NONACTUAL OBJECTS?

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is about a Roman emperor named "Julius Caesar"; Cervantes' Don Quixote is about an errant knight who goes by the name of "Don Quixote." One work generates fictional truths about Caesar, the other fictional truths about Quixote. Readers of the novel are to engage in imaginings about Don Quixote, as spectators of the play are to engage in imaginings about Caesar. Don Quixote, it seems, is an object of Don Quixote just as Julius Caesar is an object of Julius Caesar.

Picasso's Seated Woman (192.3) is a picture of a certain (unnamed) woman, as his marvelous Portrait of Stravinsky (192,0) is a picture of Stravinsky. Fictionally the woman is seated with her hands clasped loosely together, and fictionally Stravinsky is doing the same. This woman is an object of the one picture as Stravinsky is of the other.

So it seems. But mustn't something exist in order to be an object of representation, in order for there to be fictional truths about it? Julius Caesar and Igor Stravinsky are real people, but Don Quixote and Picasso's seated woman are not. Some would minimize this difference by claiming that there are such entities as Don Quixote and the seated woman, even though they do not exist―or that they have a special kind of existence, or exist in a special realm distinct from the "real world." Don Quixote and the seated woman are thus rescued from oblivion to serve as objects of Cervantes' and Picasso's representa- tions.

Such metaphysical contortions are easily ridiculed, but they deserve sympathy and understanding. We need to appreciate and to accom- modate somehow in our theory the enormous intuitive urge to deny the undeniable, to make room somewhere in the universe for Don Quixote and his fellow fictions. Recognizing them may do little for

the idea that representationality is to be understood in terms of a quasi-linguistic relation of denotation, as I argued earlier, but that is by no means the main ground of their claim for recognition.

The best way to muster sympathy for fictitious objects is to try to do without them. If there is no Don Quixote, there are no fictional truths about him. So perhaps Cervantes' novel makes it fictional merely that there is a person whose name is "Don Quixote," who has a squire named "Sancho Panza," who mistakes windmills for giants and flocks of sheep for armies, and so on.21 It is fictional that all this is true of someone or other; the novel does not specify whom fictionally it is true of, for the simple reason that there is no one to specify. If there is no (actual or nonactual) person of whom Seated

Woman makes it fictional that she is clasping her hands loosely

together, the painting would seem to make it fictional merely that there is someone or other who is doing so.

If this is right, ordinary claims like

(1) Don Quixote mistook windmills for giants and

(2) The woman's hands are clasped loosely together, which sound so similar to ones like

(3) Julius was warned of the Ides of March by a seer and

(4) Stravinsky's hands are clasped loosely together,

will have to be understood very differently. We can take (3) and (4) almost at face value, apparently, with only the addition of the implicit "in Shakespeare's play" or "in Picasso's portrait" or something to that effect. But (1) and (2) demand drastic reformulation. A first stab would be to gloss (1) as

(5) It is Don Quixote-fictional that there is someone named "Don Quixote" who mistook windmills for giants.

This transforms what looks like a statement about a particular thing into one that says merely what sort of thing it is fictional that there is. This analysis is not even remotely adequate. Suppose that the central character of Cervantes' novel did not mistake windmills for giants, but that in an obscure passage one of the characters mentions

a remote ancestor of Don Quixote who shares his name and who did mistake windmills for giants. Then, fictionally, there is a person named "Don Quixote" who mistook windmills for giants, even though (1), which is "about" the Don Quixote, is false. We must be able somehow to distinguish different characters of that name, it seems, and that cannot be done without recognizing characters. A healthy suspicion of the prospects of getting along without fictitious objects is very much in order. A second failing of this analysis is that (5) is in part about the name "Don Quixote," whereas (1) uses but does not mention it.

The suspicion deepens when we consider cases in which it is not known whether a given work has an actual object or not. We may have no idea whether or not an aboriginal cave painting or a contempo-rary sketch portrays a real person. But this uncertainty may scarcely matter; our experience need not depend in any fundamental way on which we suppose to be the case. To describe the uncertainty as uncertainty about which of two drastically different forms the fic- tional truths generated by the work take would be to make much too much of it. It would seem more faithful to the phenomenology of the experience to allow that we know that the work has an object, that it generates fictional truths about something, and that we engage in the appropriate imaginings about it; what we do not know is just whether the object is actual or merely fictional. When we describe something as a "picture of a person," we need not feel that this claim is radically ambiguous, that it may mean either that there is a person whom the work pictures or something entirely different.

Some representations obviously do generate fictional truths just about what sorts of things there are, not about particular (actual or fictional) things. These contrast sharply with Don Quixote and Seated

Woman, as well as with Julius Caesar and the portrait of Stravinsky.

