Abstract

Semanticists and philosophers of fiction that formulate analyses of reports on the content of media—or ‘contensive statements’—of the form ‘In/According to _s_, \(\phi \) ’, usually treat the ‘In _s_’-operator (_In_) and the ‘According to _s_’-operator (_Acc_) on a par. I argue that _In_ and _Acc_ require separate semantic analyses based on three clusters of linguistic observations: (1) preferences for _In_ or _Acc_ in contensive statements about fictional or non-fictional media, (2) preferences for _In_ or _Acc_ in contensive statements about implicit or explicit content and (3) tense preferences in contensive statements with _In_ and _Acc_. To account for these three observations I propose to adopt Lewis’s possible world analysis for contensive statements with _In_ and to analyse contensive statements with _Acc_ as indirect speech reports.