The workshop will be take place on February 4-5, 2025 at the University of Macerata – Department of Human Studies, Aula A “Omero Proietti” Third Floor, via Garibaldi 20, Macerata – Italy.
For information about how to join (either online or in presence), please write to Michele Paolini Paoletti at m.paolinipaoletti@unimc.it.
Program of the day
DAY 1 – Tuesday, February 4, 2025
Morning session
Chair: Michele PAOLINI PAOLETTI
9.00-10.00 Elisa PAGANINI (Milan)
Debates about fictional characters
10.00-11.00 Jansan FAVAZZO, Francesco ORILIA (Macerata)
Indeterminate and inconsistent characterizations: two different perspectives
11.00-11.30 Break
11.30-12.30 David DAVIES (McGill)
Further reflections on ‘connected names’ in fictions
12.30-14.00 Lunch Break
Afternoon session
Chair: Emilio SANFILIPPO
14.00-15.00 James PHELAN (Ohio State)
Character Narration as Characterization: A Matter of Degree?
15.00-16.00 Heloísa ABREU DE LIMA, Gaia TOMAZZOLI (Sapienza Rome)
Scholarly observations on literary characters: two case studies from Medieval Italian literature
16.00-17.00 Françoise LAVOCAT (Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Character and literary theory (20th-21st centuries): from one dissolution to another
17.00-17.30 Break
17.30-18.30 Anthony EVERETT (Bristol)
Three ways to imagine a fiction
DAY 2- Wednesday, February 5, 2025
Morning session
Chair: Francesco ORILIA
9.00-10.00 Catharine ABELL (Oxford)
Fictional entities from a Dual Perspective
10.00-11.00 Gregory CURRIE (York)
Folk psychology, silly questions, and the interpretation of characters in Attic drama
11.00-11.30 Break
11.30-12.30 Michele PAOLINI PAOLETTI (Macerata)
Interpreting Ficta: Actual Intentions Matter
12.30-14.00 Lunch Break
Afternoon session
Chair: Gaia TOMAZZOLI
14.00-15.00 Alberto VOLTOLINI (Turin)
Are Fictional Characters Objects of Interpretation?
15.00-16.00 Marco BUZZONI (Macerata)
Thought Experiments and the identification of fictional characters
16.00-16.30 Break
16.30-17.30 Benedetta GIOVANOLA (Macerata)
AI and the interpretation of texts: influence, manipulation, bias
17.30-18.30 Marta VILARDO, Emilio SANFILIPPO, Roberta FERRARIO, Claudio MASOLO (CNR)
Interpretation at the Intersection between Literary Studies, Analytic Philosophy, and Formal Modeling
Abstracts
Catharine ABELL (Oxford)
Title: Fictional entities from a Dual Perspective
Abstract: When we talk about fictional entities from an internal perspective, we talk about them as if they were real people, cities, buildings etc. When we talk about them from an external perspective, however, we take them to be fictional entities, things that feature in stories created by authors. From this perspective, it is fictional that they are people, cities, buildings etc. Both realists and anti-realists about fictional entities must identify the conditions under which we correctly take internal and external discourse to concern the same fictional entity. I will argue that this task is much harder for the anti-realist than for the realist.
Heloísa ABREU DE LIMA and Gaia TOMAZZOLI (Sapienza Rome)
Title: Scholary observations on literary characters: two case studies from Medieval Italian literature
Abstract: Dante scholars and readers have generally agreed on acknowledging that Beatrice is a key character in Dante’s works. Appearing in different texts with various features and with a historical identity still controversial, Beatrice can be considered an extremely complex character in literary history. With a much more limited appearance in the Divine Comedy and probably based on a historical woman, the character of Francesca da Rimini has likewise fascinated Dante’s readers to a great extent, and has been the object of numerous rewritings. Both characters, more importantly, have been the object of endless critical debates over the centuries.
In this talk we will focus on Beatrice and Francesca as two case studies for the ontological modeling of scholarly statements. First, we will address some of the main interpretative problems concerning Beatrice, and sketch a brief profile of the critical reception of this character in the last twenty-five years. In particular, we will shed light on different approaches and methodologies adopted by scholars and on their effects on the various interpretative practices related to Beatrice. In the second part of this talk we will recall the main attitudes adopted by readers of Dante’s Commedia dealing with the character of Francesca along the centuries. We will especially focus on how the interpretations related to her have been charged with moral judgments and psychological analysis. The comparison between the two characters proves to be all the more interesting because the criticism concerning them appeals to vey different interpretive tools and critical stances, thus offering different viewpoints into the methodologies and argumentation strategies of literary criticism.
