Ontology of Fictional Entities

The field of ontology of fictional entities investigates the metaphysical and semantic status of characters, objects and worlds that arise within works of fiction. Scholars debate whether fictional characters should be regarded as abstract artefacts, linguistic conventions or merely as useful fictions without ontological underpinning. Central questions concern reference—how names like “Sherlock Holmes” secure meaning without corresponding real-world referents—identity across possible worlds, truth conditions for fictional statements and the nature of emotional engagement with non-existent objects. Research draws upon classical theories from Meinong and Ingarden, contemporary developments in formal semantics and advances in cognitive science. Interdisciplinary methods span phenomenological analyses of imaginative experience, pragmatic accounts of discourse dynamics and experimental findings that suggest readers treat ficta as inhabiting a distinct subrealm of being. The global significance of this work extends to digital media, where virtual avatars require coherent ontological models, and to artificial intelligence, where narrative comprehension hinges on a robust account of non-real entities. Concrete examples, such as the evolution of roles assigned to characters across sequel literatures or the interpretation of quantifiers within fictional worlds, illustrate the breadth and practical import of the field.

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Ontology of Fictional Entities publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in ontology of fictional entities across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Fictional entity: An object or character posited within a narrative framework but lacking real-world existence.

Abstract artefact: A non-empirical object whose existence depends on human creative or linguistic conventions.

Intentionality: The quality of mental states that are directed towards objects or content, real or imaginary.

Negative existential: A statement asserting the non-existence of a referent, as in fictional non-being (“Holmes does not exist”).

References

1. Fictional names and individual concepts. Synthese (2020).
2. A contextualist treatment of negative existentials. Intercultural Pragmatics (2021).
3. Ingarden vs. Meinong on Ficta’s Generation and Properties. Estetika The European Journal of Aesthetics (2024).
4. Real Emotions for Unreal Fictional Objects: A Brentanean Perspective. Philosophia (2024).
5. Fictional domains. Noûs (2022).