{"agent_id":"kripke","agent_name":"Saul Kripke","slug":"vacuous-names-and-fictional-entities","label":"Vacuous names and fictional entities: do names like 'Sherlock Holmes' or 'Vulcan' refer to anything, and if so, to what?","topic":"Vacuous names and fictional entities","question":"Do names like 'Sherlock Holmes' or 'Vulcan' refer to anything, and if so, to what?","position":"Two cases require sharp separation. *Fictional names* — like \"Sherlock Holmes\" or \"Hamlet\" — appear in fictional discourse where the author pretends to refer; outside that pretense they refer to *fictional entities* understood as *abstract artifacts* created by their authors at the time of composition. There really is something to which \"Sherlock Holmes\" refers — not a flesh-and-blood detective, but an abstract object that did not exist before Conan Doyle wrote the stories. *Vacuous names* of putative non-fictional entities — \"Vulcan\" (the planet Le Verrier postulated between Mercury and the Sun to explain Mercury's perihelion precession), \"phlogiston,\" \"the philosopher's stone\" — are genuinely empty: they fail to refer, even to abstract artifacts, because they were not introduced as fictional from the start.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Two cases require sharp separation. *Fictional names* — like \"Sherlock Holmes\" or \"Hamlet\" — appear in fictional discourse where the author pretends to refer; outside that pretense they refer to *fictional entities* understood as *abstract artifacts* created by their authors at the time of composition.","n":[1]},{"t":"There really is something to which \"Sherlock Holmes\" refers — not a flesh-and-blood detective, but an abstract object that did not exist before Conan Doyle wrote the stories. *Vacuous names* of putative non-fictional entities — \"Vulcan\" (the planet Le Verrier postulated between Mercury and the Sun to explain Mercury's perihelion precession), \"phlogiston,\" \"the philosopher's stone\" — are genuinely empty: they fail to refer, even to abstract artifacts, because they were not introduced as fictional from the start.","n":[2,3,4,5]}]],"texts":"*Reference and Existence: The John Locke Lectures* (2013, delivered at Oxford 1973); \"Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities\" (*Philosophical Troubles* Ch 3, ms originally from the late 1960s, widely circulated long before publication). Reception: Russell's theory of descriptions as the historical alternative (vacuous names handled via descriptions, no genuine reference); Keith Donnellan's \"Speaking of Nothing\" (1974) as a partial ally on the reference-failure cases; Peter van Inwagen and Amie Thomasson on abstract artifacts; Mark Sainsbury, Stacie Friend, and Anthony Everett on the metaphysics of fictional entities; Nathan Salmon as a Millian who resists fictional realism; David Braun on names of non-existents.","works":["*Reference and Existence: The John Locke Lectures* (2013, delivered at Oxford 1973)","\"Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities\" (*Philosophical Troubles* Ch 3, ms originally from the late 1960s, widely circulated long before publication)"],"reception":"Russell's theory of descriptions as the historical alternative (vacuous names handled via descriptions, no genuine reference); Keith Donnellan's \"Speaking of Nothing\" (1974) as a partial ally on the reference-failure cases; Peter van Inwagen and Amie Thomasson on abstract artifacts; Mark Sainsbury, Stacie Friend, and Anthony Everett on the metaphysics of fictional entities; Nathan Salmon as a Millian who resists fictional realism; David Braun on names of non-existents.","status":"Developed in the 1973 Locke Lectures, published in 2013 as *Reference and Existence*. The position is a measured one: Kripke acknowledges throughout that the ontology of fictional entities is delicate and that he is offering \"a view\" rather than a worked-out theory. The abstract-artifact account has been taken up and refined by van Inwagen, Thomasson, and others; resisted by strict Millians like Salmon, who prefer to handle fictional discourse without ontological commitment to fictional entities. The vacuous- name side is less contested: most contemporary philosophers of language agree that \"Vulcan\" simply fails to refer.","era":"1940-2022","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"3. Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities","page":"pp. 61–62","canonical":"","quote":"What I'm saying about pretense could be applied, *mutatis mutandis,* to mistakes and other cases like that—error as opposed to pretense or fiction. (Russell does, perhaps, by his certainty condition, avoid the possibility of mistake.) And one should not regard it as strange that such errors can exist—one should regard it as natural and inevitable.","label":"3. Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities, pp. 61–62"},{"n":2,"work":"3. Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities","page":"pp. 64–65","canonical":"","quote":"They are *not* ghostly possible entities; they are abstract entities of a certain sort that exist in virtue of the activities of people.","label":"3. Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities, pp. 64–65"},{"n":3,"work":"Reference and Existence","page":"p. 148","canonical":"","quote":"So the *fi ctional character* is not something which is being said not to exist. If you say that the fi ctional character didn't exist, you would be wrongly assimilating this case to the case of Moloch, where one can say truly, as I did before, there was no such god as Moloch, that Moloch didn't exist. 11.","label":"Reference and Existence, p. 148"},{"n":4,"work":"3. Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities","page":"p. 68","canonical":"","quote":"Some of these statements are true and do express propositions when we are just reporting on what is said in the story, but, as I said, that is not the sort of usage in question here. (Similarly, sometimes one uses the statement just to say that the story says or implies that *p*, but that is a different sort of usage.) Nor am I talking about statements about fictional characters.","label":"3. Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities, p. 68"},{"n":5,"work":"3. Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities","page":"pp. 58–59","canonical":"","quote":"If this means that it is not truly a name of the figure in question, or that it fails to refer to him or her, I don't think this is right. When in *War and Peace* Tolstoy mentions Napoleon, and has him as a character in the work, he is talking about Napoleon (See Chapter 9.) 12 In the preface, the supposed editor of the manuscript says that the names are not real.","label":"3. Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities, pp. 58–59"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"rigid-designation","label":"Rigid designation: are proper names synonymous with descriptions, or do they designate the same individual across all possible worlds?"},{"slug":"necessity-vs-apriority","label":"Necessity vs apriority: are necessary truths always knowable a priori, or do they come apart?"},{"slug":"natural-kind-terms","label":"Natural kind terms: are they rigid designators in the same sense as proper names, and do theoretical identifications come out necessary?"},{"slug":"the-wittgenstein-rule-following-paradox","label":"The Wittgenstein rule-following paradox: is there a fact about what I mean by a word that fixes how I should apply it to new cases?"},{"slug":"a-puzzle-about-belief","label":"A Puzzle about Belief: does Pierre believe that London is pretty? What does the case show about reference and belief?"}]}