Cat’s Cradle

Abstract

This chapter extends the Radical Fictionalist take on peripheries and storyworlds with an introduction to the idea of peripheral importation, paying particular attention to the peripheral importation of actual semantic regularities. The chapter continues with a discussion of the repercussion of Radical Fictionalism for fictional co-reference and translation, with a focus on reported speech and on the translation of fictional proper names. At the end of the chapter, one starred section is devoted to so-called real names in fiction, with a negotiable commitment to the importation of the (presumed) actual metaphysical properties of words. A second starred section is concerned with the idea of fictional languages, as in Burgess’ Nadsat or Vonnegut’s Bokoninish.