Abstract

In this paper I want to hold that contextualism – the position according to which wide context, i.e., the concrete situation of discourse, may well have the semantic role of assigning truth-conditions to sentences – may well accommodate (along with some nowadays established theses about the semantics of proper names) three data about fiction, namely, the facts that as far as discourse involving fiction is concerned, i) sentences about nothing are meaningful ii) they may be true in fiction iii) yet they may also be true in reality. Moreover, I also want to hold that such a contextualist accommodation does not depend on endorsing a realist stance about fictional entities, although such a stance gives the best truth-conditional explanation for such data, in particular iii).