Marco BUZZONI (Macerata)
Title: Thought Experiments and the identification of fictional characters
Abstract: By briefly comparing empirical-scientific and fictional thought experiments, a fundamental similarity and a main difference between empirical-scientific and narrative thought experiments are brought to the fore. On the one hand, the counterfactual construction of idealised scenarios is something shared by scientific and fictional thought experiments; on the other hand, the differences depends on the different intentionalities to which this construction is subordinated: fictional TEs, instead of resolving the dimension of counterfactuality in real empirical facts, processes (or real-historical characters), use it to propose certain cultural contents (among which there are also fictional characters) which can be relived in the first person in a dimension outside any particular space and time. These two moments help to understand how fictional characters can be both conceived as such and concretely identified. From this point of view, in fact, it is possible to reconcile two opposing instances that have emerged in the literature concerning the identification of fictional characters, namely those linked to the author’s intentions and those linked to the undeniable traits of autonomy that fictional characters acquire in the history of culture.
Gregory CURRIE (York)
Title: Folk psychology, silly questions, and the interpretation of characters in Attic drama
Abstract: We employ our ordinary folk psychological capacity for understanding others when seeking to understand the thoughts and actions of fictional beings. But we do so within constraints that do not have real world counterparts: authorial intent, the coherence of plot, the expectations of genre and the opacity of the work’s representational devices, especially in staged drama. The result is often a set of conflicting demands on our interpretation of character, with no clearly best reconciliation–and perhaps no reconciliation at all. I illustrate this with examples, mostly from drama and most extensively from Oedipus Tyrannus. The discussion helps us to get some clarity about what a “silly question” (Kendall Walton) is, and whether it is silly to ask silly questions.
David DAVIES (McGill)
Title: Further reflections on ‘connected names’ in fictions
Abstract: The opening sentence of Dickens’ Bleak House is ‘London’. In the subsequent pages various things are recounted concerning fictional characters such as Mr Jarndyce. But what is the referent of the opening sentence of the novel? Many literary scholars hold that ‘London’ also refers to a fictional entity, that shares many features with Dickensian London. Similar claims are made about ‘Richard III’ in Shakespeare’s play. Stacie Friend, however, has argued that making sense of many fictions requires that what she terms ‘connected names’ remain connected to their real world referents in fictional contexts, and I have defended a related view. In this paper, I consider certain challenges to this view: (a) Do we court metaphysical incoherence in imagining that fictional characters somehow interact with real people and real places?; (b) How do we deal with cases (the ‘Alexandria Quartet’ problem) where an author has many false beliefs about the ‘real setting’ (or ‘real characters’) of her fiction that might generate incoherences or inconsistencies in the plot; (c) How does this bear on debates about the role of authorial intention in determining ‘story meaning’?
Anthony EVERETT (Bristol)
Title: Three ways to imagine a fiction
Abstract: I distinguish between three sorts of imaginative project in which we might engage when we consume fiction, the diachronic imaginings which take place while we actively consume fiction, the synchronic or all-things-considered imaginings which take place when we reflect upon the fiction as a whole and consider what took place in the fiction, and the imaginative processes that mediate these two. I note each of these imaginative projects corresponds to a different sort of interpretive project in which readers or critics might engage. I argue that making this 3-way distinction helps us get clearer about the different sorts of aesthetic experiences fiction may generate, the different sorts of interpretation required to properly engage with a text, and the nature of fictional characters. I provocatively conclude that some fictions lack fictional characters.
Jansan FAVAZZO and Francesco ORILIA (Macerata)
Title: Indeterminate and inconsistent characterizations: two different perspectives
Abstract: Fictional characters raise several troubles about their identity, not only across different stories but even within the same story. Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, for instance, depicts a world pretty much like ours, in which there seems to be no indeterminate identity, yet leaves it open whether the Shade character is the same as the Kinbote character. Following Everett (2013), we shall call it a case of type-A indeterminacy. On the contrary, in Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, there seems to be two characters, Kumiko and the woman in the hotel room, that are indeterminately identical. We shall call it a case of type-B indeterminacy. Worse still, there are cases of inconsistent identity: in Allais’ short story Un drame bien parisien, it is both the case that Raul is the same as the Templar and that Raul and the Templar are distinct. We shall address these problematic cases from two different perspectives, not really widespread in the ontology of fiction: non-objectual realism and non-fictionalist anti-realism.
Benedetta GIOVANOLA (Macerata)
Title: AI and the interpretation of texts: influence, manipulation, bias
Abstract
Françoise LAVOCAT (Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Title: Character and literary theory (20th-21st centuries): from one dissolution to another
Abstract: In this presentation, I will compare the destruction of the character in literary theories inherited from formalism with that which has taken place since the 2000s, in which the character is explicitly confused with the person. I will explain the political presuppositions of these theories and show that the resurrection of the character, which took place thanks to theories of fiction (supported by analytic philosophy), was followed by a conception of the character that denies its fictionality. Finally, I will argue for the need to take into account the pragmatic dimension in order to understand what is currently at stake in the relationship between readers, spectators, players and fictional entities.
Elisa PAGANINI (Milan)
Title: Debates about fictional characters
Abstract: It is generally taken for granted that fictional characters have certain properties, and the only debates are about what those properties are. I would like to explore the idea that fiction allows for different, but equally appropriate, interpretations
of the properties of fictional characters.
