Lógicas da Ficção

Uma abordagem pluralista para o problema da anáfora

Abstract

Sentences involving fictional proper names pose some difficulties, whether in Frege's or Russell's interpretation. In Frege's case, a sentence like ‘Capitu is a fictional character’ is neither true nor false, contrary to our intuition. In Russell's case, such a sentence would be false, also contrary to our intuition.

Another limitation of these two approaches concerns cases of anaphora, in which an occurrence of a fictional name refers to a flesh-and-blood individual while its anaphoric pronoun refers to a created entity, as in ‘Capitu is a woman from Rio de Janeiro, she is a fictional character created by Machado de Assis’. I argue that the metaphysical solution created by Recanati to deal with this problem through mental archives is too ad hoc.

The perspective that I defend here to deal with these two problems is pluralistic. In fact, both Frege's and Russell's approaches presuppose Classical Logic. But non-classical logics, specifically some free, modal and multivalued logics, seem to offer quite promising approaches that, although we must give up some important classical principles, such as the Principle of Compositionality and/or the Principle of Bivalence, we are better guided by our intuition, without having a commitment to Recanati's exaggerated metaphysical framework