Within philosophy, the significant theory concerning fictional objects and their place in the greater reality were put forward by Meinong in his Theory of Objects (Meinong, 1904). This work was extended by one of his students, Ernst Mally who dealt with the possibly contradictions in fictional objects referring to non-fictional objects (Mally, 1912). Mally dealt with this in in two ways:
1. By distinguishing two kinds of property 2. By distinguishing two types of prediction
The second of these distinctions concerns the semantics of the case, as Mally argued that
‘real’ objectsexemplify their properties while ‘fictional’ objectsencode their semantics.
For example, “Hamlet is not a Prince in the same way Charles [Windsor] is, for whereas Charles exemplifies being a prince, Hamlet merely encodes being a prince.” (Thomasson, 1998, P. 101)
This theory allows apparent contradictions to occur within encodings, fictional situa- tions, but not in exemplars. “Nothing could exemplify being round and exemplify being square, although an object my encode being round and being square, and Watson’s war wound may encode being in his arm and being in his leg” (Thomasson, 1998, P. 101). Further, the advantage of encoding over exemplifying allows it to deal with the ambi- guity of the absence of information: “Hamlet... can fail to encode being of blood type A and fail to encode not being blood type A if neither of these attributes are ascribed to him in the story”. This goes beyond the idea of ‘we don’t know’ to that of ‘we can never know and we aren’t going to worry about it as the concept is meaningless to him’. Mally’s first distinction separates what he calls the ‘nuclear’ properties such as descrip- tion from the ‘extra-nuclear’ properties, where or not the thing exists. This is com- parable to the way OntoMedia describes objects. The state of existence for an object
is specified by the State-of-Being which by default allows for the mutually exclusive
states: Alive, Dead, Undead, Non-Existent, Inanimate, Unprovable and Unknown (see Section 7.2.4.5 and Appendix G.5). These states are totally independent of any other trait such as physical description, abilities or employment, or of their participation in
events. For example, the ‘Tuttle’ episode of M*A*S*H written by David Ketchum and
Bruce Shelly (first aired 14 January 1973 (IMDB Staff, 2006b)) clearly demonstrates that non-existence is no excuse not to lead a full and active life. Going by this theory, Hamlet and Charles are both princes.
Terence Parsons takes this distinction but starts confusing the nuclear/extra-nuclear division by having all extra-nuclear properties also exist as a descriptive nuclear property (Thomasson, 1998, P. 100). OntoMedia differs here in that level of existence is a trait just as physical or other descriptors are and thus something cannot be described as existing without existing (although an entity may exist, or not, in other contexts and it’s actual level of existence has no bearing on any beliefs that other entities may have about it’s existence or lack thereof).
This theory of two kinds of property espoused by Parsons (Thomasson, 1998, P. 100) deals with contradictions (or continuity errors) existent within fiction by saying there are some types of objects, what it calls ‘impossible’, the normal rules principles don’t apply. As Parson puts it “If we read at one point that Watson’s old war wound is in his leg and we read elsewhere that it is in his arm, then Watson may turn out to be an impossible object.” (Thomasson, 1998, P. 100).
It could be argued that implicit in OntoMedia is the belief at all objects have the potential to be ‘impossible’. It is expected that entities that exist directly within the context ‘reality’ follow the rules of existence that govern the real world however this restriction is, for the most part, a social one rather than a formalised one. There are a number of ways that OntoMedia might deal with such contradictions – if it is stated in one book that the wound is in his arm and in another that it is in his leg then two contexts may exist, one for each book reality, and in one Watson got shot in the arm and in the other the leg. If it is in the same book, than it maybe that Watson has more than one ‘old war wound’ and it is correct to assign him both with the related references. Finally, although not relevant in the case of this example, the location of the wounds could have been specified by different entities, one or both of whom could be wrong and we return to the question of the unreliable narrator and whether information exists within a contextual bubble of that characters beliefs or within the general context. In any case, we might differentiate between the context or establish the providence of the information for the sake of information but we cannot worry about the inconsistency if we are to deal with fiction. We are not dealing in ‘truth’ so much as a permanent case of ‘Obi-Wan-ism’ where all truth is ‘from a certain point of view’.
Priest (1998) follows on from this concept but rejects the nucler/extranuclear idea in favour of the theory that all objects, no matter how they are described, give rise to an object fitting that description through the action of the description occurring (which presumably includes non-existent as we have done in OntoMedia). He also places the objects within their contexts “given an object like Hamlet, we can say that Hamlet is represented by Shakespeare as being a Danish Prince; it follows that Hamlet is indeed a Danish Prince, but only in worlds that really are the way Shakespeare represents things to be in.” (Kroon, 2005). Entities, or versions of entities, are allowed to find their truth by being placed in the context in which they are true - “A non-extant object must only have its characterising features in some world or other, possible or impossible” (Nolan, 2006). In this we see a system similar to the OntoMedia contexts: “Arthur is guaranteed to be King of Britain only in the worlds of the Arthur stories” (Nolan, 2006) thus solving the problem of relations between the entities involved.
