Lugano Philosophy Colloquia. Marco Santambrogio

Marco Santambrogio (University of Parma) will give a talk on Friday, December 12 at 4.30pm (CET), Room Multiuso FTL Building (USI west campus), as part of the Lugano Philosophy Colloquia of Fall 2025.

On the Creation of Some Abstract Artefacts

Chaired by N.N.

Abstract: How are abstract artefacts—assuming they exist—brought into being? Focusing on such examples as the chess queen, the senate of a constitutional state, and the fictional character Sherlock Holmes, it is argued that these entities are created through speech acts of stipulation, which are governed by a principle first introduced by Frege in Begriffsschrift. According to this principle, sentences initially used to make a stipulation can subsequently be used to make true assertions. This principle not only accounts for the creation of stipulated entities, but also explains why sentences such as ‘Sherlock Holmes is a detective'—unprefixed by locutions like ‘fictionally’ or ‘in the story’—can truthfully report what holds in Conan Doyle’s stories. Although such sentences ascribe properties of flesh-and-blood human beings to abstract objects, no category mistake is involved, it is argued, since predicates like ‘being a detective’ undergo a meaning transfer (in Geoffrey Nunberg’s sense). Finally, a classification of stipulative speech acts is offered within a Searlean framework.

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