FREGE ON FICTION

Abstract

Even though Frege hasn’t articulated a metaphysics and a semantics of the fictional discourse, we can analyze his theory of sense and reference in order to establish some conclusions for fiction. My objective in this paper is to argue that, according to Frege, the central problem for fictional discourse concerns the author’s assertoric force when he narrates a story of fiction. The author, as Frege maintains in Der Gedanke, only pretends to make assertions, so fictional sentences are pseudo-assertions. The consequence of this thesis is that every proper name that occurs in fiction is, with no exception, an apparent or empty name. Consequently, as Frege states in Introduction to Logic, Logic and On Sense and Reference, fictional sentences have sense, but lack reference, which shows that fiction has the sole purpose of providing us with an aesthetic delight — not being possible, therefore, unlike scientific and ordinary discourses, to evaluate fictional sentences as either true or false. That being the case, I will critically analyze the three problems that Frege encounters in fiction: the problem concerning empty names, the problem concerning assertoric force, and the problem concerning truth values.