Holmes' and Holmes – A Millian Analysis of Names from Fiction
Stefano Pedrelli · dialectica · 2002
In this paper, I defend a view of names from fiction compatible with the Millian theory of proper names. Unlike other attempts at providing a Millian analysis of names from fiction, my approach gives semantic recognition to our pre-theoretic intuitions without postulating meta-physically dubious entities. The intuitively correct treatment of typical examples, including true negative existential statements, is obtained by appealing only to independently motivated results in the semantics for natural languages.