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Truth and Fiction

Think about the following statement: my younger brother is male. On the surface, that’s tautological - all brothers are male. In fact, however, it’s false, since I don’t have a younger brother. The proper logical interpretation of the sentence is: there exists some X such that X is my younger brother and X is male (’X is my younger brother’ could, of course, be further unpacked). Since there is no X that is my younger brother, the statement as a whole is false.

Now think about this statement: Sherlock Holmes is male. Given the above analysis, we should conclude that this statement, too, is false, since there is no X that is Sherlock Holmes. Intuitively, however, this seems wrong. We want to say that Sherlock Holmes is male is actually true - for some reason, it feels like we can reset the metaphysical scope of our statements when we’re talking about fiction so that there is, in fact, a Sherlock Holmes that we can make true and false statements about. Sherlock Holmes’s non-existence is a different type of non-existence than my younger brother’s.

No conclusions here - just something for people to think about.