Kripkean Sense-Data Meinongianism

When he is hallucinating, Johannes sees a pink rat, even though there are no pink rats. Kripke wants to maintain the intuitive truth of this later claim, but what is the semantic content of “Johannes sees a pink rat” here? My hypothesis is that verbs like “to see” generates an [otherwise known as "intensional" perhaps?] context where predicates in its scope acquire a new [perhaps we should also call "intensional"?] extension. So that what he sees is not a pink rat but something – an imaginary entity – that looks pink and looks like a rat. These two later properties: looking-pink and looking-like-a-rat are not actual empirical properties, i.e., properties of concrete objects that can be discovered empirically, like being pink or a rat. That is so because looking-pink is not being pink. It entails it defeasibly, sure, but neither logically nor metaphysically. Normally, pink things look thing, but commonly things that are not pink look pink, and is some extreme cases – as in hallucinations – things that look red are not even there.

These things, what Braun calls "hallucinatory entities", are creatures of hallucinations, real even if they are not like everyday concrete object. They have these strange properties, like looking-pink but not their genuine empirical counterparts, like being pink. The fallibility of perception warrants their coherence.

Furthermore, the model can be extended – as suggested by Kripke – ecumenically to other phenomena, like fiction, and scientific postulation, as Caplan has argued for. So, to hypothesize that there is an object, say, planet 9 is to create a hypothetical object Planet 9, just as to imagine a pink elephant is to create an imaginary pink elephant, and to write a novel is to create its fictional characters.

Planet 9 is nowhere, and in particular it is not farther from the sun than Pluto, since it is not an ordinary concrete entity – it is a postulation, but it is [farther-from-the-sun-than-Pluto]-according-to-the-hypothesis.