Empty Names and Fictional Discourse

Core Idea

Statements about fictional characters and empty names pose semantic challenges: how are they meaningful without referents? Solutions include treating them as quantified descriptions, denying truth values, or positing abstract objects. Different theories accommodate fictional discourse differently.

Explainer

An empty name is a name that appears grammatically well-formed but lacks a real-world referent. "Sherlock Holmes," "Zeus," "Vulcan" (the hypothetical planet) — these terms look just like "London" or "Einstein" syntactically, but nothing in reality corresponds to them. This creates a serious problem for a direct reference theory of meaning, which holds that the meaning of a name just is its referent. If "Sherlock Holmes" has no referent, the theory seems to predict that sentences containing it are meaningless or semantically defective. Yet "Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street" seems perfectly understandable — and even true in some sense.

You've already studied Russell's theory of definite descriptions, which provides one classical response. Russell's move was to show that apparent names like "the present King of France" are not genuine names but disguised descriptions — logical abbreviations for existentially quantified claims. The same strategy can be applied to fictional names: "Sherlock Holmes is a detective" is parsed as something like "There exists exactly one entity satisfying the Holmes descriptions, and it is a detective." This gives the sentence a truth value (false, since no actual person satisfies the description) without requiring a real referent for the name. The Russellian approach preserves classical two-valued logic but treats fictional discourse as systematically false — which many find counterintuitive, since we don't normally say fiction-internal claims are false in the same way as empirical falsehoods.

An alternative is Meinongianism — the view that there are objects that do not exist but still have properties. On this account, Sherlock Holmes has being in a thin sense; he is a nonexistent object with the property of being a detective. Most analytic philosophers find this ontology extravagant, but it does preserve the intuition that "Sherlock Holmes is a detective" is straightforwardly true. A more palatable middle ground is the abstract object view: fictional characters are real abstract entities created by acts of authorship. On this view, Conan Doyle brought into existence an abstract object called Sherlock Holmes, which genuinely has the property of being-a-detective-according-to-the-stories. This preserves truth while avoiding nonexistent concrete objects.

A third approach, influential through Kendall Walton's work, is pretense theory: fictional discourse is a sophisticated kind of make-believe. When we say "Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street," we are not asserting something about reality — we are performing a move in a collective game of pretense governed by the fiction. The statement is fictionally true, meaning true in the pretense, not literally true. This approach elegantly handles the range of fictional talk — internal claims about what happens in the story, comparative claims across fictions, and critical assessments — without positing mysterious abstract objects or nonexistent concreta. The challenge is accounting for cross-context statements: "Sherlock Holmes is more famous than any real detective" seems to compare a fictional entity to real ones, which is hard to capture as mere pretense.

The reference-determination theory you've already studied raises an additional dimension. Causal-historical theories of reference say names refer by virtue of causal chains connecting current uses to an original baptism. For real names, this works smoothly. For fictional names, there was no baptism event that connected the name to an actual referent — the author invented the character. This suggests fictional names may have a different semantic mechanism from ordinary proper names, or that the causal theory needs supplementation to handle cases of deliberate fiction, myth, and reference failure.