Kripke's Legacy on Fictional Names

Louis Rouillé

The next meeting of the Sign-Language-Reality seminar in the academic year 2025/26 will take place:

Thursday, the 16th of April 2026, 17.00, Central European Time

Louis Rouillé 

(LanCog, University of Lisbon)

will deliver a talk:

Kripke's Legacy on Fictional Names

Abstract:

Kripke’s John Locke lectures are a seminal contribution to the
semantics of fictional names and to the metaphysics of fictional characters. In
this paper, I extensively analyse Kripke’s original proposal, in light of recent
developments in the research program that he got up and going. First, I show how
he reshaped the logical space of the semantics of names by defending the view
that the distinction between real and fictional names and the distinction
between full and empty names should be construed as orthogonal distinctions.
Second, I analyse his brand of artefactualism, which I call “dynamic”, as
articulating the metaphysical view of fictional characters as parts of fictional
works, with a semantic constraint that fictional characters act as truth-makers
for metafictional discourse. This articulation distinguishes it from “static”
artefactualism, which shares a similar metaphysical outlook without abiding by
the semantic constraint. I end up by displaying some internal tensions and
inconsistencies within Kripke’s program, thus qualifying the often proclaimed
success of dynamic artefactualism. I conclude with some speculations on the
relationship between semantics and ontology, from the vantage point of the
philosophy of fiction.

About the speaker: 

Louis Rouillé is a philosopher whose work focuses on the philosophy of fiction, with particular interests in fictional names, imagination, aesthetics, logic, and metaphysical questions about fictional characters. He is the aithor of several papers published in (among other things) in Ethics and Information Technology, Topoi, Grazer Philosophische Studien, Synthesis, Ogranon F, and Argumenta. 

Speaker's webiste: https://rouillel.github.io/

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?pwd=0l7PETAOwqQDBKTMCnheYQN7ag7zx1.1

Meeting ID: 927 1604 4372 Passcode: 697648 The meeting opens at 4:45 pm, the talk starts at 5 pm.

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


sincerely,

Tadeusz Ciecierski