While wemight not have done many of the things we did do, Anna Karenina could not, surely, have been other than a lover of Vronsky. Not so: while it is true that ‘Necessarily, someone who was not a lover of Vronsky would not be Anna’, it is also true that ‘Someone who was necessarily a lover of Vronsky would not be Anna’. Uses a framework developed by Stalnaker to explain this, and to shed light on the semantics of fictional names.
Keywords: conversation, fiction, names, pragmatics, presupposition, semantics, two-dimensional concepts