Publication Details

Abstract

What is the status of sentences about fictional entities? What is the reference of their grammatical subject? Do they possess a truth value? The paper explores possible explanations of a truth value of sentences about fictional entities. While avoiding the possible dependency on particular theories, it proceeds in accordance with he fundamental common sense and ordinery language philosophy assumptions, particularly that a statement expressed by a sentence about fiction has a truth value which is not dependent on any dynamic conditions or external changes. The paper argues that a paraphrasing strategy, which emphasises the reference to a past event of a creation of a work of fiction, is the most plausible explanation of such a state. It is not ontologically committed to any speculative metaphysics, while being justifiable both semantically and contextually, considerably simpler and not affected by the problems caused by so called meta-fictional sentences.