fictional object-name and a person-name.19 There is at least a methodological principle that seems quite sound to which we mightappeal here: that, as Boer puts it, "one ought whenever possible to try to account forpragmatic data in ways which eliminate or at least minimize the need for furthercomplication of one's antecedent syntactic and semantic theories" (Steven Boer, 'Meaning and Contrastive Stress', Philosophical Review 88 (1979), p. 274; see also Boer andWilliam G. Lycan, 'Who, MeT, Philosophical Review 89 (1980), pp. 427-466). Appealingto this sort of principle, I elaborate an argument against the claim that, e.g., the sentence'Pegasus is a winged horse' is itself elliptical for the sentence 'According to the myth,Pegasus is a winged horse' in 'On a Fictional Ellipsis', forthcoming in Erkenntnis.

Dept. of Philosophy,Purdue University,West Layfayette, IN 47907U.S.A

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Inferences, names, and fictions