Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Let us assume the quite reasonable view that Aleksey Karamazov does not exist, neither do Pegasus nor Vulcan nor all other fictional and mythical entities that apparently we can think about. There simply are no fictional or mythical entities. Upholders of referentialism argue that (non-empty) names (and singular terms in general) contribute their referents to the truth-conditions of sentences containing them. If a name does not refer, it has no truth-conditional content. Given Frege's (1892) principle that the reference of an expression is a function of the references of its subconstituent parts, expressions containing names that do not refer have no truth-conditional content either. Yet, there are apparently meaningful uses of sentences containing names without referents. In the presentation I will suggest that the problem of the meaningfulness of sentences containing names without referents can be solved in the framework of a theory of interpreted logical forms.