Aspectos Financieros y Presupuestarios

It seems to me that fictional ontology ought not to proceed without first securing an understanding of fiction itself. Clearly, this methodological intuition is not shared by the many metaphysicians and logicians who have taken up the task of explaining fictional objects and reference without alluding to any view of fiction as a whole. Luckily, in his book Art as Performance, David Davies explicitly formulates a methodological principle for the ontology of art that he dubs the ‘pragmatic constraint,’ or PC. He notes that this constraint on ontological theorizing has long been in use, though often implicitly, and bolsters his explicit formulation with some defenses against its possible vulnerabilities. He also offers some guidance on the right kind of application of the principle. He formulates PC particularly for art ontology and therefore focuses on the relationship between art practice and art works. However, a version of the constraint applies to fictional practice and fictional objects.

Davies’s PC is as follows:

Artworks must be entities that can bear the sorts of properties rightly ascribed to what are termed “works” in our reflective critical and appreciative practice; that are individuated in the way such “works” are or would be individuated, and that have the modal properties that are reasonably ascribed to “works,” in that practice.89

It’s on the basis of a principle like this that we might reject a theory of art ontology by pointing out a major discrepancy between the theory’s predictions and the judgements of the community at large. Davies uses the example of the ‘commonsense’ view, which excludes from the realm of art much of late modern art, including Abstract Expressionism and conceptual art.90

89 _{David Davies, Art as Performance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004): 18.} 90 _{Ibid., 9.}

Before I go further, I should make it clear that I am not committed to the view that fictional ontology is a species of art ontology. I take it that art is a very complex practice that may well consist of many subsidiary practices – one of these may or may not be fictional practice. However, that’s not what’s at issue just now. I think rather that Davies’ pragmatic constraint is apt for adaptation to the fictional case because fiction, like art, is a practice whose objects are the topic of much ontological theorizing by philosophers and our ontological interest in these objects arises from their use in that practice. As Davies says about art, “[i]t is because certain features of that practice puzzle us, or because the entities that enter into that practice fascinate us, that we are driven to philosophical reflection about art in the first place. To offer an ‘ontology of art’ not subject to the pragmatic constraint would be to change the subject, rather than answer the questions that motivate

philosophical aesthetics.”91 _{The same argument applies to fiction. Indeed, we saw in our} discussion of Brock’s irrealism that, in his attempt to explain away fictional objects without any allusion to the practice, he didn’t manage to say anything interesting or informative about fictional objects. He merely changed the subject. Further, if we

reformulate PC by directly substituting words pertaining to fictional practice rather than to art, we get a principle that looks plausible even without further argument:

Fictional objects must be entities that can bear the sorts of properties rightly ascribed to what are termed “characters” in our fictional practice; that are individuated in the way such “characters” are or would be individuated, and that have the modal properties that are reasonably ascribed to “characters,” in that practice.92

Of course, accepting this methodological principle does not mean that any disagreement between a theory and a critical consensus (or as near as critics get to a consensus on a judgement) rules out the theory, nor that philosophers can never make surprising or initially unintuitive ontological conclusions. Indeed, Davies arguably draws a rather

91 _{Ibid., 21.}

92 _{This is an imperfect substitution, as not all fictional objects are what we call ‘characters.’ However, they} are the most recognizable of fictional objects (that aren’t the works themselves) and the topic of most fictional discourse and philosophical discourse about fiction. Thus, this substitution retains the flavor of PC for fiction and its objects.

revisionary ontological conclusion by his use of the constraint, namely that artworks are performances. The key to applying the principle in a way that does not merely affirm a naïve institutional view is in our rational reflection on the practice.