But the contrast is in danger of being lost if we refuse to allow that

Don Quixote and Seated Woman have fictional objects.22

The difference is best understood in light of a corresponding contrast between two sorts of imaginings. I can imagine a squirrel in a tree, or I can imagine merely that there is a squirrel in the tree, that the tree has a squirrel―some squirrel or other―in it. I need not have any particular actual squirrel in mind, in the first case, which I am imagin- ing to be in the tree; yet it seems appropriate to describe what I am

11. Robert Howell has emphasized this difference ("Fictional Objects," pp. 145- 169). See also Fine, "Problem of Non-Existence," p. 104.

doing as imagining a particular squirrel. My imagining is likely to be accompanied by a visual image of a squirrel, although this too is unnecessary. In the second case, when I merely imagine the tree to be squirrel infested, I do not imagine a particular squirrel in the same sense. And although my imagining may be accompanied by an image of a tree, together with the understanding that the tree is besquirreled, it cannot, it seems, be accompanied by an image of a squirrel. To add a squirrel-image to the tree-image would be to imagine a particular squirrel.

The nature of this difference is elusive. All squirrels are particular ones, and no doubt this holds for my imaginary world as well as for the real world. So to imagine that some squirrel or other resides in the tree is, surely, to imagine that there is a particular squirrel there, some particular squirrel or other. But to imagine this is not to imagine of a particular squirrel-one that I can pick out, identify, refer to—that it is in the tree. That, it is tempting to say, is what I do in the first case. And now we are in hot water again. If, when I imagine a squirrel, I can identify the squirrel that I am imagining, there must really be such a squirrel to be identified, even if it is not an actual one.

A representation may prescribe imaginings of either kind. This Very Short Story

(A) George was an old and almost worn out ghost who lived in the rundown mansion on Spruce Street. The End

prescribes imaginings "about a (particular) ghost." A story that goes (B) There were ghosts about. The old rundown mansion on Spruce Street was home for some of them. The End

does not. It asks us to imagine a haunted house, one that is ghost infested, to imagine merely that there is some ghost or other, perhaps more than one, haunting the house. Story (A) is a story "about a ghost," but I hesitate to describe (B) this way, for (it seems) there is no particular (fictional) ghost which it is about.

The ghost in (A) has a name, whereas none of the ghosts in (B) do. (At least the reader is not told their names.) But this is not the crucial difference. We might expand (B) thus:

(B') There were ghosts about. The old rundown mansion on Spruce Street was home for some of them, including one named "George," no doubt, since at that time all ghosts were called George. The End.

We are again asked to imagine only that there is a ghost satisfying a certain description, one who is old and almost worn out and lives in the mansion on Spruce Street, and who bears the name "George." Moreover, if (A) were changed to

(A') He was an old and almost worn out ghost, living in the run-down mansion on Spruce Street. The End,

it would still prescribe imaginings "about a particular ghost."

It is not fictional in (A) that there is only one ghost named "George" living in the mansión. For all we know there might be lots of them; nothing in the story indicates otherwise. We could expand (A) to make it explicit that George is not unique:

(A") George was an old and almost worn out ghost who lived in the rundown mansion on Spruce Street. He shared his abode with two other ghosts, both of them also named "George," who were also old and almost worn out. The End.

But there still seems to be a particular (nonactual) ghost which the story is about, one that is referred to by the first occurrence of "George" in the story and by the pronoun "he."

What happens if we alter (B) to make it fictional that there is a

unique ghost fitting a certain description?

(B") There were ghosts about. The old rundown mansion on Spruce Street was home for some of them. A light was on in the attic. A ghost must have gone up there-only one, since ghosts like to be alone in attics. The End.

Shall we say that (B") is "about a particular ghost" (the one in the attic), that it prescribes imaginings "about a particular (nonactual) ghost"? I am inclined not to. The story still makes it fictional only that some ghost or other has a certain collection of properties, now including the property of being the only one in the attic. Intuitively we seem still not to know which ghost is the one in the attic, although that again implies that if we did know this, there would be a (nonactual) ghost which we know about. I expect that in some contexts the contrary construal of (B") would be reasonable. In any case, making it fictional that there is a unique F is not necessary for "representing a particular F," even if it is sufficient.

The contrast between (A) and (B) has pictorial analogues. Compare a picture (X) showing a fish or several of them swimming in a lake, and a picture (Y) of a fishy lake, one which obviously (let us assume)

contains fish, although no fish are actually shown. Both pictures make it fictional that there are fish in a lake. But (X), it seems, represents one or several particular fish and (Y) does not. (It is less easy to say whether a picture showing a fisherman in the process of landing a catch but not the fish represents a particular fish, although it clearly does not depict one.)

Don Quixote and Seated Woman are like story (A) and picture (X),

and so are Julius Caesar and the portrait of Stravinsky. They do not make fictional, ask us to imagine, just that there is something or other of a certain sort. When we say that Don Quixote mistook windmills for giants or that Picasso's seated woman is clasping her hands, we seem to have in mind a particular (fictional) person: the Don Quixote of Cervantes' novel and the seated woman in Picasso's painting. We do not yet have a viable alternative to the idea that there are fictitious entities, nonactual objects of representations, an alternative that would prevent the collapse of the distinction between Don Quixote,

Seated Woman, story (A), and picture (X) on the one hand, and

representations like story (B) and picture (Y) on the other.

