Eugene Ho

One strategy sometimes employed in defense of realism about impossible fiction is the endorsement of the principle of poetic license. While the principle of poetic license has become the focus of much discussion on impossible fiction, I argue that the principle of poetic license is neither necessary nor sufficient for realism about impossible fiction. The principle can be strengthened so as to entail realism about impossible fiction, but I argue that the strengthened principle is empirically inadequate given the data provided by fictionality puzzles. I then provide a different argument from existential generalization for realism about impossible fiction which does not rely on either variant of the principle of poetic license. I suggest that this position, which leaves open the possibility that certain sets of propositions could not be jointly true-in-fiction, accommodates the data provided by fictionality puzzles and is more theoretically attractive than an account that endorses either variant of the principle of poetic license. Following which, I defend realism about impossible fiction from error theories about impossible fiction.

My belief that Socrates was wise, and your belief that Socrates was mortal can be said to have a common focus, insofar as both these thoughts are about Socrates. In Peter Geach’s terminology, the objects of our beliefs bear the feature of intentional identity, because our beliefs share the same putative target. But what if it turned out that Socrates never existed? Can a pair of thoughts share a common focus if the object both thoughts are about, does not actually, really exist? Object-centric accounts of intentionality which explain the aboutness or directedness of thought in terms of the intentional object the thought in question is about, contend that thoughts which share a common focus do so in virtue of both thoughts simply being about the same intentional object. However, Alexander Sandgren contends that such theories face difficulties in explaining a puzzle of intentional identity put forward by Walter Edelberg, in which a pair of sentences seem to differ in truth value but are purportedly logically equivalent on the object-centric theory. If this is right, then it seems that any account which explains intentionality with reference to an intentional object is threatened by this result, whether this object be abstract, merely possible, Meinongian, or otherwise. In this paper, I argue that Edelberg’s Puzzle is analogous to Frege’s Puzzle and the same tools conventionally used to solve Frege’s Puzzle can be used to solve Edelberg’s Puzzle. I then propose a new object-centric solution to Edelberg’s Puzzle which takes into account modes of presentation and which is able to accommodate all the relevant linguistic data.