Counterfactual claims about fictional characters: philosophical and literary perspectives

Abstract The problems of making and evaluating counterfactual claims about fictional characters cannot be adequately handled without taking into account the practices of literary criticism, interpretation, and re-creation. The direct-reference theory of names explains only a subset of the phenomena of fiction and explains away the rest as irrelevant or pseudo-problems, whereas some criticisms of that theory bring in metaphysical concepts that may obscure the issue. This paper suggests that the indeterminacy of fictions and the conventions of the aforementioned practices are sufficient basis for explaining and assessing such counterfactual claims. In this view, fiction ceases to be understood as a phenomenon sui generis; it is instead an institutionalized use of the stipulative or computational aspects of language that are at work in other areas as well. Thus, these results can be brought into line with recent ideas in the fields of the philosophy of mathematics, relevance theory, and cognitive studies.