 The central piece of theoretical machinery the modal fictionalist employs is the “According to PW …” operator. When it is glossed in tempting ways, as “if PW were true, then …” or “it follows from PW that …”, it seems to be a modal notion: and if this is not to be further explained, the modal fictionalist cannot use the fiction of possible worlds and its contents as the basis of an analysis of modality in terms of something else. (This sort of analysis is sometimes known as a reductive analysis.) This will only be of concern to some modal fictionalists, of course — timid fictionalists will not have been looking for a reductive analysis of modality based on their fiction in the first place — and some timid fictionalists such as Divers 1999b explicitly endorse modal explanations of the fictionalist operator (Divers 1999b, p. 335). Such fictionalists may be happy to take advantage of possible analyses of “according to the fiction” operators in modal terms, and in so doing provide an answer to the question of how to understand such expressions: but on the other hand, their position may not be attractive to someone primarily concerned to analyse modal operators. (Even timid fictionalism is compatible with a reductionist account of modality, of course, since the timid fictionalist may seek to explain modality in some other terms. It is just that it is not hospitable to reductionist accounts of modality in terms of possible worlds).