Abstract
Like parafictional statements, metafictionalstatements also serve to talk about fiction, and therefore adopt an external perspective. They too, correlatively, are judged to be true or false, and not "neither true nor false" like fictional statements, which are based on simulation and do not deal with reality. Unlike parafictional statements, however, metafictional statements aim not to convey the content of the fiction (in order, for example, to inform someone who hasn't read the novel but wants to know "what it's about"), but to situate it in the real world.
A metafictional statement like "Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character invented by Conan Doyle in 1887" is intuitively true, but we don't understand it as conveying an implicit prefix. We can't say: "In Conan Doyle's fiction, Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character created in 1887". For this type of statement, the theory that seems most natural is the one I attributed in the first lecture to certain metaphysicians. According to this theory, the name "Sherlock Holmes" in this type of statement refers not to a flesh-and-blood individual born of a father and mother, but to an entity of another kind: a fictional character.
A fictional character is what we call a dependent entity, whose existence necessarily implies the existence of the entity on which it depends. In this case, a fictional character exists as such only because he or she is one of the protagonists in the story told by a work of fiction - and is thus existentially dependent on it. This property distinguishes fictional characters from real people, who may also be represented, but whose existence does not depend on that of the representation. The fictional character, understood in this way, is a cultural creation, of the same nature as a melody or the song La Marseillaise, and not a flesh-and-blood person.
It follows that the name "Sherlock Holmes" does not refer to the same type of entity in a fictional statement as in a metafictional statement. in fiction, "Sherlock Holmes" refers to a flesh-and-blood individual who is pretended to exist, but in fictional discourse, it also refers to the character Conan Doyle created when he fictitiously represented the flesh-and-blood individual. Unlike the flesh-and-blood individual, who is purely imaginary and can only be referred to in a simulative way, the character created by Conan Doyle does exist, and literary critics can refer to him in a completely serious way. These two entities, the flesh-and-blood individual referred to in fiction (as if he existed) and the fictional character actually created by fictionalizing the flesh-and-blood individual, are closely linked. The use of the same name for both things is therefore not surprising, and evokes other well-known cases of "polysemy".
