We are pleased to announce that on Friday, December 12 at 4.30pm (CET), Marco Santambrogio (University of Parma) will give the talk On the Creation of Some Abstract Artefacts as part of the Lugano Philosophy Colloquia Fall 2025 organised by the Institute of Philosophy (ISFI) at USI. This hybrid talk will take place in Room Multiuso FTL Building (USI west campus) and online via Zoom. If you are interested in joining online, please write to events.isfi(a)usi.ch. Here is the abstract of the talk: How are abstract artefacts—assuming they exist—brought into being? Focusing on such examples as the chess queen, the senate of a constitutional state, and the fictional character Sherlock Holmes, it is argued that these entities are created through speech acts of stipulation, which are governed by a principle first introduced by Frege in Begriffsschrift. According to this principle, sentences initially used to make a stipulation can subsequently be used to make true assertions. This principle not only accounts for the creation of stipulated entities, but also explains why sentences such as “Sherlock Holmes is a detective”—unprefixed by locutions like ‘fictionally’ or ‘in the story’—can truthfully report what holds in Conan Doyle’s stories. Although such sentences ascribe properties of flesh-and-blood human beings to abstract objects, no category mistake is involved, it is argued, since predicates like ‘being a detective’ undergo a meaning transfer (in Geoffrey Nunberg’s sense). Finally, a classification of stipulative speech acts is offered within a Searlean framework.