A WORLD LINE SEMANTICS FOR THE ARTIFACTUAL THEORY OF FICTION

According to the Artifactual Theory of Fiction, literary fictional characters exist as created entities. This explains how they can contribute to the meaning of sentences that refer to them. However, their creation has often been described in terms of a fuzzy process. This has been the source of strong criticisms that have jeopardized the relevance of identity conditions provided by the Artifactual Theory of Fiction. One of the main difficulties is to articulate the two aspects of a fiction; that is, the fact that it appears as an abstract artifact from an external viewpoint, but (possibly) as a concrete entity from an internal viewpoint. Our answer takes place in the context of Hintikka's world line semantics, enriched by fictionality operators. In a modal framework, literary fictional characters can be understood as world lines made available for quantification thanks to a double mode of individuation. This is the starting point to overcome number of difficulties, in particular concerning questions of identity in fictional contexts.