Episode 94: Zsofia Zvolenszky discusses fictional names
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What does the host introduce and why are listener reviews important?
Hey, Matt Teichman here from Elucidations. I just want to say thanks very much for all the iTunes reviews. They've been very helpful, and please keep them coming. As always, you can find us on Twitter at atelucidationspod, and you can check out our blog at lucian.uchicago.edu slash blogs slash elucidations. One other thing I wanted to mention is that since August, we've been doing our hosting through a new startup called Pippa, which is pretty cool. It's actually founded by some former philosophers. And I have to say I've been very impressed so far. The service is totally free. It provides detailed analytics, makes it very easy for you to migrate from your previous host to them. So all in all, it's been a very positive experience, and it's enabled us to get much more detailed stats on who's listening and when.
So if you have a podcast and you're looking for a hosting service, you might check them out. They can be found at pippa.io, P-I-P-P-A dot I-O. All right, thanks.
Thank you.
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Teichman, and with me today is Zsófia Czwolensky, Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, and Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy at Utwórsz University in Budapest. And she is here to discuss fictional names. Zsófia Czwolensky, welcome.
Thank you, Matt. I'm delighted to be here.
Okay, so coming at this subject for the first time, you might wonder what is special about fictional names. So the name Matt refers to me and the name Luke Skywalker refers to an imaginary character that George Lucas made up. Is there anything like sort of special about a fictional name that makes it different from the name of a real person?
So in philosophy of language, proper names have gotten a lot of attention given that they're special devices enabling us to talk about specific things in the world, whether that be people or towns or countries. It seems like these things that they pick out, the town, the person, are quite central to what these expressions like proper names mean and what they contribute to the sentences in which they are featured. Now, if we take reference to be so central, of course, we're going to have special issues coming up with names that don't refer to anything quite like the objects that proper names like Matt Teichman refers to, or a proper name like Hungary refers to, because there's no such thing as Luke Skywalker, there is no concrete object occupying space and time the way you and I occupy space and time and where we can think of the proper names that pick us out as referring to these objects.
And then you might have various views about, well, do names like Luke Skywalker or Princess Leia pick out names Anything, are they just names that are without reference? But in any case, if you have a paradigm for proper names where reference is a central aspect of theirs in accounting for the meanings of such expressions and the meaning contributions of such expressions to the sentences that feature them, then you're going to be facing a challenge. How are you going to bring fictional names under the umbrella of a view by proper names such that reference is such a central feature there?
So Princess Leia does not refer to any actual person because Princess Leia is an imaginary fictional character. why can't we just say the name Princess Leia refers to like the idea of Princess Leia or something like that? And that way we can keep this idea that every name, the meaning of every name is the thing it refers to.
Why does the podcast mention the new hosting service Pippa?
Matt Teichman refers to a person, but Princess Leia refers to an idea.
Mm-hmm.
Well, there is the issue of intersubjectivity that comes right up if you're thinking about the reference of any kind of expression as a mental entity. After all, when we're trying to account for the meanings of various expressions, one of our fine goals is to account for the possibility of communication, the possibility of getting thoughts across and getting thoughts understood.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What does the host introduce and why are listener reviews important?
0:00–4:03
2
Why does the podcast mention the new hosting service Pippa?
4:03–7:54
3
How does the conversation shift to introducing Zsófia Zvolenszky and fictional names?
7:54–12:03
4
What makes fictional names like ‘Harry Potter’ philosophically different from real‑world names?
12:03–16:13
5
How does the causal‑historical chain theory explain what a proper name refers to?
16:13–20:25
6
What is fictional artifactualism and how does it handle inadvertent creation?
20:25–25:14
7
Can Kripke’s causal theory be extended to non‑concrete objects such as numbers or fictional characters?
25:14–30:17
8
What are the final takeaways and concluding remarks of the episode?
30:17–36:20
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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Episode 155: Rebecca Lowe discusses speaking freely
Episode 154: Greg Salmieri discusses free speech, "cancel culture," and "academic freedom"
Episode 153: Sam Enright discusses lifelong learning
Epsiode 152: Luca Gattoni-Celli discusses the housing crisis