One fruitful and commonsensical res

One fruitful and commonsensical response to these metaphysical problems draws on possible-world theory. When applied to the question of fictional reference, possible-world theory simply states that a sentence referring to a fictional character such as “Sherlock Holmes lives in London” has an implicit contextualizing operator. We make truthful claims about nonactual states of being everyday when we say “I hope that it stops raining this afternoon.” The phrase “I hope that” brackets the untruthful statement “it stops raining” in a way that allows it nonetheless to be part of a truthful claim. Likewise, possible world theory suggests that when we make a claim about the facts of a fictional text, we are implicitly saying “In the world of Conan Doyle’s novel” before we say “Holmes lives in London.”