GEMMA CELESTINO FERNANDEZ ... Gemma Celestino Fernández, 2012 ..... my
research in some way or another: Roberta Ballarin, Oscar Cabaco, Javier ...
! REFERENCE THROUGH DEMONSTRATION: SINGULAR TERMS, PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES AND FICTION by GEMMA CELESTINO FERNANDEZ Llicenciada en Filosofia, Universitat de Barcelona, 1999 Diploma d’Estudis Avançats, Universitat de Barcelona, 2002
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Philosophy)
THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver)
October 2012 © Gemma Celestino Fernández, 2012
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Abstract This thesis defends original accounts of the semantics and metaphysics of propositional attitudes, their reports and fiction in general. These accounts are unified by being parts of a general view on language, according to which demonstrations play a crucial role in explaining a wide range of phenomena. The basic ideas of the view defended here about propositional attitudes and their reports can be summarized as follows: first, propositional attitudes are binary relations between individuals and structured propositions, which are constituted by individuals and properties, but also possibly by representations of those individuals and properties. Secondly, like utterances of sentences containing singular terms in general, propositional attitude reports containing singular terms express both a descriptive proposition and a singular structured proposition, which are the objects of propositional attitudes. Thirdly, a standard Gricean pragmatic explanation is offered to account for those cases in which reports seem to ascribe an attitude towards a less fine-grained proposition than the ones to which the theory appeals. The proposal on fiction defended here is also derived from more general views on language and metaphysics. The basic idea is that the meaningfulness of fictional discourse, which involves many empty singular terms, is mostly due to the descriptive proposition that any utterance of a sentence expresses in addition to expressing the other, more widely accepted proposition. This is also due, however, to the occurrence of implicit prefixes such as ‘the fictional character’, ‘fictionally’, or ‘a fictional persona’, in addition to the ones that are already discussed in the literature. According to the view defended here, fiction does not represent real possibilities –nor is it intended to. Fictional worlds, while having the same nature as possible worlds, do not represent possibilities for the actual world. Both proposals are based on a semantic view of singular terms presented and defended at the outset, which is a Fregean metalinguistic token-reflexive view. ii
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Preface -A previous version of part of Chapter 5 has been published as Celestino Fernandez (2008) “Fictional Contingencies” ESSLLI’08 Student Session Proceedings. -A previous version of part of Chapter 6 has been published as Celestino Fernandez (2009) “Demonstrating Fictional Names”, in Actas del VI congreso de la Sociedad de Lógica, Metodología y Filosofía de la Ciencia en España, Valencia. (ISBN 978-84-3707655-3)
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