The Paradox of Fictional Creatures

Abstract

Authors create fictional characters; that is a “creationist locution”. Artefactualism takes such statements very seriously and holds that fictional characters are abstract artefacts, i.e., entities that are both created and abstract. Anti-creationists, by contrast, deny that we need to postulate such doubtful entities to explain creationist locutions. In this paper, I present this debate in the form of a paradox, which organises the many existing theories of creationist locutions in a single logical space. This new way of framing the problem displays the crucial role of so-called “linking principles”. In general, it seems that fictionality entails nonexistence, while creation entails existence. This is why “fictional creatures” are puzzling. I further argue that to create means to invent and to realise, and finally, that fictional characters are invented but not created, contra artefactualism. I thus advocate for a new kind of anti-creationism about fictional characters.

Taking Abstract Artifacts Seriously—The Functioning and Malfunctioning of Fictional Characters

“…In what follows, I will focus on a case of the former kind in order to show the sense in which a paradigmatic literary character, namely Poe's Berenice, has words as its matter while its form prescribes one to deploy a singular mental representation and add a set of properties to this representation. Literary characters, in this sense, are "people of paper", as Louis Rouillé [12,13] calls them. If, on the other hand, one endorsed Evnine's claim that the matter of a literary character consists of properties instead of words, one could not find such matter directly in Poe's text, which surely is made of words.…”