Abstract

For those who endorse Millianism and take ‘Sherlock Holmes’ to be an empty name, the sentence ‘Sherlock Holmes is clever’ may not count as expressing a complete proposition. The sentence ‘According to the fiction, Sherlock Holmes is clever’, however, should count as expressing a true proposition. I attempt to reconcile these two intuitions by arguing that ‘According to the fiction’ is a two-dimensional operator: to evaluate a statement of the form ‘According to the fiction, S’ at world @ (where @ is also taken to be the actual world), we evaluate S at the world of the fiction (where the fiction is also taken to be the actual world).