 Finally, a number of philosophers (see, most notably, van Inwagen (1977), Wolterstorff (1980), and Zalta (1983, 1988)) think that fictional objects, or fictional characters, are best thought of as abstract objects. (Salmon (1998) and Thomasson (1999) also take fictional objects to be abstract, but their views are a bit different; they maintain that abstract fictional objects are created by humans.) To see why one might be drawn to this view, consider the following sentence: