Sherlock Holmes and the Queen of Chess

Andrea Raimondi (Bielefeld University), Marco Santambrogio

The next meeting of the Sign-Language-Reality seminar in the academic
year 2024/25 will take place:

Thursday, the 5th of June 2025, 17.00, Central European Time

Andrea Raimondi (University of Bielefeld)

Marco Santambrogio (Università degli Studi di Parma)

will deliver a talk:

Sherlock Holmes and the Queen of Chess


Abstract:
Two views are central to a widely accepted philosophical account of fiction:
first, authors of fiction engage in pretense rather than assertion; second,
there are fictional characters understood as abstract objects created by authors
The paper’s critical section advances some objections: (i) these views are hard
to reconcile, since pretense – not a proper speech act – does not seem capable
of creating anything; (ii) the first view is incompatible with the thesis that
names are directly referential; (iii) the second view struggles to account for
the apparent truth of sentences like ‘Sherlock Holmes is a detective’ when used
as reports of fiction, as they seem to involve category mistakes – attributing
to abstract objects properties that do not appear applicable to them.
The paper proposes a novel account grounded in two ubiquitous linguistic
mechanisms: stipulation and meaning transfer. Authors perform speech acts of
stipulation. A principle from Frege’s Begriffsschrift – which, we argue, governs
all declarative speech acts – clarifies how the authors’ stipulations can give
rise to truths: sentences first used stipulatively can later be truthfully
asserted. This entails that ‘Sherlock Holmes is a detective’ truthfully reports
what Conan Doyle stipulated and straightforwardly accounts for the creation of
fictional characters.
To address the problem of the category mistake, we appeal to Nunberg’s notion of meaning transfer. In the report ‘Sherlock Holmes is a detective’, the predicate
undergoes a transfer: instead of picking out (as it ordinarily does) a property
of people, it picks out a structurally analogous property of abstract objects.
Our account places fiction within a broader and entirely new perspective
encompassing phenomena seemingly unrelated to it, like perception and various
human artifacts, including games and political institutions.
Finally, we compare our theory with recent proposals by Abell, and Bergman and
Franzen.

The seminar will be held online, to join the meeting, please use the
information below:
Join Zoom Meeting https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/j/92716044372...
Meeting ID: 927 1604 4372 Passcode: 697648

The meeting op   ens at 4:45 pm, the talk starts at 5 pm.

https://www.pts.edu.pl/seminarium