Angel Odette Martínez & Reyna Janette Barba
Universidad de Guadalajara CUCHS & Benemérita y Centenaria Escuela Normal de Jalisco
One of the positions in the discussion of the philosophy of fiction declares that fictions exist as real entities in possible worlds by using a logic system named supervaluationism. Supervaluationism is a logic of vagueness which says that propositions are true just if they satisfy all the definitions of the thing that they are talking about (called precisifications), are false if they satisfy none and otherwise they can be neither true nor false. In this way, we could evaluate the truth of unspecified features of fictions by considering them as neither true nor false, because they are true in some possible worlds and false in others.
Nonetheless, the author Shiffer finds this not satisfactory because if we’d like to report an indirect speech as “Mary said that John is bold” what Mary would’ve been saying is that John is bold in one interpretation and in another and in another, etc., something that we find not to be true. Thus, Keefe answers it happens because our interpretation of supervaluasionism is mistaken. What she does is to say propositions don’t refer to objects. She puts a barrier between the proposition and the object, working the first more like a cipher which passes for precisifications, precisifications that coincide with objects but aren’t objects.
I will argue that the model of Keefe is problematic in the sense that it implies, a priori, having the truth value of a proposition. This, in the consideration that to have the cipher for certain precisifications is to have, already, something that should tell you if the proposition is true, false or neither true nor false. And with that I would declare the supervaluationist through is not valid for a possibilist of fiction.
Chair: tba
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Location:
SOPhiA 2026 