The Impossibility of Sherlock Holmes?

In a recent piece Bill writes,

The purely fictional is barred from actuality by its very status as purely fictional: Sherlock Holmes cannot be actualized. What cannot be actualized is not possible; it is impossible. Sherlock Holmes is an impossible item. He is impossible because he is incomplete. Only the complete (completely determinate) is actualizable. Sherlock is incomplete because he is the creation of a finite fiction writer: Sherlock has all and only the properties ascribed to him by Conan Doyle. Not even divine power could bring about the actualization of the Sherlock of the Conan Doyle stories. What God could do is bring about the actualization of various individuals with all or some of Sherlock's properties. None of those individuals, however, would be Sherlock. Each of them would differ property-wise from Sherlock.

Surely something has gone wrong here?   Conan Doyle wrote the Holmes stories as if they were the accounts of Holmes's investigations written up by Dr. Watson.  Is there not a possible world in which a John Watson writes a history of a detective called Sherlock Holmes using exactly Conan Doyle's words?

Arguments for anti-presentism?

Bill has been discussing David Benatar's The Human Predicament. Benatar introduces what he calls the Existence Requirement,

(ER) In order for something to be bad for somebody, that person must exist at the time it is bad for him.

Many people find this self-evident. Bill argues here that the reason for this is a tacit commitment to presentism. Bill explains presentism via a somewhat murky notion of 'existence simpliciter', but I think the gist is captured by the following,

Consider Tom Petty who died recently. On mortalism, he no longer exists. On presentism, what no longer exists (i.e., what existed but does not now exist) does not exist at all. So on presentism, Petty does not exist at all. If so, dead Petty cannot be subject to harms or deprivations.

So if we have grounds for rejecting presentism, we can also reject Benatar's Existence Requirement.  But why would we want to say that ceasing to exist does not imply ceasing to exist at all?  What residuum of existence remains after something has ceased to exist?  Bill says,

We don't want to say that a dead man becomes nothing after death since he remains a particular, completely determinate, dead man distinct from others. If the dead become nothing after death then all the dead would be the same. If your dead father and your dead mother are both nothing, then there is nothing to distinguish them.

It's difficult to know what to make of this.  My guess is that Bill is conflating a thing with the idea of a thing.  First, 'particular' and 'completely determinate' do not denote properties of  concrete objects like men.  One can contrast 'I have in mind a particular man' with 'I have in mind a man' but 'particular' here qualifies not 'man' but rather the way of having in mind.  'Completely determinate' functions in a similar way.  What would 'partially determinate man' denote?  A partially determinate idea of a man makes sense, however;  we know some of his properties but not others.  Second, 'dead' is an alienating adjective.  If a man is a living thing and 'dead' means non-living then a 'dead man' is a somewhat contradictory conception.  Better to think of 'is dead' as 'has died'.  A dead man is one who has passed through that final event that all living things inevitably come to, and has ceased to be.  Third, to speak of 'becoming nothing' on death is misleading.  Death is the end of all becoming.  One has finally begone, as it were. It's not that the dead lack something to distinguish them. Rather, they are not there to be distinguished one from another.  But this is not to say that my parents were indistinguishable as objects.  Nor is it to say that my thoughts about my parents are now indistinguishable.  Surely I can say, My mother was short and my father was tall. 

Nor do we want to say that a person who dies goes from being actual to being merely possible. There is clearly a distinction between an actual past individual and a merely possible past individual.  Schopenhauer is an actual past individual; his only son Willy is a merely possible past individual

Once again I'm afraid I can't regard 'being actual' and 'being merely possible' as denoting properties of individuals. How these predications are to be understood is not an easy question.  Suffice it to say that there is clearly a problem with  'Schopenhauer's only son Willy' when the philosopher's only child was a daughter.

On the 'growing block' theory, dead Petty exists. (This is obviously not a present-tensed use of 'exists.') He does not exist at present, but he exists in the sense that he belongs to the actual world.  Once actual, always actual. Is this wholly clear? No, but it is tolerably clear and plausible. After all, we are making singular reference to Petty, a concrete actual individual, as we speak, and this is a good reason to hold that he exists, not at present of course, but simpliciter.

The 'growing block' theory sounds like a kind of four-dimensionalism deriving from the physicist's notion of spacetime as a four-dimensional manifold.  We trace the world-lines of the particles that were ever part of Petty and we find that they form a densely packed blob within a certain spacetime region.  We are tempted to identify the contents of this region with Petty himself.  If we think of the ensemble of worldlines of all material particles as the actual world itself, then yes, the Petty blob seems indeed to belong to the actual world.  But this is a mistake.  The worldline of a particle represents not so much the particle itself but rather its history.  Likewise the blob we take to be Petty represents his biography, in mind-numbing detail.  We are confusing a thing with the life it lived.  Of course Petty belonged to the world---I don't see quite what 'actual' adds here---it's just that he does not belong to it any more.  Perhaps Bill is emphasising that Petty was a real man, not, say, a character in a fiction like Spinal Tap.  There is more than a hint here that Bill is appealing to a theory of direct reference.  Petty has to exist in order that we may refer to him.

In the article, Fiction and Alienans Adjectives, I discuss this and related matters with Bill.

Purely Fictional Objects

It looks as if Bill's musings on 'same God' have led him back to What Problem Does Literary Fiction Pose?,
a reworking of an earlier post that we have already discussed.  He offers the following aporia:

1. Purely fictional objects do not exist.
2. There are true  sentences about purely fictional objects, e.g., 'Sherlock Holmes is a detective' and 'Sherlock Holmes is purely fictional.'
3. If a sentence of the form Fa is true, then there exists an x such that 'a' refers to x.

For me, alarm bells were ringing before I reached (3). If we conjoin (1) and (2) we get

There are no PFOs yet there are true sentences about them,

and we should ask what the them refers to. Compare with

There are no leprechauns but there are true sentences about them.

So we can reject (1) and (2) without worrying too deeply about what it means to be a PFO.  I have claimed earlier that 'purely fictional', like 'mythological', 'past', 'intentional', and others, are not adjectives in the ordinary sense.

Arguing over ficta

In a piece titled Arguing with Brightly over Ficta Bill responded at length to a comment of mine on an earlier post, offered a counter proposal and asked me if and why I rejected it.  The discussion in that thread rather ran into the sands of mutual incomprehension, so here I'd like to respond at greater length to Bill's suggestion.  Here are Bill's concluding paragraphs.

I think Brightly and I can agree that a purely fictional man is not a man, and that a purely fictional alcoholic is not an alcoholic. And yet Bone is at least as real as the novel of which he is the main character. After all, there is the character Bone but no character, Son of Bone. In keeping with Brightly's notion that there is an equivocation on 'purely fictional item,' we could say the following. 'Bone' in the internal sentence 'Bone is an alcoholic' doesn't refer to anything, while 'Bone' in the external sentence 'Bone is a purely fictional character' refers to an abstract object.

We can then reconcile (1) and (2) by replacing the original dyad with

1* There are no purely fictional concreta
2* There are some purely fictional abstracta.

The abstract artifact theory allows us to accommodate our three datanic or near-datanic points. The first was that Bone does not exist. We accommodate it by saying that there is no concretum, Bone. The second was that Bone is a creature of a novelist's creativity. We accommodate that by saying that what Hamilton created was the abstract artifact, Bone*, which exists. Bone does not exist, but the abstract surrogate Bone* does. The third point was that there are truths about Bone that nevertheless do not entail his existence. We can accommodate this by saying that while Bone does not exemplify such properties as being human and being an alcoholic, he encodes them. (To employ terminology from Ed Zalta.) This requires a distinction between two different ways for an item to have a property.

I do not endorse the above solution. But I would like to hear why Brightly rejects it, if he does.

I do reject Bill's proposal.  I don't think Bill grasps the extent to which I reject the language in which Bill couches his solution.  My view is that the term  purely fictional carries risks if used too freely.  I can countenance its use in 'Emma' is a purely fictional literary work but not in Emma Woodhouse is a purely fictional young woman.   There are clearly fictional works and non-fictional works, as a visit to a public library demonstrates.  The purely fictional young women do not form a subset of the young women.  Hence purely fictional in this context  is alienating rather than non-alienating.  What then is a purely fictional young woman?  It's not at all clear to me what this phrase means and I much prefer to avoid it.  I see it as a problem in the philosophy of fiction to explain this usage.  So for me, Bill's account sets off on the wrong foot.  He then says,

And yet Bone is at least as real as the novel of which he is the main character. After all, there is the character Bone but no character, Son of Bone.

I dispute this.  Your telling me all about your mother-in-law may be real enough, but the lady herself may not.  And your not mentioning her daughter has no bearing on the matter.

Bill characterises my position as one of claiming that there is equivocation in the use of purely fictional.  That is not quite right.  It suggests that I think that the phrase has at least two distinct senses.   I agree that it makes sense when applied to books and films,  but have serious reservations that it makes sense when applied to anything else.  Whether the latter usage does make sense is what we are trying to elucidate.  Bill suggests the following distinction,

'Bone' in the internal sentence 'Bone is an alcoholic' doesn't refer to anything  [1], while 'Bone' in the external sentence 'Bone is a purely fictional character' refers to an abstract object [2].

As an adherent of Ed Ockham's 'story-relative' theory of reference I'd have to disagree with (1).  Within Hangover Square 'Bone' refers to Bone, else the story utterly lacks cohesion.  (2) tells us that an abstract object can be an instance of purely fictional character, if there is such a concept. This looks to be along the right lines because it takes fictional characters out of the realm of the concrete.  However, although I think there is room for a Zaltaian abstract object in this view of things, I don't think it's Bone himself.   Rather it's the idea of Bone that reading Hamilton's novel invokes in us. Let's call this idea Bone*.  We can say with Zalta that Bone* encodes exactly those properties that Hamilton tells us Bone possesses (if we read attentively).  And we can say that Bone* exemplifies Van Inwagen creature of fiction properties such as acquired through reading 'Hangover Square' in 2014.  Also, with respect to the properties it encodes, Bone* is incomplete.  If Hamilton doesn't tell us then we have no information as to Bone's birthday, say.  So Bone* has one of the essential characteristics of a Vallicellan intentional object.

See also: Ficta and Impossibilia

Ficta and impossibilia

Continuing the discussion of the problems of fiction, Bill has an older post in which he says,

Purely fictional objects are most plausibly viewed as made up, or constructed, by novelists, playwrights, et al. It may be that they are constructed from elements that are not themselves constructed, elements such as properties or Castaneda's ontological guises. Or perhaps fictional objects are constructed ex nihilo. Either way, they have no being at all prior to their creation or construction. There was no Captain Ahab before Melville 'cooked him up.' But if Ahab were a merely possible individual, then one could not temporally index his coming to be; he would not come to be, but be before, during, and after Melville's writing down his description.

The issue could be framed as follows. Are novels, plays, etc. which feature logically consistent pure ficta, something like telescopes that allow us to peer from the realm of the actual into the realm of the merely possible, both realms being realms of the real? Or are novels, etc. more like mixing bowls or ovens in which ficta are 'cooked up'? I say the latter. If you want, you can say that Melville is describing something when he writes about Ahab, but what he is describing is something he has made up: a merely intentional object that cannot exist apart from the acts of mind trained upon it. He is not describing something that has ontological status apart from his mind and the minds of his readers. He is also not describing some real feature or part of himself as subject. So we could say that in describing Ahab he is describing an item that is objectively but not subjectively mind-dependent.

He then offers an argument to the conclusion that,

Ahab is not a merely possible human being, but a fictional human being where 'fictional' unlike 'merely possible' functions as an alienans adjective.

In this piece I want to try to get at just what I think has gone wrong in this.  My chief difficulty is that it's hard to know where to begin.  Bill couches the whole piece in language with which I am not comfortable.   He talks about 'fictional objects', 'impossible objects',  'intentional objects', 'incomplete objects', and so on, confident that these terms are meaningful and refer to something or things.  To engage him at all is to concede a good deal.   But here goes.

Bill says that Melville 'cooked up' Ahab.  What Melville cooked up was a description, a certain form of words, that he gives us in Moby Dick. On reading the novel, we cook up our own idea of a whaling captain from Melville's words.  Bill says, 'Melville is describing something when he writes about Ahab, but what he is describing is something he has made up'.  I demur.  Melville isn't describing anything.  He is transcribing his own idea of Ahab into words.  But this does not imply that he has not produced a description.  Perhaps this diagram helps.

At top left we have concrete people, past and present.  On the right we have concrete descriptions of some of these people, sentences thought up and written down or spoken by individuals attempting to say what certain people are or were like.  In the end these are combinations of words having a certain form that we recognise as descriptive.  But clearly there can be many more combinations than there are people, past and present. Such a combination, written or spoken, that does not arise from an attempt to describe a person, we can call a fictional description.  Now a problem arises.  In general, there is no way of telling from its words alone whether a given description is genuine or fictional. Of course, some descriptions will be sufficiently outlandish that we can be confident that they are fictional, but not all.  Again, some descriptions come wrapped in covers labelled 'Emma: A Novel' so we can be confident they too are fictional.    Nevertheless, on reading such a description we inevitably 'cook up' an idea of a person.  We need to be careful with this last term.  There is no implication that this is an idea of a particular person, one of the people in the upper left of the diagram.  In fact, I'm not sure one can have an idea that attaches to an external object in any way, but this opens questions about intentionality that I don't want to enter.  Rather, it's just a 'person-shaped' idea.  If asked to describe this person we just reiterate the description we have just read.  And, after all, this is how Melville got started, with a person-shaped idea for Captain Ahab.

This, I think, is about as far as we can go.   Bill would go further.  He wants to say either that this idea is an 'intentional object' in its own right, or that there is something it is an idea of, and this something he calls an intentional object.  I've never been clear on this, though I suspect the latter.  This strikes me as a theoretical postulate, rather than a given.  Bill thinks the phenomenology justifies it, and I do not.  Since the theory seems to run into trouble I'd rather do without its postulates. 

At bottom, the problem is that Bill makes a move from

Melville imagines a whaling captain

to

There is an imagined-by-Melville whaling captain

and hence to

There is an imaginary whaling captain,

and this 'imaginary whaling captain' Bill regards as an 'intentional object'.  This is exactly the move that Ed Ockham always objects to and which gives rise to the problematic terms 'imagined-by-Melville' and 'imaginary', which elsewhere I have been calling 'pseudo concepts'.

Is this a picture of an impossible object?

Of course not! Impossible objects are, well, impossible.  There can't be any, so we can't have a picture of one, surely?  What we have is a representation, or, better, a specification, that cannot be realised.  Just as 'round square' and 'married bachelor' are descriptions that cannot describe or predicates that cannot predicate, this is a representation that cannot represent.  Note the element of semantic ascent which is crucial to all of this.  In each case, something ontologically unexceptional, such as a bunch of words or marks on screen or paper has to be understood as a representation.  And sometimes it doesn't or cannot represent anything.  That's where the trouble starts.  For the temptation is to say that it represents a fictional person or an impossible object, and now we are on the slope to perdition.

Here is the argument that Bill offers in the cited post.

1. Pure ficta are made up or constructed via the mental acts and actions of novelists, playwrights, et al.
2. Ahab is a pure fictum.
3. Ahab came into being via the mental activity of a novelist or playwright. (from 1,2)
4. No human being comes into being via the mental activity of novelists, et al., but via the uniting of human sperm and human egg.
5. Ahab is not a human being. (from 3, 4)
6. A merely possible human being is a human being, indeed a flesh-and-blood human being, though not an actual flesh-and-blood human being.
7. Ahab is not a merely possible human being, but a fictional human being where 'fictional' unlike 'merely possible' functions as an alienans adjective.

Bill writes as if he finds the underlined terms transparent and unproblematic, functioning as ordinary concept terms.  Over the years he has come up with many aporia in which they appear.  My contention is that the source of paradox lies within these terms.  They are neither transparent nor unproblematic.  How to convince Bill of this?

Fictional conundra

Bill says,

As I see it, the central problem in the philosophy of fiction is to find a solution to the following aporetic dyad:

1. There are no purely fictional items.
2. There are some purely fictional items.

The problem is that while the limbs of the dyad cannot both be true, there is reason to think that each is true.  (1) looks to be an analytic truth: by definition, what is purely fictional is not, i.e., does not exist.  George Harvey Bone, the main character in Patrick Hamilton's 1941 booze novel Hangover Square, does not now and never did exist.  He is not a real alcoholic like his creator, Patrick Hamilton, who was a real alcoholic.  What is true is that

3. Bone is a purely fictional alcoholic.

That (3) is true is clear from the fact that if a student wrote on a test that Bone was a teetotaler, his answer  would be marked wrong.  But if (3) is true, then, given that nothing can satisfy a predicate unless it exists, it follows that

4. Bone exists

and, given the validity of Existential Generalization, it follows that

5. There is a purely fictional alcoholic.

But  if (5) is true, then so is (2).

Bill suggests a number of responses to this aporia.  My choice is

E.  Dissolutionism.  Somehow argue that the problem as posed above is a pseudoproblem that doesn't need solving but dissolving.  One might perhaps argue that one or the other of the dyad's limbs has not even a prima facie claim on our acceptance.

The puzzle hinges on what we mean by ‘a fictional X’, for some concept term X.  Is this itself a concept term? It’s not clear.  I think we can be mislead into thinking that it is a concept term, and this gives rise to Bill’s paradox.

The usual way of understanding 'a Y X' involves a conjunction of the concepts X and Y.  The extension of Y X is thus a subset of the extension of X.  Example: X=Roman, Y=female.  But this goes wrong for Y=fictional.  When we list the alcoholics we don’t count the fictional ones, whatever they may be.  If we must interpret ‘fictional alcoholic’ in this way we must conclude that its extension is the empty set.  Similarly 'fictional X' for any concept term X.  Hence we are lead to Bill’s (1):  There are no [purely] fictional items.

Why then is Bill’s argument for (2) rather compelling?  I suggest that we are inclined to read

n is a [merely] fictional X

as a surface transformation of

[merely] fictionally, n is an X,

And this we take as

[merely] in some piece of fiction, n is an X.

Thus 'Bone is a fictional alcoholic' becomes 'fictionally, Bone is an alcoholic', which is understood as 'In some piece of fiction it says that Bone is an alcoholic', and this we take to be true by virtue of Hamilton's works.  This kind of transformation can be seen elsewhere. Compare

n is a [merely] fictional X   <--->  [merely] fictionally, n is an X

with

n is a possible X   <--->  possibly, n is an X
n is a past X   <--->  pastly, n is an X
n is a real X   <--->  really, n is an X
n is a false X   <--->  falsely, n is an X

On the right, sentential operators; on the left, pseudo concept terms.

Thus the inference from 'n is a fictional X' to 'there is a fictional X' is not valid unless the latter is read as 'fictionally, there is an X'.  That is, 'Some piece of fiction says there is an X'.

The interpretation of 'fictional' as a disguised sentential operator fits nicely with a phenomenon that Bill notes parenthetically: 

As Kripke and others have noted, there are fictional fictions, fictional plays for example, such as a fictional play referenced within a play.

A female female Roman is just a female Roman.  Doubling up the qualifier 'female' tells us nothing more.  But 'n is a fictional fictional character' can be seen as 'fictionally, fictionally, n is a character'.  That is, in some story there is a story in which n is a character.  This alone tells us that there is something odd about 'fictional' as a concept term.
 
None of this says anything as to the existence or otherwise of van Inwagen 'creatures of fiction'.

In an earlier  post  Bill claims to have refuted this kind of approach to the puzzle.  He says that in the 'story operator' solution,

4. Sherlock Holmes is a detective
5. Sherlock Holmes is fictional

are elliptical for, respectively,

6. In the Conan Doyle stories, Sherlock Holmes is a detective
7. In the Conan Doyle stories, Sherlock Holmes is fictional.

but (7) is clearly false.  I reply, of course, that 'fictional' is a pseudo concept term and that (5) makes an assertion 'outside' the Conan Doyle stories.  The move from (5) to (7) is invalid.  Bill  says that the argument can be made with other 'extranuclear' terms such as 'merely possible' and 'mythological.'  Indeed it can, and these turn out to be pseudo concepts also.

See also Actualism and Presentism.

I should add that there is, of course, a perfectly valid use of 'fictional' as a concept term, and that is in sentences such as 'Jane Austen's Emma is fictional', where we are referring to the novel and not the young woman it is about.  To apply 'fictional' to anything other than a representation is to make a category mistake.  More on how representations  come into this in Ficta and impossibilia

Fictional characters

Arizona Bill has been discussing the metaphysics of fiction (again) with adversary London Ed.  This time we seem to have got a little further than before.  See here for the latest.  One question we have is How are we to understand

1. Frodo is a purely fictional character?

In particular, does it licence the inference to

2. There are purely fictional characters?

My reply is No and Yes.  There are two distinct but related meanings embedded in (1).  To bring this out,  let me simplify the context considerably.  Consider the following tiny dialogue:

Al: I met this chap called Soc in the pub last night.  Soc is a philosopher.
Beth: I don't believe you.  Soc is a purely fictional character.

Al is making an existential assertion:  There is a philosopher called Soc.  Beth is denying this.  She is not attributing the property of fictional characterhood to the entity Soc.  Her utterance, 'Soc is a purely fictional character' is not intended indicatively and does not supply information about Soc.  It simply rejects Al's existential assertion. Hence it does not licence the inference to (2). Moreover,  it shouldn't be seen as a continuation of Al's text about Soc, to be made sense of as part of his story.  It can't be.  It contradicts Al's story!  There is no point in trying to formulate a logical language in which Al's assertion and Beth's can be seen together as an integrated whole.  They are fundamentally antagonistic.

Suppose now that Al is, objectively, a fabulist.  He has a history of inventing personages met in pubs.  The dialogue might then go like this:

Al: I met this chap called Soc in the pub last night.  Soc is a philosopher.
Beth: Honestly, Al. Soc is just another of your purely fictional characters.

This time Beth's statement is intended indicatively.  In the larger context of Al's repeated story-telling Beth sees Soc as a van Inwagen creature of fiction.  To get this view we must stand back from Al's utterance.  We must see it not only for its meaning but also for itself as an act of speech.  To  the exasperated Beth it's just another fabulation in a long series of such.  So Beth is attending to Al's speech as one of a series of meaning-laden acts or events.  She is making a semantic ascent.  At this level Al's Soc is indeed a purely fictional character and the inference (2) that there are such things is justified.

Actualism and Presentism

There is an interesting parallel between our difficulties in formulating presentism and those in formulating actualism, as Bill explains here.  If we understand actualism to be the claim that

A.  Only the actual exists,

then Bill says

One is very strongly tempted to say that to exist is to be actual. If 'exists' in (A) means 'is actual,' however, then (A) is a tautology. But if 'exists' in (A) does not mean 'is actual,' what does it mean?

I agree that there is such a temptation. But I don't agree that the problem lies in our understanding of 'exists'.  I take that as a rock-solid given.  Rather, we must investigate what we mean by 'the actual',  'the possible', 'the past', and so on.

There is a temptation to take the possible as the extension of the concept possible; likewise, the past as the extension of the concept past.  We say Caesar is a past Roman,  Balls is a possible prime minister, and so on, as if past and possible functioned as concept words.  But I think this is a mistake.  For the extension of possible prime minister  is  a superset of the extension of prime minister whereas the extension of female prime minister  is a subset.   Likewise, the extension of past Roman exceeds the extension of Roman, though I might be accused of question begging in claiming this.  However, I note that the extension of past Roman just goes on increasing with time, whereas that of female Roman may increase and decrease, as it did following the fall of Rome.  So there is a case for regarding possible etc as other than concept terms.  If this is right, how are we to understand them?

What follows is speculative.  I claim that past and possible and their ilk act as 'adverbs of assertion'.  They qualify whole sentences, as in

Pastly, Caesar crosses the Rubicon,
Possibly, Ed Balls is prime minister,
Fictionally, Holmes is a detective.

Though we ordinarily distribute the adverbial operators into the sentences, as in

Caesar crossed the Rubicon,
Ed Balls is a possible prime minister,
Holmes is a fictional detective,

their logical structure is  that of an operator applied to a sentence.  The presence of the operator modifies what we take as the truth value of the sentence.  Pastly asserts that there was a time when the sentence was true though it may not be true now.  Possibly warns us to take the sentence with a pinch of salt.  It's truth value is indeterminate. Everything told us by an untrustworthy source we might preface with possibly.  Fictionally reminds us that the sentence comes from or paraphrases an element of a story.  It has no truth value. It is not an attempt to say anything about the world.

The question now is what we are to make of proper names introduced by sentences under such operators.

Pastly, there is a Roman called Caesar,
Possibly, there is an MP called Balls,
Fictionally, there is a detective called Holmes.

The first primes us that the name 'Caesar' in forthcoming sentences will refer to this no longer extant Roman.  The second that 'Balls' will refer to a putative MP, with the caveat that there may be no such person.  What follows concerning said 'Balls' may be utter flim-flam, but it may turn out true.  The last primes us not to worry about the truth of sentences asserting properties or actions of 'Holmes'.   Note the element of semantic ascent:  this is information about sentences about Caesar, not information about Caesar.   And since a sentence about Caesar contains the name 'Caesar' it seems reasonable to suppose that this information is associated with the name itself.  So we appear to have names introduced under the pastly operator, the possibly operator, the fictionally operator, and so on.  I would hazard a guess that a well-educated Westerner is familiar with as many, if not more, pastly and fictionally names as presently names.  Possibly names tend to be much fewer in number since we require them to be verified and become actually names, else we tend to forget them.  One exception springs to mind: Jack the Ripper.   

My guess is that it is because the actually and presently names are subsets of all the names in our possession, and because we are tempted to think that actual and present are concept terms that pick out subsets of the available existents that we are inclined to think that presentism and actualism must be substantive metaphysical claims.  But they are not.  They really are the trivial claim that

the present = the actual = the existent

and

the past = the merely possible = the fictional =  ∅.