Creating abstract objects

Friedell, David

doi:10.1111/phc3.12783

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 83 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…van Inwagen (2003) is noncommittal on the two abstractionist lines, mentioning costs for both. Friedell (2021) presents responses to worries about artifactualism, congenial to the social‐Austinian view that both Abell (2020) and García‐Carpintero (2013, 2019b) defend. Fictional works result on this view from the communicative acts of fiction‐makers; they are social constructs, abstract created artifacts with norm‐regulated functions.…”

Section: Realist or Irrealist Semantics?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The semantics of fiction

García‐Carpintero

2022

Mind & Language

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The paper reviews proposals by Abell, Predelli, and others on the semantics of fiction, focusing on the discourse through which fictions are created. Predelli develops the radical fictionalism of former writers like Kripke and van Inwagen, according to which that discourse is contentless and does not express propositions. This paper offers reasons to doubt these claims. It then explores realist proposals like Abell's in which singular terms in fictions refer to fictional characters, understood as socially created representational artifacts, and irrealist alternatives in which the discourse is fully meaningful even though those terms fail to refer.

show abstract

Section: Realist or Irrealist Semantics?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The semantics of fiction

García‐Carpintero

2022

Mind & Language

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Musical works are mind-independent artifacts

Mikalonytė

2023

Synthese

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Realism about musical works is often tied to some type of Platonism. Nominalism, which posits that musical works exist and that they are concrete objects, goes with ontological realism much less often than Platonism: there is a long tradition which holds human-created objects (artifacts) to be mind-dependent. Musical Platonism leads to the well-known paradox of the impossibility of creating abstract objects, and so it has been suggested that only some form of nominalism becoming dominant in the ontology of art could cause a great change in the field and open up new possibilities. This paper aims to develop a new metaontological view starting from the widely accepted claim that musical works are created. It contends that musical works must be concrete and created objects of some sort, but, nevertheless, they are mind-independent, and we should take the revisionary methodological stance. Although musical works are artifacts, what people think about them does not determine what musical works are. Musical works are similar to natural objects in the following sense: semantic externalism applies to the term ‘musical work’ because, firstly, they possess a shared nature, and, secondly, we can be mistaken about what they are.

show abstract

Creating abstract objects

Cited by 2 publications

References 83 publications

The semantics of fiction

The semantics of fiction

Musical works are mind-independent artifacts

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About