fictional names have been one of the most important and serious topics in the contemporary philosophy of language and metaphysics.several questions such as “do fictional names refer to any objects?” “are fictional characters existent objects?” have resulted in a considerable literature of philosophy. in this essay, we will follow two objectives. first we will describe and elaborate the ideas ...

In a number of recent articles Timothy Williamson has built a strong case for the claim that everything necessarily exists. His argument rests on a combination of the derivability of this claim from quantificational logic, with standard modal principles and a robust understanding of the Kripke semantics for quantified modal logic. In this paper I defend a contingentist, non-Meinongian metaphysi...

On the Direct Reference thesis, proper names are what I call ‘genuine terms’, terms whose sole semantic contributions to the propositions expressed by their use are the terms’ semantic referents. But unless qualified, this thesis implies the false consequence that sentences containing names that fail to refer can never express true or false propositions. (Consider ‘The ancient Greeks worshipped...

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