As an experiment, I am using the expression in the world of Sherlock Holmes as the first example to be analyzed in my introduction to intensional semantics this semester. The idea is not so much to peek pique the interest of literary theorists — although why not— but to start with an expression that wears its possible worlds semantics on its sleeve.

Of course, after some preliminaries one quickly realizes that there is no such thing as the world of Sherlock Holmes. David Lewis (in his “Truth in Fiction”) writes:

>[I]t will not do to follow ordinary language to the extent of supposing that we can somehow single out a single one of the worlds … . Is the world of Sherlock Holmes a world where Holmes has an even or an odd number of hairs on his head at the moment when he first meets Watson? What is Inspector Lestrade’s blood type? It is absurd to suppose that these questions about the world of Sherlock Holmes have answers. The best explanation of that is that the worlds of Sherlock Holmes are plural, and the questions have different answers at different ones.

Usually, one then makes the move of making such operators universal quantifiers over accessible worlds. And with some important wrinkles, that’s what Lewis does. But he also writes this intriguing passage:

>… these are the worlds of Sherlock Holmes. What is true throughout them is true in the stories; what is false throughout them is false in the stories; what is true at some and false at others is neither true nor false in the stories. Any answer to the silly questions just asked would doubtless fall in the last category.

As far as I can see, his semantic proposal does not actually deliver this result. According to his (essentially universally quantified) semantics, it is simply false that in the world (s) of Sherlock Holmes, Lestrade has blood type A. But he is on to something with his intuition, I believe.

Bonomi & Zucchi in the only other paper I have read about fiction operators mention in a footnote Lewis’ desire for a truth-value gap in such cases but say that for simplicity they will stick to the universally quantified semantics. [Andrea Bonomi & Alessandro Zucchi. (2003) “A pragmatic framework for truth in fiction” Dialectica, pdf preprint](http://filosofia.dipafilo.unimi.it/~bonomi/Bonomi&Zucchi03.pdf))]

I am intrigued by this, since it reminds me of facts I have found with other operators as well. In my “Bare Plurals, Bare Conditionals, and Only” paper (abstract](http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jos/14.1.1)), preprint)](http://web.mit.edu/fintel/www/only.pdf))), I argued that operators like definite plurals, generic bare plurals, and bare conditionals have a homogeneity presupposition, which results in presupposition failure when not all the cases quantified over behave the same. For example, the kids are asleep is true when all of them are asleep, false when none of them are, and neither true nor false when some are and some aren’t. This was first argued for by Janet Fodor in her dissertation.

It is interesting to see something similar argued for with fiction operators. So, my question to any readers that know more about this than me: has this topic been addressed in more detail anywhere in the fiction operator literature? Has anyone actually proposed a semantics that cashes out Lewis’ intuition?

Thanks. And I’ll gladly reciprocate with hints about topics I know at least something about.