" IA7E can truly say that Sherlock Holmes lived** in Baker Street, and that he liked to show off his mental powers. We cannot truly say that he was a devoted family man, or that he worked in close cooperation with the police. It would be nice if we could take such descrip? tions of fictional characters at their face value, ascribing to them the same subject-predicate form as parallel descriptions of real-life characters. Then the sentences" Holmes wears a silk top hat" and" Nixon wears a silk top hat" would both be false because the referent of the subject term? fictional Holmes or real-life Nixon, as the case may be? lacks the property, expressed by the predicate, of wearing a silk top hat. The only difference would be that the subject terms" Holmes" and" Nixon" have referents of radically different sorts: one a fictional character, the other a real-life person of flesh and blood.

I dont't question that a treatment along these Meinongian lines could be made to work. Terence Parsons has done it. 1 But it is no simple matter to overcome the difficulties that arise. For one thing, is there not some perfectly good sense in which Holmes, like Nixon, is a real-life person of flesh and blood? There are stories about the exploits of super-heroes from other planets, hobbits, fires and storms, vaporous intelligences, and other non persons. But what a mistake it would be to class the Holmes stories with these! Unlike Clark Kent et al., Sherlock Holmes is just a person? a person of flesh and blood, a being in the very same category as Nixon.