3 - “He Doesn’t Look Like Sherlock Holmes”: The Truth Value and Existential Status of Fictional Worlds and their Characters
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2021
Summary
Abstract
This chapter seeks to define the existential status and truth-value of fictional characters, with frequent appeals to multiple iterations of Sherlock Holmes as an example. It surveys two rival schools of thought, drawn from metaphysics and possible-world semantics. Alexius Meinong's “non-existent objects”, i.e. the metaphysical approach, is shown to be qualitatively different from how we think of fictional characters. David Lewis's “truth in fiction”, derived from counterfactual logic and possibleworld semantics, fails to address the particularities of fictional characters as they are represented anew across multiple iterations. By contrast, I advance that fictional characters are best thought of as “quasi-existent”— a stipulated term that conveys how their imagined existence is neither reducible to real-world knowledge nor is the sum of their textual iterations. In conclusion, I suggest how “quasi-existent/existence”, however counterintuitive, may prove productive to future theories of fiction.
Keywords: Sherlock Holmes, nonexistent objects, truth in fiction, Meinong, David Lewis
Introduction
In an interview some years ago, Steven Moffat, co-creator of the BBC series Sherlock, declared the following: “I think Robert Downey Jr.'s done a great job of being Sherlock Holmes, but I’m never, ever going to look at him and believe he actually is Sherlock Holmes. He's too little, and he doesn't look like him” (Leader 2010). It is a response any fan, author, or even general audience member understands. We ascribe attributes to fictional entities and thereafter imagine them as looking and acting in a certain way. Conversely, we establish boundaries and limitations within which we accept a range of varied portrayals. Sherlock Holmes, unlike you or me, can exist in the 21st century, or in Victorian England.
But, in accepting these multiple portrayals, is there any sense in which we think of them as true, or relatively correct? The very idea of a truthful or correct portrayal of Sherlock Holmes seems oxymoronic. Yet the above quote indicates that the truth value of fictional discourse invites greater complexity than the simple declaration that “it's all made up.”
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- World Building Transmedia Fans Industries , pp. 62 - 76Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2017