Jacob O'Sullivan

Fictionalism is a popular approach to handling possible worlds discourse. It gives one the power of possible world semantics without being committed to undesirable consequences. The standard approach of reparsing possible world statements by attaching a fictional operator suffers from a problem that we argue is structural for all kinds of narrow fictionalism. To show this, we develop a toy theory of temporal fictionalism, showing that it is vulnerable to the same problem. We develop a solution in the form of a broad account of modal fictionalism. Broad modal fictionalism is a contentious view and its usefulness needs to be clarified. Given this, towards the end of the paper we offer some motivations for why broad modal fictionalism is useful and gesture towards how modal talk arises in everyday discourse.

Fictionalism is a popular approach to handling possible worlds discourse. It gives one the power of possible world semantics without being committed to undesirable consequences. The standard approach of reparsing possible world statements by attaching a fictional operator suffers from a problem that we argue is structural for all kinds of narrow fictionalism. To show this, we develop a toy theory of temporal fictionalism, showing that it is vulnerable to the same problem. We develop a solution in the form of a broad account of modal fictionalism. Broad modal fictionalism is a contentious view and its usefulness needs to be clarified. Given this, towards the end of the paper we offer some motivations for why broad modal fictionalism is useful and gesture towards how modal talk arises in everyday discourse.