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with WN as if in it the notion of supernumerary individual dissolved into the property of being necessarily and symmetrically related to another given individual. In WN a supernumerary is the set of the x's that satisfy the condition of being related symmetrically to another given individual. |
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The fact that such a set has one and only one member makes the identification of a supernumerary possible. |
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Since this is all these objects are, it is clear that, in another world in which this relation is not considered a necessary condition for the construction of the world structure, they cannot be constructed. |
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Therefore it cannot be said that WN R W0. |
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The above demonstration can be taken as a mere game, since no one seems interested in the question whether, from the inside of a fictional world, our world W0 can be reached (the hypothesis of a fictional text in which a character tries to deal with W0, as in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, represents a case of trompe-l'oeil: even the author takes part in Pirandello's WN, a world that encompasses many WNc). |
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However, a psychological experiment may be useful. |
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Consider Dumas' The Three Musketeers. There (WN) we have certain individuals also belonging to W0 (such as Richelieu and probably d'Artagnan) who retain their essential properties as far as the historical frame is concerned. Richelieu is a French Cardinal, the prime minister of Louis XIII, and so on. Then there are some supernumeraries, among which Athos and Lady de Winter. Besides their essential properties they have the relational property of having been husband and wife (and the fabula strictly depends on this interidentification). |
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Now let us imagine Athos wondering how things might have been were he not the husband of Milady. In this case, from WN, Athos would not be able to conceive of a variant of himself. He is Athos only insofar as he is the husband of Milady. Split from this relation he would disappear. Athos knows this rule very well and cannot conceive of a world in which both 'Athos exists' and 'Athos does not exist' would be equally nonsensical, since the definition of Athos is nothing but 'this x who is related to Milady'. |
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Obviously, this is a rather metaphysical game: Athos can have propositional attitudes as an individual of WN in a WNc about the course of future events in WN, but he cannot have propositional attitudes concerning a WN set up totally differently. But this is exactly what I am trying to say. The world of a fabula cannot be otherwise. Were it otherwise, Athos would be somebody else living in another WN.
16 |
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The fact is that we are not so interested in speculating about our world from the point of view of a novel, but are, rather, eager to do the opposite, to analyze the world of a novel from our point of view (as happens par- |
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