Philosophical debates around fiction often tend to focus on semantical arguments for and against the inclusion of fictional entities in the overall inventory of what there is. Realist philosophers have a few strings to their bow in the field of semantics. Apparently, people quantify over fictional characters and assert true propositions about them, even when they are not engaged in some sort of pretense such as the act of telling a fictional story. It seems that, while asserting that Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde were created by R. L. Stevenson, we commit ourselves to the existence of at least two fictional entities. Hence, a new category should be admitted to our catalogue of real things. Clearly enough, anti-realist philosophers can resist arguments of this kind in many different ways. This is one of the reasons why purely ontological arguments are preferred by realists such as Thomasson (1999) and Voltolini (2006): there must be some evidence other than ordinary language for accepting things like Jekyll and Hyde as genuine entities. On this ground, anti-realists may try to reject…
˜