Fictional Realism and Negative

We have all been prone to say, in our common-sense usage of exist, that Pegasus does not exist, meaning simply that there is no such entity at all. Quine (1948, 3) Fictional realism is the view that fictional objects, such as Hermione Granger and Sherlock Holmes’s violin, are part of the ‘furniture of our world’.1 Realists take their view to be charitable to our ordinary conception of fiction and fictional characters, but no matter how well realism can accommodate common sense, there is one kind of talk with which it struggles: negative existentials. The difficulties the realist faces when it comes to explaining utterances such as ‘Holmes does not exist ’ have been pointed out more than once by fictional anti-realists, who reject the existence of fictional characters. And Anthony Everett (2007) has recently argued that fictional realists cannot meet the explanatory challenges posed by negative existentials. Everett’s discussion of the extant realist treatments of negative existentials about fictional objects is comprehensive, and the challenges he raises are interesting and important. And in order to overcome them, the fictional realist has to do more explanatory work than she has done so far. In this chapter, I Many thanks for helpful and inspiring discussions go to Tim Crane, Kit Fine, Manuel García-Carpintero, Dominic Gregory, Steve Makin, Genoveva Martí, Friederike Moltmann, Eric Olson, Peter van Inwagen, Richard Woodward and, in particular, Anthony Everett. Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at a workshop in Paris as part of the ENS project ‘Semantical Structure and Ontological Structure ’ and at the Postgraduate Research Seminar at the Logos centre in Barcelona and thanks go to my audience on both occasions. An early version was written during a visit on Friederike Moltmann’s ENS project in Paris and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank both Friederike and her project for their financial and intellectual support. I’d also like to thank the Royal Institute of Philosophy who supported me financiall