Names, Fictional Names, and 'Really'
R. M. Sainsbury, David K. Wiggins · 1999
ABSTRACT Evans argued that most ordinary proper names were Russellian: to suppose that they have no bearer is to suppose that they have no meaning. The first part of this paper addresses Evans’s arguments, and finds them wanting. Evans also claimed that the logical form of some negative existential sentences involves ‘really ’ (e.g. ‘Hamlet didn’t really exist’). One might be tempted by the view, even if one did not accept its Russellian motivation. However, I suggest that Evans gives no adequate account of ‘really’, and I point to unclarities in Wiggins’s similar, but distinct, attempt to use ‘really ’ in the logical form of true negative existentials. I Introduction. Fictional names pose at least two kinds of prob-lem: how, if at all, do they mean anything? And how, if at all, do they affect the truth or other semantic value of sentences in which they occur? Answering the first question is especially diffi-cult if one holds both of the two opinions (1) that all genuine names have bearers and (2) that fictional names do not. One