ABSTRACT
Fictionalism is often motivated by ontological scruples. Mathematical fictionalists like Field are nominalists: they deny that numbers, along with all other abstract things, are real. Fictionalists about possible worlds are often actualists: they deny the reality of all nonactual things, including nonactual possible worlds and any nonactual inhabitants thereof. Moral fictionalists are sometimes motivated by the thought that our world, the natural world, could not contain such weird entities as moral values seem to be. The most obvious way in which the metaphysics of fiction can impinge on fictionalism is if some form of realism is true, and the fictional objects (nonexistent, nonactual, or nonconcrete) somehow get in the way of the fictionalism, or of the motivation behind it.
