Abstract

Fictional realism provides a poor account of certain forms of discourse that purport to concern fictional objects, and cannot accommodate our intuitions in a significant range of cases. Realists cannot give an adequate account of cases where we deny the existence of fictional characters, or of cases where we simultaneously talk as-if a fictional character was a real thing created by an author and as-if it were the way the fiction describes it. And realists cannot give an adequate account of certain cases where we naturally talk as-if two people were thinking of the same fictional character. In contrast the pretense theorist can provide an attractive account of these matters. Moreover the identity criteria that realists offer for fictional characters all have counterintuitive consequences.