Priest (1998) put forward a general principle that for any condition of an entity is true somewhere, just not necessarily in this world. Also that for any entity, there exists closed worlds in which it exists in all possible states that are not otherwise logically following from the characterisation or from facts about the entity. In some ways this goes further than OntoMedia and in other ways not as far. OntoMedia allows for any fact or property to be changed in another context but at the same time pays no attention to the potential contexts which might exist. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations (IDIC), one of the long standing by-laws of fan fiction and by extension literature (or alternatively literature and by extension fan fiction). In keeping with this philosophy, OntoMedia does allow for the concept that any variation is possible within it’s own
context, but until that variation is expressed then there is no point in describing it. Parson’s allows for the concept of ‘surrogate fictional characters’ (Thomasson, 1998) for characters who are based on real people. OntoMedia approaches this concept by
describing the shadow-of relationship between the fictionalised person and the ‘real’
person. Interestingly, Parson dislikes the idea of dealing with fictional surrogates on a exclusive basis and “maintains that, although we may sometimes in special situations speak of fictional surrogate objects like ‘the London of the Holmes stories’, it is the real objects that appear in the stories” (Thomasson, 1998, P. 104). This provides an interesting comparison with the rules related to Real Person Slash (RPS) that exist
on the RareSlash mailing list28 and thus the distinctions which OntoMedia would be
required to accommodate within it’s model. Direct RPS is not allowed to be posted to the list however (RPS based on documentaries is not allowed since it was deemed to be direct), while stories based on a fictionalisations of real persons are allowed as they are seen to be about a fictional character and not about the real person. For example, stories featuring Julius Ceasar are not allowed while stories about Ceasar as portrayed
in the television series Rome or in ‘August’ by Neil Gaiman ((Illustration by Bryan
Talbot and Stan Woch), 1993) are permitted. Or, more modern, stories concerning real astronauts are disallowed but those inspired by the film ‘Apollo 13’ are not.
Due to the fact that even documentaries are a fictional version of the ‘truth’ (some more
fictional that others) in both these cases OntoMedia would posit ashadow-of relation-
ship between the character that exists within the context expressed by the media and the person who exists in reality – one of Parson’s ‘surrogate fictional characters’. However, it can be argued that in those cases where there is no difference between the ‘fictional’
and ‘real’ entities then the relationship should be described as anisrelationship rather
than a shadow-ofrelationship. This is particularly the case in news or ‘actual footage’
documentary contexts or across concentric rather than parallel contexts. By designat-
ing the relationship anis rather than a shadow-of, the implication is that the two are
identical, just existing in different contexts.
Thomasson (1998) differentiates between two different types of context - the ‘fictional context’ which is the ‘in-universe’ view and the ‘real contexts’ which appear to be the paradigms from which the critic/reader is interrogating the text. OntoMedia approaches this in a number of ways. The ontology is primarily concerned with the fictional context perspective view because that is what the text is portraying. The real context perspective is what reader brings to the text and, thus, is what the reader brings to the text as described through OntoMedia. However, it is necessary to recognise that what is in the text is not always undisputed. Since one of the, often put forward, axioms to write by is as ‘show not tell’, the reader is required to interpret the text to understand the facts, this means that any description of the textual narrative, for example in OntoMedia, must have gone through a ‘real context’ interpretative process at the point the encoding from
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the original text was made. Or, more simply, anything described in OntoMedia is going to be an interpretation. Some things people are going to interpret the same way, except when dealing with unreliable narrators stated facts like a character’s name are hard to dispute (see Section 7.3.1.2). Other information may be less clear cut (see Listing 7.11). For this reason OntoMedia allows traits to be differentiated both by the way the trait appears to others within the context and by the way it appears to the audience (see Section 7.2.4.5). It also allows for information regarding the level of evidence for a piece of information to be attached to that information (see Secction 7.2.4.11). The evidence levels include the state ‘interpretation’ to allow for cases where the belief in the truth of the statement has been filtered through theories of thought such as ‘neo-marxist postmodernism’, ‘femanism’ or ‘slash goggles’.
Thomasson argues that “we should take seriously the fact that we make reference to the story to explain the sense in which such claims are true, for this suggests that statements such as ‘Holmes is a detective’ really are shorthand for a longer locution such as ‘according to the story Holmes is a detective”’ Thomasson (1998, P. 113). However, while the different theories are intended to take into account the fact that a given entity may be fictional, the trait being assigned to them is not. As in the previous example, we may argue whether Holmes is or is not fictional but we do not also ask whether the concept of a detective is a fictional one. The properties of a given entity are meta in that the profession of ‘prince’ is the same concept no matter what reality we refer to. In this respect we are impressing our context of reality onto all the other concepts because it is within that context that the ontology exists and is defined. This is not seen as problematic because authors are also a product of the real world and so are also impressing the context of their reality onto the expressions they are creating of the fictional universes.