I will work toward such an alternative in Part Four. But it is now possible to sketch a way of understanding the difference between representations of the two sorts which seems to me to render less pressing the need to recognize fictitious objects. The difference lies not in what fictional truths the representations generate, I suggest, but rather in the games of make-believe that are to be played with them.

When a viewer sees picture (X), it is fictional in her game that she sees and thereby identifies a (particular) fish. But it is fictional in the game one plays with picture (Y) merely that one sees a fishy lake and perhaps infers that there must be fish in it. Although the reader of story (A) does not, fictionally, see a ghost, it is fictional that he knows about one, that he has de re knowledge of a ghost. This is not fictional of the reader of story (B); fictionally, he knows only that there are ghosts in the mansion. If story (A) has a narrator, it may be fictional that the reader is told about a ghost by him, that the reader knows it as the ghost the narrator speaks of. If there is no narrator, it will still be fictional that the reader knows of a ghost, although it may be indeterminate how fictionally he knows of it.

This is not a difference in the worlds of the works, It is fictional in both stories and both pictures just that there is something or are things-ghosts or fish-of a certain sort. The difference is in what is fictional about the appreciator, and these fictional truths belong not to the work worlds but to the worlds of the appreciators' games.

This difference is not the essential one, however. When one sees picture (X), not only is one to imagine that one sees a fish, but one is to imagine this from the inside. This means, in part, that one is to imagine seeing a fish, and thus knowing about one. (See § 1.4.) The reader of (A) imagines knowing about a ghost, not just that he knows about one. The viewer of (Y) and the reader of (B) engage in no such imaginings. The games appreciators play, the games that are to be played with the works, are thus different in a way that goes beyond any difference in what propositions are fictional in the game worlds. Not only is the appreciator of (A) or (X) to imagine certain proposi- tions, but he is to imagine them in a certain manner.

To imagine a ghost or a fish or a squirrel is, I suggest, to imagine knowing about a (particular) ghost or fish or squirrel. (Perhaps it is, more specifically, to imagine this from the inside.) So we can say (as I did originally) that representations "about a particular ghost" are ones that serve as props in games in which one is to imagine a ghost.23

We can now appreciate the similarity between representations about actual things and ones that seem to be about merely fictional ones. The reader of Don Quixote imagines knowing about an errant knight of that name, as the reader of Julius Caesar imagines knowing of a certain Julius Caesar. On viewing either Seated Woman or the portrait of Stravinsky, one imagines seeing and thus identifying a particular person. Although in two of these cases one actually knows about a particular person and in the other two one does not, there being no one to know about, in all of them one imagines doing so. All four representations thus go beyond merely making it fictional that there is someone of a certain sort.

We can see also why it may not especially matter whether or not a cave painting has an (actual) person for an object, or whether we think it does. The difference consists in whether we are to imagine of some actual person that we see him. But in either case we are to imagine seeing someone.

We have managed to hold off, at least temporarily, the demands of fictitious objects of representation for recognition. The crucial ques- tion, so far, is whether imagining a ghost, for instance, requires that

23. If a picture prescribes imagining a fish and to imagine a fish is to imagine (oneself) seeing a fish, it prescribes an imagining about oneself. Doesn‟t this put the viewer in the work-world? No, there is no particular person such that the picture mandates imagining about him or her; the person who is to be imagined seeing a fish is different for each viewer. (Compare “you” used in novels such a Calvino‟s If

on a Winter’s Night a Traveler to refer to the reader.) The picture does seem to

prescribe imagining, to make fictional the proposition that someone sees a fish, however. I treat worries like this in §6.5.

there be a (fictional or imaginary) ghost for one to imagine, Certainly imagining that one sees a ghost does not, and it seems unlikely that imagining seeing a ghost should. But the case is by no means closed. It may be best for now, however, to assume that fictitious entities do exist. A premature embrace of (what I take to be) the correct ontological position may be more seriously distorting than acceptance of an incorrect one. We must be sure that our alternative gives a clear view of the sources of the powerful inclination to reify fictions against our better judgment, and that it provides viable ways of doing the theoretical work fictitious entities are called on to do in theories that recognize them. The reader will have noticed that in accepting state-ments such as "It is fictional that Gregory discovered the bear hiding in the underbrush" and "It is Tom Sawyer-fictional that Tom attended his own funeral," we appear committed to there being fic- titious entities: a bear such that fictionally Gregory discovered it and a person referred to as Tom who, fictionally, attended his own funeral. This commitment wiü be removed in Chapter 10, where statements like these will be ruled out as ill formed. We will have to explain what is meant by their everyday relatives such as "In Tom

Sawyer Tom attended his own funeral," why they do not represent a

commitment to a fictional Tom, why it is so difficult to get along without speaking in this way, and why this does not matter as far as the ontological question is concerned. Until then I will continue to