Fictional Characters and Their Individuating Properties

In this article, I want to defend two claims. First, as regards fictional characters ( ficta), one must appeal to constitutive properties, i.e., properties that are not only necessary but also essential for a fictum involved by a certain narration; namely, the internal discourse about a fictum. Such properties are indeed the properties that are truly predicated of ficta, either explicitly or implicitly, in that narration. For the appeal to such properties may explain not only i) the truth of important bits of external discourse, i.e., the discourse concerning a fictum outside that narration, but also ii) a fictum’s individuation, i.e., what makes that fictum the object it is. Second, ficta are truly internally predicated such properties, i.e., they possess such properties in a specific, constitutive, mode. For those properties are members of the property sets with which ficta are somehow correlated; indeed, possession of truly internally predicated properties precisely amounts to set-membership.