Jeonggyu Lee

This paper deals with the identity problems of fictional objects, focusing on Anthony Everett's and Stuart Brock's leading criticisms against fictional creationism, the view that fictional objects are abstract objects created by our acts involving literary practices. My primary aim is to argue that creationism based on referentialism has enough resources to individuate fictional objects and hence can address the alleged identity problems: every alleged problematic case regarding the identity of fictional objects is well explained in terms of the notions of authorial intention, gappy proposition, inadvertent creation, and reference shift.

In this paper, I defend fictional creationism, the view that fictional objects are abstract artifacts, from the objection that the apparent truth of fictional negative existentials, such as “Sherlock Holmes does not exist,” poses a serious problem for creationism. I develop a sophisticated version of the pragmatic approach by focusing on the inconsistent referential intentions of ordinary speakers: the upshot would be that creationism is no worse —perhaps even in a better position— than anti-realism, even if we restrict our linguistic data to fictional negative existentials.

This paper deals with the semantics and meta-semantics for ordinary names in fiction. It has recently been argued by some philosophers that when ordinary names are used in fictional contexts, they change their semantic contents and work as fictional names in general. In this paper, I argue that there is no compelling reason to believe that such reference changes occur and defend the view that whether those names refer to real or fictional objects depends on which semantic intentions speakers have.

It is widely accepted among philosophers that there is a tension between acquaintance constraints on singular thought and the plausible assumption that the truths of singular attitude reports ensure the subject's having singular thoughts. From this, anti-acquaintance theorists contend that acquaintance constraints must be rejected. As a response, many acquaintance theorists maintain that there is good reason to doubt a strong connection between singular attitude reports and singular thoughts. In this paper, however, I defend the acquaintance theory by arguing that there is in fact no tension at all. I consider three objections regarding singular attitude reports against the acquaintance theory: (i) ultra-liberal singular attitude reports, (ii) the “There is something that S believes to be F” locution, and (iii) infelicities of singular attitude reports. Then, I argue that none of them succeed in showing a genuine tension.

The primary aim of this paper is to provide the exact diagnosis of the contingent a priori debate so far by untangling complicated issues surrounding it, such as singular thought, linguistic stipulation, and epistemic justification. I will first maintain that most philosophers' arguments for or against the contingent a priori are ultimately based on one of two conflicting intuitions about linguistic stipulation: sceptics of the contingent a priori have appealed to the intuition that extra-linguistic knowledge cannot be acquired through the stroke of a pen, whereas proponents of it have appealed to the other intuition that one is in a position to understand a name that one introduces by oneself into one's own language. Then I will reconstruct the sceptics' and proponents' positions in their strongest form respectively and examine where they disagree, and finally I will argue that the contingent a priori debate cannot help but end in a stalemate without further scrutiny into singular thought. From this diagnosis, I conclude that in order to appropriately judge whether a contingent proposition is knowable a priori, we must first independently investigate what the conditions for singular thought are: the contingent a priori rides on the singular thought debate.

The primary aim of this paper is to provide a plausible fictional creationist explanation of when and how a fictional object comes into existence without a successful creative intention, focusing on the problem posed by Stuart Brock’s nominalist author scenario. I first present some intuitions about parallel scenarios for fictional objects and concrete artifacts as data to be explained. Then I provide a sufficient condition for the existence of artifacts that can explain both cases. An important upshot of this is that there is an overlooked way to bring artifacts into existence that should merit serious consideration, and this leads to a version of the mind-dependence, but not the intention-dependence, view of artifacts.