Fictionally Fictional Object: The Alleged Objecthood of Nothingness

Wai Lok Cheung

doi:10.4312/as.2025.13.3.153-162

Authors

Wai Lok CHEUNG

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.4312/as.2025.13.3.153-162

Keywords:

nothingness, impossibility, fiction, pretence, counterpart

Abstract

Nothingness is inconceivable, yet at the same time it is not inconceivable because it is actually referred to. I propose several accessibility relations to illustrate that nothingness is not an object at all. The fictional object that Sherlock Holmes is belongs to the domain in some semantic context, but the fictionally fictional object that nothingness is does not. Based on this idea, I will also discuss the semantics and the pragmatics of “Nothingness does not exist”. How is it that it is not an object, unlike Sherlock Holmes, but we attribute to it nonexistence?

Metrics

Metrics Loading ...

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Cheung, Wai Lok. 2024. “A Realist Daoism: Reading the Zhuang-Zi with Lao Zi’s Daoist Realism.” Comparative Philosophy 15 (2): 43–65. https://doi.org/10.31979/2151-6014(2024).150207.

Cheung, Wai Lok. 2025. “A Situational Hermeneutic: The Priority of Reference Over Meaning.” Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics 48 2 (Suppl.): 61–72. http://jcla.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/JCLA-48.2-Suppl._Summer-2025_Wai-Lok-Cheung.pdf.

Cheung, Wai Lok. Forthcoming. “Epistemic Possibility: Kripke versus Soames.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy.

Everett, Anthony. 2013. The Nonexistent. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kaplan, David. 1989. “Demonstratives: An Essay on the Semantics, Logic, Metaphysics, and Epistemology of Demonstratives and Other Indexicals.” In Themes from Kaplan, edited by Joseph Almog, John Perry, and Howard Wettstein, 481–563. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kripke, Saul. 1972–1980. Naming and Necessity. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Kripke, Saul. 2013. Reference and Existence: The John Locke Lectures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Priest, Graham. 1996. “Some Priorities of Berkeley.” In Logic and Reality: Essays on the Legacy of Arthur Prior, edited by Jack Copeland, 479–88. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Priest, Graham. 2014. “Speaking of the Ineffable …” In Nothingness in Asian Philosophy, edited by JeeLoo Liu and Douglas L. Berger, 91–103. London: Routledge.

Priest, Graham. 2016 [2005]. Towards Non-Being: The Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stalnaker, Robert. 2014. Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press.