The Speech Act of Naming in Fictional Discourse

Amalia Haro Marchal

The Slovak-Austrian Philosophy of Language Network (https://danzeman.weebly.com/slovak-austrian-cooperation.html) announces an online talk by Amalia Haro Marchal (Slovak Academy of Sciences), entitled "The Speech Act of Naming in Fictional Discourse". The talk is on Friday, APRIL 16 at 18.30 CEST and is hosted by the Vienna Forum in Analytic Philosophy, University of Vienna (http://wfap.philo.at). Please write to [email protected] or [email protected] if you want to participate.

Here is the abstract of the talk:

The debate surrounding the characterization and definition of proper names has spread to those proper names embedded in fictional discourses. An influential account in this regard is the one proposed by Manuel García-Carpintero. In this talk, I present his Mill-Frege theory of proper names (2017) in connection with his normative account of fiction-making (2013). According to García-Carpintero, the speech acts performed in fiction by an author are merely pretended acts, including what García-Carpintero calls the speech act of naming. I elaborate the view that, when the particular aspects of the speech act of naming as defined by García-Carpintero are taken into account, its application to his theory of fiction-making results in a flawed conceptualization of the speech act of fiction-making; specifically, one where this speech act is rendered defective. In this regard, I will conclude that both García-Carpintero’s theory of proper names and his theory of fiction-making do not seem to work well together.