Fictionalism versus deflationism a new look

Authors: Matteo Plebani

Publish Date: 2017/01/25

Volume: 175, Issue: 2, Pages: 301-316

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Abstract

In the recent literature there has been some debate between advocates of deflationist and fictionalist positions in metaontology The purpose of this paper is to advance the debate by reconsidering one objection presented by Amie Thomasson against fictionalist strategies in metaontology The objection can be reconstructed in the following way Fictionalists need to distinguish between the literal and the real content of sentences belonging to certain areas of discourse In order to make that distinction they need to assign different truthconditions to the real and the literal content But it is hard to see what more is required for the literal content to be true than for the real content to be true So fictionalism is an unsatisfactory position Here I offer a novel reply to Thomasson’s challenge I argue that the literal and the real content need not be distinguished in terms of their truthconditions rather they can be distinguished in terms of their different subjectmatters leaving it open whether their truthconditions coincide or not I explain how replying to Thomasson’s objection is crucial for deepening our understanding of fictionalist strategies in metaontologyThe version of hermeneutic fictionalism developed by Yablo 2001 2002 2005 2010 is an answer to the question why the felttruth of claims like 1 does not settle the issue of the existence of numbers1 The real content of a typical utterance of a sentence like 1 is according to hermeneutic fictionalists different from its literal content also called the “full” content of the sentence The literal content of 1 is that there are no dragons and there is a number the number 0 that counts how many dragons there are The real content of 1 is that there are no dragons The literal content of 1 entails the existence of the number 0 whereas its real content does not the real content of 1 is that there are no dragons and that is what ordinary speakers assert when uttering 1 1 sounds uncontroversial because its real content is uncontroversial but the real content of 1 does not entail 2—only the literal content doesRecently Amie Thomasson has challenged the hermeneutic fictionalist’s distinction between real and literal content Thomasson contends that fictionalists incur a certain “argumentative debt” they ought to make sense of the idea that “there is something more it would take for the ontological claim ie the literal content to be literally true than for the undisputed claim ie the real content to be true” Thomasson 2013 p 1039

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