 But the most important consequence of this wholesale shift in the ontological status of abstracta is that it opened the door to perhaps the most prominent form of contemporary actualism—dubbed (rather tendentiously) ersatz modal realism by David Lewis (1986: §3.1)—on which modal phenomena are understood in terms of abstracta of various sorts and, hence, in terms of actually existing things only, as per  \(\textbf{Act}^{*}\).[21]  (Ersatz modal realism is discussed in more detail in  §4.2  and  §4.4  below and in §2.2 of the Encyclopedia’s entry on  possible worlds.)