“He Doesn't Look Like Sherlock Holmes”

This chapter seeks to define the existential status and truth-value of fictional characters, with frequent appeals to multiple iterations of Sherlock Holmes as an example. It surveys two rival schools of thought, drawn from metaphysics and possible-world semantics. Alexius Meinong’s “non-existent objects”, i.e. the metaphysical approach, is shown to be qualitatively different from how we think of fictional characters. David Lewis’s “truth in fiction”, derived from counterfactual logic and possible-world semantics, fails to address the particularities of fictional characters as they are represented anew across multiple iterations. By contrast, I advance that fictional characters are best thought of as “quasi-existent”— a stipulated term that conveys how their imagined existence is neither reducible to real-world knowledge nor is the sum of their textual iterations. In conclusion, I suggest how “quasi-existent/existence”, however counterintuitive, may prove productive to future theories of fiction.