ABSTRACT
Fictional objects, such as fictional characters, are at once both utterly familiar and utterly mysterious. Realists agree with error theorists that the data generally commit to fictional characters, and so, when the ontological chips are down, they existentially quantify over fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes. The main tasks for the realist are to give an account of the nature of fictional characters and to explain the data in the light of that account. Voltolini expands the kind approach, proposing that fictional characters are composite entities, thus adding a little of the flavor of the artifactual account, rendering fictional characters contingent. As in the debates over mathematical, modal and moral objects, the main obstacle to realism about fictional objects is an argument from “queerness”: the more a postulated object fits the intuitions about fictional characters, the more metaphysically queer it seems to be. But realism is not easy to abandon, especially in the light of commitment to critical statements.
