Abstract
Artifactualism about fictional characters, positing Harry Potter as an abstract
artifact created by J. K. Rowling, has been criticized on the grounds that the idea
of creating such objects is mysterious and problematic. In the light of such qualms, it is
worth homing in on an argument in favor of artifactualism, showing that it is the best
way to include the likes of Harry Potter in our ontology precisely because it incorporates
authorial creation. To that end, I will be exploring Kripke’s fleeting remarks in the Addenda
to his “Naming and Necessity” lectures about expressions like ‘unicorn’ and ‘Harry
Potter’. Elsewhere, Kripke motivates artifactualism by suggesting that incorporating
authorial creation (as artifactualism does) is a move that is intuitive and natural; but
beyond this, he doesn’t provide any arguments in favor of such a move. My purpose in
this paper is to construct such an argument based on considerations about Kripke’s general
view about proper names, in particular, his seminal causal-historical chain account
of reference determination, and its consequences for fictional names as well as nonfictional
names without bearers such as ‘Vulcan’.