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Sherlock Holmes Is Not Out There : Some Ideas for An Anti-Exoticist Account of Fictional Characters

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Abstract:  Many philosophers include fictional objects like Sherlock Holmes in their ontological inventory. Yet, if Sherlock Holmes is part of reality, then he must be an «exotic» entity: either non-concrete or non-actual or non-existent. In this paper, I will assume that whatever there is (in reality) is concrete, actual, and existent. Accordingly, I will sketch a way to get rid of fictional entities, based on Sellars' metalinguistic strategy for nominalism. Roughly speaking, the main result can be stated as follows: when we talk about Sherlock Holmes, we are actually talking about Sherlock Holmes depictions. Keywords : Fiction, Nominalism, Actualism.