 Some final remarks about the notion of worlds that features in Lewis’s account and the many accounts inspired by his approach. Lewis’s worlds are possible worlds.  He himself construes these as maximal connected spatio-temporal objects (Lewis 1986), although many others take them to be abstract entities of some kind (see the entry on  possible worlds.)    One can accept Lewis’s account of truth in fiction while preferring one of these alternative metaphysical conceptions of possible worlds.  The important point is that the notion of a possible world, no matter how conceived, is a piece of modal machinery that has many other roles to play in metaphysics.  It should not be confused with the notion of a fictional world, appealed to by philosophers and non-philosophers alike. Fictional worlds present themselves as realms, created by authors and generally incomplete and sometimes inconsistent, that are more or less distant from the real world but despite the distance are at least partially accessible from the real world (thus, we can know about Holmes and admire him from a distance, even if we can’t help him solve crimes).  But although we often talk about fiction in terms of fictional worlds, making literal sense of such talk is fraught with difficulty (Pavel 1986 makes the attempt; Walton 1978 is a salutary reminder of what can go wrong), and philosophers have tended to take such talk with a grain of salt, construing fictional worlds instead as sets of fictional truths (Walton 1978; Walton 1990: 64–7) or as sets of worlds rather than single worlds (Lewis 1983: 270; Ross 1979: 49–54). Some have used the notion of a fictional world construed in some such way to provide a kind of linguistic counterpart to the mental reality and imaginary models discussed in 1.6, by appealing to the idea of a context of utterance or interpretation.  (For more on the relevant notion of context, see the entry on   theories of meaning.)  On such a view, saying that a sentence is aimed at correctly representing a fictional world means that the sentence is to be interpreted relative to a context that contains the fictional world rather than the actual world as its world parameter.  Consider a sentence like “Othello was jealous”.  As uttered in a context that contains the actual world as its world parameter, this sentence is not true since “Othello” refers to nothing there.  But the very same sentence is true in a fictional context that contains the fictional world of Othello as its world parameter, for at that world “Othello” refers to the jealous Venetian soldier of Shakespeare’s play.  This account arguably also accommodates the problem of how fiction can contain real truths, as in historical fiction. In such cases, one and the same sentence, say “Napoleon invaded Russia”, can be both actually and fictionally true, keeping the very same content in both the real and the fictional context. 