Abstract Objects by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030382421
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

14Here we speak of the relation of determination in a semantic sense, in order to establish what an intensional object is directly about. So, in the case of a fictional content it is directly about a specific fictional object–i.e., a fictional character, a fictional place, a fictional kind, a fictional situation, etc.

15In this sense, we should distinguish the case in which a novelist conceives some fictional scientist formulating a new SM–or postulating a new theoretical entity–(where the scientist and the SM construed by him–or the theoretical entity in question–are fictional in the sense that they exist thanks to the novel and its creation by the novelist) from the case in which an actual scientist construes a new SM–or postulates a new theoretical entity–to account for a certain (set of) phenomenon(a). The SM in the novel–let us suppose that it is even conveniently detailed–is not truly a SM, i.e. conceived for scientific purposes, but just because of the plot of the novel. Nevertheless, it will be easy to check that our approach can obviously account for these fictional cases as abstract artifacts, because the conceived SM in a novel is determined by that novel in a similar way to a character in a work of fiction (for instance, the Sherlock-Holmes-character of Doyle’s stories or the Hobbit-kind in Tolkien’s novels). Only in the case where a SM serves for actual scientific purposes and it has been construed by an actual scientist or group of scientists, we are facing an intensional entity that conveniently tries to satisfy scientific standards and that is construed with the purpose of understanding the real concrete world. This proposal is also accounting for cases in which scientists don’t believe that the SM stands for a real concrete system (or systems), as for example with the Bohr’s atom model nowadays. (The authors of this article want to thank an anonymous referee for his/her helpful comments at this point that lead us to clarify this issue.)

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