Victoria Weronika Grygorczuk
Universitat de les Illes Balears
Recent debates in the ontology of fiction divide broadly between deflationary approaches, which treat fictional entities as artefacts grounded in social practices, and inflationary frameworks that anchor fictional truth in robust modal or metaphysical structures. This paper introduces a third option that has received insufficient attention: Roman Ingarden’s theory of purely intentional objects, which locates irreducible ontological indeterminacy at the structural level of fictional works themselves.
On Ingarden’s account, a literary work is the primary purely intentional object: a stratified, schematic entity whose being is genetically dependent on intentional acts but not reducible to any mental state or representation. The represented objects within the work are internal to this structure and exist only derivatively. Crucially, their incompleteness is not an epistemic deficit but an ontological feature: there is no fact of the matter regarding unspecified properties. A second intentional act: the reader’s concretization is required for configured fictional objects to emerge at all.
This framework is brought into dialogue with David Lewis’s possible worlds semantics for fiction, particularly his account of fictional truth as what holds across accessible worlds where the fiction is told as known fact. The paper argues, then, for a restricted structural correspondence. The literary work functions as a constraint on possible worlds: it defines a space of compatible worlds without being identical to any of them. Concretizations are then understood as world-selections within that space, and the resulting configured objects as counterparts of the schematic objects prescribed by the work.
The proposed correspondence is explicitly asymmetric: concretizations do not presuppose Lewisian possible worlds, but Lewisian possible worlds provide the formal apparatus to describe the space of their realizations. This avoids both the ontological inflation of treating fictional characters as full inhabitants of concrete possible worlds and the deflationary move of dissolving their ontological significance into pragmatic terms. Fictional entities emerge as ontologically distinctive: structurally incomplete at the level of the work, modally realizable at the level of concretization, and irreducible to either mental representations or abstract artefacts.
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SOPhiA 2026 