Prop Oriented Make-believe, Metaphor, Fictionalism: Reply to Elisabeth Camp 1

Prop Oriented Make-Believe, Metaphor, Fictionalism: Reply to Elisabeth Camp1 Kendall L. Walton (Draft, 16 September 2013) Prop oriented make-believe is make-believe utilized for the purpose of understanding what I call “props,” real world objects or states of affairs that make propositions “fictional,” i.e. true in the make-believe world.2 Prop oriented make-believe plays important roles in two distinct areas. It lies at the heart of the functioning of many metaphors (if not most or even all of them)—or so I, David Hills and others have claimed.3 And one variety of fictionalism in metaphysics invokes prop oriented make-believe to explain—explain away—apparent references to entities some find questionable or problematic (fictional characters, propositions, moral properties, numbers).4 I myself employ this kind of fictionalism in treating discourse about fictional characters and kindred merely fictitious or made-up entities.5 In what follows I defend Hills’ and my views of metaphor against arguments that Elisabeth Camp (2009)6 has leveled against them, many of which Catherine Wearing (2011) echoes or endorses. Camp and Wearing seriously misrepresent what we say about metaphor, and their arguments miss their targets. If they were right about our take on metaphor and the prop oriented make-believe it involves, it would be difficult to see how prop oriented make-believe could figure in coherent fictionalist theories (Wearing 2011: 2). So the clarification of our views