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Are Fictional Characters and Literary Works Ontologically on a Par?
Author(s) -
Motoarcă IoanRadu
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
pacific philosophical quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.914
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1468-0114
pISSN - 0279-0750
DOI - 10.1111/papq.12182
Subject(s) - argument (complex analysis) , parallelism (grammar) , ontology , realism , philosophy , epistemology , literature , character (mathematics) , linguistics , art , mathematics , biochemistry , chemistry , geometry
This article is a reaction to the following argument that has been offered in favor of abstract realism about fictional characters: fictional characters do not impose any extra ontological cost on our ontology, because they belong to the same ontological kind as literary works, which we already accept. I address arguments that have been adduced by Jeffrey Goodman in defense of this argument, and I show that there is no relevant parallelism between fictional entities and literary works that the abstract fictional realist can use to bolster her theory.