Abstract
Modal fictionalists propose to defuse the unwanted ontological commitments of modal realism by treating modal realism as a fictional story, and modal assertions as assertions, prefixed by a fictionalist operator, that something is true in that story. However, consideration of conditionals with modal antecedents raises the problem ofembedding, which shows that the simple prefixing strategy cannotsucceed. A compositional version of the fictionalist strategy isdeveloped and critiqued, and some general semantic morals aredrawn from the failures of both strategies.
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Dever, J. Modal Fictionalism and Compositionality. Philosophical Studies 114, 223–251 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024967701483
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024967701483