Kripke, Saul A. Reference and Existence. The John Locke Lectures.

Abstract

Kripke, Saul A. Reference and Existence. The John Locke Lectures. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 170 pp.

What Kind of Non-Realism is Fictionalism?

“…It is usually presented as a key attraction of mathematical fictionalism that the view can accommodate our mathematical practices and give a straightforward account of mathematical discourse without committing to an ontology of mathematical entities. 2 Fictionalism has also been suggested as an approach to moral properties (Joyce 2001;Kalderon 2005;Nolan, Restall, and West 2005), fictional characters (Brock 2002;2015;Everett 2007;Kripke 1973;Sainsbury 2009;Walton 2000), scientific entities (Rosen 1994), 3 concrete possible worlds ( Divers 1999;Rosen 1990;, time (Baron, Miller, and Tallant 2021), mereological parts (Schaffer 2007), and composite entities (Rosen & Dorr 2002), among other things. These other forms of fictionalism have similar features and motivations.…”

The null hypothesis for fiction and logical indiscipline

“…I only assume that the kind of constructions are well-formed, that is, they can have perfectly coherent truth conditions (their syntactic soundness is beyond question). I should add, however, that copredication cases are not easily assimilable to standard treatments of fiction precisely because they meld different ways in which fiction is used, and so prima facie preclude approaches designed exclusively to deal with in or out cases, respectively, and also dual treatments that assume fictional terms to be somehow ambiguous between, say, character as abstract artefact and pretence (Kripke, 2013). If a traditional account is to work on copredication, something additional is required (Collins, 2021a).…”