Fiction and indeterminate identity DAVID FRIEDELL 1. Introduction Everett (2005) argues against fictional realism: the view that there are fic- tional objects, such as Wonder Woman and her Lasso of Truth. He relies on peculiar fictional stories. I’ll focus here on ‘Bah-Tale’, Schnieder and von Solodkoff’s (2009: 139) nursery rhyme that is based on one of Everett’s stories. Bah-Tale There once was a man called Bahrooh There once was a man called Bahraah But nobody knew if Bahraah was Bahrooh Or if they were actually two Fictional realists think there is a character Bahraah and a character Bahrooh. There is a puzzle: are Bahrooh and Bahraah distinct or identical characters? It’s true in the fiction that they are either identical people or distinct people, but the fiction leaves open which possibility obtains. (Let us suppose that Schnieder and von Solodkoff did not settle in their minds whether Bahrooh and Bahraah are identical in the fiction.) Everett thinks that fictional realists are committed to Bahrooh and Bahraah being, outside the fiction, indetermi- nately identical characters. After all, it seems arbitrary to say they are iden- tical characters and arbitrary to say they are distinct characters. Everett, along with many other theorists, thinks there cannot be indeterminate iden- tity. 1 He concludes that we should reject fictional realism. 2 Woodward (2017) concedes that it is indeterminate whether Bahrooh and Bahraah are identical characters. He argues that this result, contra Everett, is consistent with there being no indeterminate identity. He thinks there is merely indeterminate reference. I am sympathetic to Woodward’s approach. Still, the approach is incomplete. Like many theorists in the literature on Everett’s (2005) paper, Woodward does not discuss what exactly fictional characters are. This is a mistake. I will show that Woodward’s approach is consistent with a version of Platonism about fictional characters but incon- sistent with a version of abstract creationism about fictional characters. The paper will proceed as follows. In §2 I discuss Woodward’s approach. In §3 I argue that a version of Platonism about fictional characters leads not Analysis Vol 0 | Number 0 | August 2019 | pp. 1–10 doi:10.1093/analys/anz066 ß The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com 1 Evans (1978) and Salmon (1982) seminally argue for this conclusion. 2 Everett, however, articulates and expresses sympathy for a version of fictional realism in Everett and Schroeder 2015. wnloaded from https://academic.oup.com/analysis/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/analys/anz066/5626213 by National Science and Technology Library -Root user on 19 November 20