  One’s account of category mistakes also has implications for more specific questions in the philosophy of language. We have seen (§3.2.1) that the meaninglessness view of category mistakes is arguably incompatible with a range of accounts for the semantics of metaphor. This means that one should either reject the meaninglessness view, or else offer a theory of metaphor that is compatible with the view. Another area where the debate on category mistakes is important is the semantics of fictional discourse. Consider a sentence such as ‘A famous detective lives in 221b Baker Street’. There is a sense in which the sentence seems true (contrast it with ‘The famous detective was called ‘Watson’’ which seems false). However, the sentence isn’t true on its most straightforward literal reading. One popular view on how a true reading of such sentences can be generated (see, e.g., Lewis 1978), is to assume that the fictional sentence is within the scope of an (unpronounced) operator, so the sentence is taken to express a claim of the form: ‘According to the Sherlock Homes stories, a famous detective lives in 221b Baker Street’, a claim which is straightforwardly true. Recall, however that fictions can often contain categorically mistaken sentences; for example, “Once there was a tree and she loved a little boy” (Silverstein 1964).  But if the fictional sentence \(s\) is either meaningless or even contentless, then arguably, even after embedding it in the propositional operator ‘according to the story’, we will get a contentless ascription (cf. Friend 2007, 143). The upshot is that the operator view of fictional discourse is incompatible with both the meaninglessness view and the contentlessness view of category mistakes.