Co-Identification and Fictional Names

Abstract

Stacie Friend raises a problem of 'co-identification' involving fictional names such as 'Hamlet' or 'Odysseus': how to explain judgments that different uses of these names are 'about the same object', on the assumption of irrealism about fictional characters on which such expressions do not refer. To deal with this issue, she contrasts a Kripke-inspired 'name-centric' approach, pursued among others by Sainsbury, with an Evans-inspired 'info-centric' approach, which she prefers. The approach is motivated by her rejection of descriptivist ways of dealing with the problem. In this paper, I rely on the presuppositional, reference-fixing form of descriptivism I favor for the semantics of names, and I explain how it helps us deal with Friend's problem, which I take to concern primarily the semantic contribution of names to ascriptions of representational content to fictions. The result is a form of the 'name-centric' sort of approach that Friend rejects, which can (I'll argue) stand her criticisms.