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exophthalmia, will suffice. But where reference is understood as strictly to actual
individual objects, they will not. For Goodman, pictures, like names, obtain
predicates, and a nominalist ontology requires fictive pictures be taken firstly to
depict or denote no actual or individual object, or as null-denotation. 63 A nulldenotation
is understood to reverse the direction of its reference, to point to (or
place its predicate in) only a sort of picture. A unicorn-picture or a Homer Simpsonpicture,
are here the preferred nomenclature, taken as a more accurate indication of
reference direction, rather than implying there is an actual object, or a predicate
extended beyond the fictive picture.
Null denotation thus directs reference to the way we use or sort pictures, even at
the expense of having a further or actual object. Expanding on sorts of pictures is
not an idle exercise, as pictures of actual objects must all belong to sorts of pictures,
must be an x-picture of a y-object, and sometimes a y-as-x-picture. A unicornpicture
or a Homer Simpson-picture go to organising the workings of pictures in
the same way as class terms sort pictures of young women as young womenpictures,
not that all pictures containing young women need be classed as young
women-pictures, or that young women-pictures need contain only young women.
Importantly, the sorting of pictures and objects does not in Goodman’s view
require prior definitions or acquaintance with rules. It proceeds by trial and error,
practice and precedent, can learn sort of picture from object or vice versa, and
complies with consensus. This urges the parallel with language acquisition, and the
commitment to depiction taken as denotation. Yet Goodman’s view also aligns
fiction with fundamental processes of classification and construal, and fiction duly
emerges a more dignified and vital activity.
How is this nominalist view of fiction reconciled within a view of depiction as
exemplification? 64 If anything the view of depiction as exemplification makes it
clearer that fictive or null depiction functions as a form of self-reference, requiring a
two-way or resemblance relation. In exchanging null denotation for null depiction,
the study exchanges the notion of a null yet converse denotation, for the two-way
63 Goodman, 1976, pp. 21-26.
64 Although Goodman explicitly denies that exemplification may be fictive (Goodman, 1984, p.
60) this is taken here to apply to material exemplification, or exemplification of threedimensional
properties, rather than depictive exemplification.