book reviews | 779

Fiction and Fictionalism

BY RICHARD M. SAINSBURY
ROUTLEDGE, 2010. XX þ 244 PP. £95.00 CLOTH, £19.99 PAPER

This is a great book. In it Mark Sainsbury provides a lucid and interesting discussion
of the nature of fiction, the status of fictional objects, and fictionalism in general,
offering an excellent overview of these subjects and giving a barrage of interesting
arguments for his own views along the way. The book is also timely. There has been a
recent surge of interest in all three of these issues and I know of no other book that
comes close to providing such a good introduction to, and discussion of, these topics.
Moreover, while many are drawn to an Irrealist view of fiction that rejects an
ontology of fictional objects, few attempts have been made to work out the details
of such an account in a systematic and careful way. The most detailed Irrealist account
offered up to now was the pretence-theoretic account developed in the work of
Kendall Walton. In Fiction and Fictionalism Sainsbury presents an alternative
Irrealist account, building upon the views developed in his earlier Reference
Without Referents.
The book itself contains 10 chapters. Chapter 1 considers the nature of fiction.
Chapter 2 considers the reasons we might accept an ontology of fictional objects and
the arguments standardly advanced in favour of such Fictional Realism. Sainsbury
suggests, and I agree, that the most powerful of these are arguments to the effect that
we need to accept an ontology of fictional objects to account for the truth of various
intuitively true sentences which purport to refer to, or quantify over, fictional things.
In Chapters 3, 4 and 5, he nicely presents and argues against three brands of Fictional
Realism, Meinongian accounts which take fictional objects to be actual non-existent
entities, Possibilist accounts which take them to be non-actual possibilia, and Abstract
Artefact accounts which take them to be abstract entities which actually exist and are
of human making, things with a similar ontological status, perhaps, to marriages and
universities and nations. Sainsbury’s arguments against these views will be familiar to
those involved in the current debate, so I don’t suppose many Fictional Realists will be
terribly moved by them. Nevertheless, I think the arguments are well taken and make
a strong prime facie case against the Fictional Realist. Chapter 6 presents Sainsbury’s
own Irrealist account of fiction. Chapters 7–9 consider fictionalist accounts of various
subject matters and in particular modal and moral fictionalism. And Chapter 10
considers what bearing the different accounts of fictional objects might have upon
attempts to provide fictionalist accounts of various domains. The chapters typically
conclude with a nice summary of the discussion and suggestions for further reading,
and the book contains a nice glossary, allowing this to serve as an excellent textbook.
It is obviously impossible to do justice to everything in Sainsbury’s excellent book.
But I do want to say a few words about Sainsbury’s own Irrealist account. Sainsbury’s
strategy in Chapter 6 is to consider the sorts of sentences whose apparent truth is used
to motivate Fictional Realism and argue that the Irrealist can account for their truth,
or explain away their apparent truth, without needing to invoke fictional objects.
Sainsbury does this in a rather piecemeal way. He suggests ontologically non-
committal paraphrases for some sentences. He suggests ways in which other sentences
could be replaced by ontologically non-committal sentences which ‘serve all the

Analysis Reviews Vol 71 | Number 4 | October 2011 | pp. 779–780 doi:10.1093/analys/anr067

ß The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust.
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780 | book reviews

purposes of the originals’ (119). He suggests that certain apparently true utterances of
other sentences are really non-committal since they are actually made within the scope
of the presupposition that their subject matter exists. He suggests that some inten-
sional transitives are ontologically non-committal because they take sentential com-
plements. And he offers a provocative argument that if a sentence S is entailed by a
sentence (or set of sentences) S*, then the ontology required for the truth of S does not
exceed that required for the truth of S* (where p entails q just in case there is no world
where p is true and q is not).
Sainsbury’s suggestions here are often ingenious but one might well feel unhappy
about the piecemeal nature of Sainsbury’s approach. This is surely a weakness of
Sainsbury’s account when we compare it to Walton’s rival pretence-theoretic account,
since the latter ultimately has the resources to provide a unified account of a range of
cases Sainsbury treats in a piecemeal manner.
In fact, while Sainsbury is at pains to distinguish his notion of presupposition from
Walton’s notion of pretence (121–22, 125), there may ultimately be less difference
between the two notions than Sainsbury thinks. Sainsbury notes that, for Walton,
assertions made within the scope of a pretence are not genuine assertions but rather
pretend assertions and they will typically not be genuinely true. Sainsbury takes this to
be a strike against Walton’s account. In contrast Sainsbury suggests that we may make
genuine assertions within the scope of a presupposition, and that these assertions may
be true, albeit relative to that presupposition. But we should certainly not take my
utterance of ‘Zeus’, made within the scope of a presupposition that Zeus exists, to
genuinely refer to Zeus. Nor should we take me to have secured genuine speaker
reference to an object. Reference within the scope of a presupposition is not a genuine
variety of reference. So truth relative to a presupposition, and hence assertion within
that presupposition’s scope, should not be viewed as genuine forms of truth and
assertion. Sainsbury does not provide a detailed account of presupposition in this
book. But I suspect that, when fully cashed out, it may not be so different from
Walton’s notion of pretence. If so, Sainsbury and Walton may be closer here than
Sainsbury allows.
ANTHONY EVERETT
University of Bristol
Bristol BS8 1TB, UK
plaje@bristol.ac.uk

The Metaphysics of Perception: Wilfrid Sellars, Perceptual

Consciousness and Critical Realism
By PAUL COATES
ROUTLEDGE, 2010. XIV þ 274 PP. £80.00 CLOTH, £24.95 PAPER

In The Metaphysics of Perception, Coates elaborates and defends a Wilfrid Sellars-

inspired theory of perceptual experience. We can characterize Coates’s Critical

Analysis Reviews Vol 71 | Number 4 | October 2011 | pp. 780–783 doi:10.1093/analys/anr082

ß The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust.
All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com