Fregean Realism: Frodo Lives! and Other Fictions

Fregean Realism: Frodo Lives! and Other Fictions argues that literary fictions, pictures, and other artworks are modes of access to Gottlob Frege’s ＂third realm＂ of objective thoughts, about both what is in the real world and what is not, but might, or might not, be. Starting with a critique of fictionalism--the doctrine that art makes no ontological commitments because it depends on acts of pretending--Andrei Pop shifts focus to the shared meaning addressed by acts of pretending and other audience reactions to works of art. This book shows that a Fregean theory of sense, assertion, and concepts does justice to the context-specificity of artistic meaning while allowing for durable--indeed eternal--conceptual content. It explores implications for venerable problems such as the truth of art, the reality of aesthetic properties, beauty and ugliness, but also for specific genres or modes, like sculpture, allegory, the relation between image and caption, and the first-person picture.

Andrei Pop is Allan and Jean Frumkin professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago.