The actually-operator, understood as a rigidifier, has been employed for a range of purposes in natural language semantics. In this article I argue that the properties of the operator do not correspond to any feature of natural language or feature natural language users have access to. Nor is it needed to provide a formal representation of natural language sentences-the examples usually provided to illustrate the indispensability of the operator are much more plausibly interpreted using plural quantifiers. This lack of connection to natural language is a serious worry for accounts that appeal to rigidifying operations to explain natural language phenomena, as well as a challenge to theories that appeal to the operator to capture the difference between different kinds of necessity expressed in natural language.
Realists about fictional characters accept an ontological commitment to fictional characters, which enables them to provide straightforward explanations of data that are difficult to explain absent this commitment. Fictionalists about fictional characters purport to appropriate realists' explanatory power without their ontological commitments by paraphrasing the realist's claims ('according to the realist, …'). However, this approach faces a critical hurdle: To claim the explanatory benefits the fictionalist paraphrase cannot (radically) change the content of the realist theory. But realism's explanatory power comes, in part, from an associated theory of how the relevant claims should be interpreted, and that metatheory is itself ontologically committing. Fictionalists must accordingly offer alternative interpretations of the paraphrased claims, jettisoning any advantage they may claim over other anti-realist views.
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