Fictional names, mind files, and declarative speech acts

 

Resume:

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In this talk I propose to defend the thesis that fictional names refer to individual concepts, understood as mental files. Such concepts make up the set of constitutive thoughts, together with the corresponding sentences, of what I call 'the conceptual world of a fictional story'. In my defense of this thesis, I reinterpret the distinction between fictive, parafictive, and metafictive uses of sentences containing fictional names. Fictional uses are analyzed as declarative speech acts of different types: they include both original uses, through which an author introduces a name during the process of creating a story, and reproductive uses, which depend on insertion into a string. communication that leads to that story. Parafictive uses, conceived as assertive-declarative mixed speech acts, are those in which the fictional story is reformulated by creating another conceptual world that constitutes an interpretive extension of the story. Finally, metafictive uses are understood as assertive uses, determining another extension of the story, which, unlike the previous one, provides a critical interpretation or informed by the categories of literary criticism.