Michele PAOLINI PAOLETTI (Macerata)
Title: Interpreting Ficta: Actual Intentions Matter
Abstract: In this talk, I shall develop and defend a weak version of actual intentionalism about the interpretation of fictional characters (or ficta, in short). I shall first introduce legitimate acts of interpretation of ficta and a number of possible factors of interpretation, i.e., of factors that determine/cause/influence/constrain legitimate acts of interpretation (e.g., linguistic context, hypothetical audience, and so on). Among such factors, I shall argue that the actual intentions of actual authors are somehow more fundamental than all the other factors. Roughly, when it comes to the other factors of interpretation, the explanation as to how and why they determine/cause/influence/constrain legitimate acts of interpretation of ficta must always include some actual intentions of actual authors – whereas the converse need not be the case. However, first, actual intentions of actual authors need not replace or divest other factors of interpretation. And, secondly, the contents of such actual intentions need not always correspond to the contents of legitimate acts of interpretation – though some explanatory links between the former and the latter should be in place.
James PHELAN (Ohio State)
Title: Character Narration as Characterization: A Matter of Degree?
Abstract: In Living to Tell about It (2005) I proposed a distinction between character functions and narrator functions as a way to account for the distinct roles of character narrators as actors and as tellers. The default in realistic fiction is to have the functions converge so that how the character narrator tells about their actions also functions to characterize them. In this paper, I return to the distinction as I explore what happens when authors depart from the default either by clearly subordinating the narrator functions to the character functions or vice versa. The goal of this exploration is to unpack the often-overlooked complexity of the synthetic functions of realistic characters.
Maria E. REICHER-MAREK (RWTH Aachen)
Title: Creative and non-creative interpretations
Abstract: As a starting point for my contribution, I have chosen a bundle of questions that I found on the website of the MITE project:
Are the identity, persistence, and existence criteria of ficta contingent upon interpreting agents? If so, how does this situation unfold when the same text is subject to non-compatible interpretations? In other words, how many ficta emerge from a single text that undergoes diverse interpretations? (https://www.loa.istc.cnr.it/mite/index.php/about/wp2/)
In a nutshell, my answer is this: It depends on what kind of interpretation is involved. I will argue that interpretations can be divided into two classes, which I call creative and non-creative interpretations. With non-creative interpretations, no (new) fictional characters emerge. With creative interpretations, new fictional characters emerge. To answer the question of how many new fictional characters emerge from creative interpretations, I will (1) propose identity conditions that are based on a distinction between two kinds of predicates and (2) delineate a mereology of fictional characters.
Marta VILARDO, Emilio SANFILIPPO, Roberta FERRARIO, and Claudio MASOLO (CNR ISTC Laboratorio di ontologia applicata, Trento & Catania)
Title: Interpretation at the Intersection between Literary Studies, Analytic Philosophy, and Formal Modeling
Abstract: The interpretation of literary texts plays a fundamental role in literary studies. An interpretation commonly covers various features of a text, and can depend on various dimensions, one for all, the critical framework that interpreters adopt for their analysis. If one can easily find different approaches to literary interpretation, not necessarily agreeing on methods, goals, etc, a few things are broadly acknowledged. First, literary interpretation must be grounded on empirical available textual sources; second, interpreters must be aware of the norms adopted within a community, if any; third, multiple and possibly incompatible interpretations for the same text can coexist, hence – in more emphatic terms – there might not be a single, right interpretation of a literary text. When one looks at these considerations from a computational perspective, there is active research in the scope of the Digital Humanities on the development of formal means to handle literary interpretation to support scholars in their work. In the context of this presentation we shall dig into the analysis of some approaches for the modeling of interpretations, discussing their advantages, shortcomings, points of departure and intersection. In doing so, we have a double goal: by formal and philosophical analysis, to shed some light on the intricacies of interpretation practices, e.g., making it clear what is the argumentative strategy put forward by an interpreter, or the grounding for the inferences they make; second, to support the development of computational models that can support scholars in their interpretative goals. To exemplify our discussion, we will consider examples relative to the interpretation of fictional characters (ficta), arguing that an ontological theory for their characterization cannot avoid reference to the interpretation of the texts where they are found.
Alberto VOLTOLINI (Turin)
Title: Are Fictional Characters Objects of Interpretation?
Abstract: In Voltolini (2006), I have defended a rigid Meinong-like position on the identity of both fictional characters and fictional works. According to this position, fictional characters are makebelieve-based correlates of property sets, and fictional works are constituted out of such characters. As a consequence, if a fictional character changed one of the properties that belong to such a set, it would be a different individual, and so would be the fictional work that is constituted out of it. Yet as anyone knows, not only ascribing a property to a fictional character, but also assessing whether a fictional work contains such a character, is often a matter of interpretation. In this talk, I will try to see whether and how my position can account for such hermeneutical matters.
