Fictional names, mental files and declarative speech acts

Abstract

In this paper I defend the claim that fictional names refer to individual concepts, understood as mental files. Those concepts constitute the set of thoughts that are in turn constitutive, together with the corresponding sentences, of what I call ‘the conceptual world of a fictional narrative’. In defending this thesis, I offer a novel interpretation of the distinction between fictive, parafictive and metafictive uses of the sentences containing fictional names. Fictive uses are analysed as declarative speech acts of different kinds: they encompass both the original uses, by means of which an author introduces a name in the context of the creation of a fictional narrative, and the replicating uses depending on the insertion in a communication chain leading to that narrative. Parafictive uses, conceived of as mixed acts, partly assertive and partly declarative, are those speech acts in which the narrative is reformulated: the output is the creation of an interpretative extension of the original conceptual world. Finally, metafictive uses are understood as assertive speech acts, constitutive of another extension of the conceptual world of the narrative, whose purpose is to interpret it critically.