Merely Possible Fictional Characters - Public Lecture Professor Daniel Nolan (Notre Dame)

As well as the characters of fictions that have been actually told, we can talk about the characters of fictions that could have been composed but never were or will be. What ontological attitude should we take to these characters of merely possible stories? This talk will argue that we should treat them as on a par with the fictional characters of stories that are actually told. Most of the standard theories of fictional characters can accommodate this, but one of the major options, creationist abstractionism, faces difficulty doing so. This is plausibly a disadvantage of creationist abstractionism compared to many of its rivals.