ONLINE FIRST
published on September 25, 2015
Stuart Brock
Fictionalism about Fictional Characters Revisited
Fictionalism about fictional characters is a view according to which all claims ostensibly about fictional characters are in fact claims about the content of a story. Claims that appear to refer to or quantify over fictional objects contain an implicit prefix of the form “according to such-and-such story. In "Fictionalism about Fictional Characters" (2002), I defended this kind of view. Over the last fourteen years, a number of criticisms have been leveled against this variety of fictionalism. This paper reconsiders the initial position in light of those criticisms and attempts to answer the most trenchant of them.