 These difficulties for possibilism do not equally affect all versions of the doctrine. Consider David Lewis’s version of the doctrine, which is embedded in his realist account of possible objects (Lewis 1986). Roughly speaking, Lewis takes a possible individual to be a Holmes-candidate if it has Holmes’s properties in a possible world in which the Holmes stories are told as known fact (Lewis 1978). For Lewis, each such individual is a part of one world and not part of any other world (possible individuals are in a sense ‘world-bound’ on Lewis’s view); no Holmes-candidate is therefore identical to any other Holmes-candidate. But unlike more doctrinaire possibilists, Lewis can use his counterpart theory (Lewis 1986) to offer a principled way of counting each such Holmes-candidate as being Holmes. Suppose you are a reader of the Holmes stories. Each Holmes-candidate is a counterpart for you of every other Holmes-candidate. For even if they should differ substantially in terms of overall qualitative similarity, the various Holmes-candidates are all counterparts by acquaintance for you (or, as Lewis seems to have thought, for your community of fellow-readers)—they are all, in their respective worlds, the person called “Holmes” whom you or your community (or rather, your counterparts) learn about by reading the Holmes stories, told as known fact (cf. Lewis 1983b; Currie 1990: 137–9; Kroon 1994). In short, the fact that there are so many distinct Holmes-candidates is less embarrassing for Lewis than it is for other possibilists. (See also the suggestion in Sainsbury 2010 (pp. 82–3) that Lewis could have accommodated a plurality of possible Holmes-candidates by refusing to identify Holmes with any of them, instead modeling the relation between talk of Holmes and talk of these possible Holmes-candidates on the model of the notion of precisification used in Lewis’s semantics of vagueness.)