The Logic of Fictional Existence

Fictional characters have a complex relationship with existence. Intuitively, they do not exist in our world, but they exist in their fictional world, as shown by the following intuitively true statements: (1) In the Lord of the Rings, Frodo exists. (2) Frodo does not exist. This is not yet a problem, for it merely shows that the natural language expression "to exist" must have an indexical shade of meaning, which is well known. But it calls for attention, for it is not clear how readers keep track of the fictional characters (non)existence in practice. In this article, I give a semantic analysis of this pair of statements combining two ideas. First, I motivate (Leonard 1956)'s not so original idea that "to exist" means something like "to have at least one contingent property". Second, I build on Currie (2003)'s argument to show that fictional characters have contingent properties in their fictional world but only necessary properties outside it. Combining these two ideas nicely explains the fictional characters' subtle ontological status which crucially depends on the perspective we (readers) take when thinking about them.