Here is where I offer a strong interpretation of the correct implementation of PC, perhaps even stronger than Davies himself intended. However, I have good reason for holding a strong version of the principle, and an example of where Davies took it to be poorly implemented will be instructive. In “The Primacy of Practice in the Ontology of Art,” Davies further clarifies PC and its methodological implications by way of criticizing Julian Dodd’s strategy in Works of Music.93 _{Dodd offers a view of musical works according to} which they’re norm-types, not so different from Wolterstorff’s norm-kinds. We need not go into detail here, but the important thing to note is that Dodd gives up on the idea that musical works are created in order to secure two other features that his theory explains very well: repeatability and audibility. That is, musical works are repeatable since they can be played today on stage or tomorrow on a record, and they are audible since we have access to the work itself via patterns of sound. Given how well the theory does on these two fronts, giving up that they are created and instead holding that they’re eternally existing norm-types is an acceptable tradeoff. This, according to Dodd, is a form of appropriate rational reflection on the practice and conforms to PC.

Not so, says Davies. In weighing repeatability and audibility against creatability, Dodd has built his theory on the wrong foundations: that is, on ontological foundations. Dodd homes in on one aspect of PC: that the properties that are ascribed to works in the practice must be ascribed rightly. According to a type-token theorist like Dodd, some properties are ascribed to works wrongly by the practice, because the practice ascribes properties to works that can only be ascribed to composers or their actions. His ontological theory gives him good reason to deny that works have certain properties that are ascribed to them by the practice. Davies points out that this argument “suggests that Dodd reads PC, with its normative dimension, as asserting that appreciative practice and ontology constrain one 93 _{David Davies, “The Primacy of Practice in the Ontology of Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism} 67, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 159-171.

another.”94 This gets things the wrong way around. Dodd’s entire dialectical strategy is essentially backwards, since he begins with the ontology, relying on its strength as the supposed default view, and then endeavors to make the practice – or an epistemology of art, in Davies’ words – fit it. Not to mention that giving up on the idea that works are created radically transforms the nature of appreciation, and “no acceptable ontology can require that we revise the basic conception of artistic appreciation to be found in that practice, for it is only by reference to this conception that we can get any firm grip on the very subject of the ontology of art.”95

If we look back to Art as Performance, we can see the kernels of this later criticism of Dodd’s way of implementing PC. Davies offers a blueprint for the type of ontological argument that properly implements PC, somewhat confusingly calling it an

‘epistemological argument.’96 _{This kind of argument begins with an ‘epistemological} premiss,’ which is the rational reflection on the practice, continues with a methodological premiss – PC – and ends in an ontological conclusion.97 However, the ‘epistemological premiss’ is rational reflection in the minimal sense of making some considered

observations about what happens in the practice. It is rational reflection in a much more robust sense of a “theoretical representation of the norms” of a practice.98 _{He cites Gregory} Currie as a proponent of the kind of constraint that he’s aiming for, as he wrote in his book

An Ontology of Art that prior to an ontology must be “an overall aesthetic theory which

describes and analyses the sorts of relations that hold between us as critics and observers, and the works themselves.”99 _{This indicates that it’s not mere observation about some} purported facts about a practice that needs to come before ontology, but a theory that contextualizes and explains these facts about the practice.

If this is correct, then even Thomasson’s ontology does not fully conform to a strong version of PC. She is careful not to fall into the trap that other metaphysicians do when 94 _{Ibid., 162. Emphasis in original.}

95 _{Ibid., 163.}

96 _{Davies, Art as Performance, 22.} 97 _{Ibid., 23.}

98 _{Ibid., 20.}

theorizing about fictional objects and insists that an ontological view ought to begin “by paying careful attention to our literary practices.”100 _{However, I think this approach does} not go far enough. For one thing, we cannot expect to gain a full understanding of fictional objects by only paying attention to literary practices. Literature is not the same as fiction, and many fictional works and their objects do not originate in linguistic fiction. Also, merely paying attention to the practices and making space for things like creatability is not to place the practice in an overall theoretical framework. I think it’s evident that her aim is not to explain fiction as a whole practice; she even calls her view the artifactual theory of

fiction, despite it being not a theory of fiction but just a theory of fictional objects.101 This, in part, is why I will argue in Chapter 4 that Thomasson’s ontology misses out on an important and large part of fictional practice that bears on the metaphysics of its objects. As much as a theory of fiction ought to have something illuminating to say about ontology, an ontological view ought not to proceed without first committing to some overall theory of fiction.