Fictional Names as Props

In Yablo’s diagnosis, a seemingly fatal combination for the Millians is the existence of sentences where empty-names,  occur in standard use, and express evaluable propositions, especially true propositions. The most recalcitrant candidates for such a kind of sentences are negative existentials like “Sherlock Holmes does not exist”.

As is well known, Millian proposals to deal with these sentences are a dime a dozen. In particular, Yablo is interested in Kripke’s puzzling proposal, according to which, in Nathan Salmon’s reconstruction, “…the sentences involving the name ‘Sherlock Holmes’ that were written in creating the fiction express no propositions, about the fictional character or anything else. They are all part of the pretence…” (1998: 294). This means they are props. Therefore, “…the name ‘Sherlock Holmes’ is ambiguous. In its original use as a name for a human being – its use by Conan Doyle in writing the fiction, and presumably by the reader reading the fiction – it merely pretends to name someone and actually names nothing at all. But in its nonpretend use as a name for the fiction character … it genuinely refers to that particular artifactual entity. In effect, there are two names [although] spelled the same…” (Ibidem) Thus, considering only the name that purports to refer to an actual human detective, the problem arises again.

However, Salmon is wrong here. There is only one genuine name here: ‘Sherlock Holmes’ (what he later calls “Sherlock Holmes 2”, i.e., the non-ambiguous name of Conan Doyle’s character. The ‘Sherlock Holmes’ that appears in Conan Doyle’s text is not an actual name, but a prop for the pretence of talking about a very smart detective. But just like a pretend/toy phone is not an (actual) phone that makes no phone calls, a pretend name is not an actual name that names no one. A toy phone is not a phone, and a fictional name is not a name. Therefore, the truth of “Sherlock Holmes does not exist” is made true by this fact, i.e., that the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ that occurs in Conan Doyle’s texts is not a name, but a prop. Consider the sign during the opening credits of much missed David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks”. It is not an actual town sign, but a prop in a TV show. There is something written there. It spells “Twin Peaks” but it is not a name, much less the name of a non-existing town. Thus, negative existentials are not counter-examples to the Millean – and ultimately, anti-idealist – claim that sentences that use empty names in a standrad sense are not truth evaluable.

Kripke dislikes meta-lingüístic solutions like this. So he explores a similar position, where negative existential are still about something non-linguistic. So that “Sherlock Holmes does not exist” is still about Sherlock Holmes, because the phrase ‘about Holmes’ has “a special sort of quasi-intensional use”