Speaking of Fictional Characters Amie L. THOMASSON † ABSTRACT The challenge of handling fictional discourse is to find the best way to resolve the apparent inconsistencies in our ways of speaking about fiction. A promising approach is to take at least some such discourse to involve pretense, but does all fictional discourse involve pretense? I will argue that a better, less revisionary, solution is to take internal and fictionalizing discourse to involve pretense, while allowing that in external critical discourse, fictional names are used seriously to refer to fictional characters. I then address two objections to such realist theories of fiction: One, that they can’t adequately account for the truth of singular nonexistence claims involving fictional names, and two, that accepting that there are fictional characters to which we refer is implausible or ontologically profligate. Fiction has persisted as a philosophical problem because (as in the case of most classic philosophical problems) there are apparent inconsistencies in our ordi- nary ways of speaking of and thinking about the subject. We want to say, for example, in one breath that Frankenstein’s monster was a creation of Dr. Frankenstein, in another that he was a creation of Mary Shelley. We want to say that Sherlock Holmes is a detective, but also that he is a fictional charac- ter that thus cannot be called upon to solve crimes. We want to say that Emma Woodhouse doesn’t exist, but in other contexts we want to confirm that there are such fictional characters as Emma and her sister Isabella, while there is no such character as Emma’s pesky kid brother. It is because of these surface- level inconsistencies in what we want to say that a philosophical account of fictional discourse is needed. But since there are apparent inconsistencies, any consistent theory must give up appearances somewhere. I think it is at least in part for this reason that no theory has won universal acceptance by giving us all we (pre-theoretically) wanted. But, that much being acknowledged, how can we best understand fictional discourse in a way that avoids apparent inconsistencies like the three men- tioned above? Does the best understanding of fictional discourse involve Dialectica Vol. 57, N o 2 (2003), pp. 205-223 † Department of Philosophy, University of Miami. Email: thomasson@miami.edu