Publication Date
2014
Faculty Department
Department of Philosophy and Religion
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Artifactualists hold that some abstracta are contingent entities, products of the intentional activities of people. A great many artifactualists are fictional creationists, asserting that fictonal characters are abstracta of this sort, but some, notably Kripke (1973), Salmon (1998, 2002), and Braun (2005), further embrace mythical creationism. They hold that certain entities that figure in false theories are likewise abstracta that are produced by our intentional activities. A paradigm example would be Vulcan, the planet proposed by Le Verrier to be the cause of perturbations in the orbit of Mercury. I here argue that one may not reasonably take the metaphysical route travelled by Kripke, Salmon, and Braun; even if one holds that fictional characters are artifacts, one ought not further hold that mythical objects are, too. Realism about mythical objects is best accommodated by a traditional, Platonic conception of abstracta.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
“Creatures of Fiction, Objects of Myth,” Analysis, Vol. 74, No. 1 (2014)
