 As Thomasson (1999: 5) puts it, the first question amounts to asking: what would fictional entities be, if there were any? To this question different answers have been proposed. But however much they differ, they all try to accommodate in some way or other what seems to be an intuitive datum facing philosophers who theorize about fictional entities: these entities lack existence, or at least existence as ordinary physical objects. According to this datum—call it the nonexistence datum—paradigmatic objects of fiction like Hamlet and Holmes do not exist. In support of this datum, note that the layperson would almost certainly answer “No” to the question of whether such objects exist, although she might qualify this answer by adding “there is at least some sense in which they don’t.” We also appeal to nonexistence in this sense when we want to dispute the view that some alleged individual is a genuine historical figure; we might say, for example, that King Arthur does not exist, thereby underlining our view that a search for a historical King Arthur would be in vain.