How to Vindicate (Fictional) Creationism

Abstract

In this paper, I want to show that Moderate Creationism (MC), a variant among realist doctrines concerning fictional entities (ficta), is the only form of Fictional Creationism that may rescue it from both the ontological and the metaphysical criticisms that have been recently raised against this position in general. According to MC, what is distinctively required in order for a fictum to come into existence qua abstract mind-dependent entity is that a certain reflexive stance applies to the non- ontologically committal make-believe practice that there is a certain (nonactual yet typically concrete) individual. In this stance, the practice is taken as involving a certain set of properties, the properties the storyteller mobilises in the relevant bit of her narration. So taken, the practice amounts to the fact that that very set of properties is make-believedly identical with a certain (nonactual yet typically concrete) individual. In particular, I appeal to a strong version of MC, according to which, once it is so taken, the practice counts as a certain fictum, in virtue of a constitutive rule for its generation. For this version may account for the special sense in which ficta may be created entities.