Fictional characters are awkward creatures. They are described as being girls, detectives, and cats; as being famous, based on real people, and well developed, and as being paradigmatic examples of things that don’t exist. It’s not hard to see that there are tensions between these various descriptions— how can something that is a detective not exist?— and there is a range of views designed to make sense of the pretheoretical data. Fictional realists hold that we should accept that fictional characters are part of ‘the furniture of our world’. Others are fictional antirealists, who hold instead that our world does not contain any such things. In this article, I deploy an independently motivated metaontology to defend a novel version of fictional antirealism. On the view I develop and defend, the central task we face is that of explaining facts concerning fictional characters, where the relevant notion of explanation is distinctively metaphysical in character. Fictional antirealism emerges as the plausible thesis that facts about fictional entities can be completely explained in terms of the existence and features of other things.

中文翻译：

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解释虚构人物

虚构人物是笨拙的生物。他们被描述为女孩，侦探和猫。以出名，以真实的人为基础，发展良好，并且是不存在的事物的典范实例。不难看出，这些不同的描述之间存在着张力-怎么可能不存在侦探？-并有一系列旨在理解前理论数据的观点。虚构的现实主义者认为，我们应该接受虚构的人物是“我们世界的家具”的一部分。其他人则是虚构的反现实主义者，他们认为我们的世界不包含任何此类东西。在本文中，我部署了一种独立动机的元本体论，以捍卫小说形式的虚构的反现实主义。根据我的发展和捍卫，我们面临的中心任务是解释有关虚构人物的事实，其中有关解释的概念在性质上是形而上学的。虚构的反现实主义作为一个合理的论点出现，即关于虚构实体的事实可以根据其他事物的存在和特征来完全解释。