 (A cautionary comment. In light of what we have just said, the claim that the properties true of a fictional object in a work count as the object’s nuclear properties needs qualification. It is true in the Holmes stories, for example, that Holmes exists, even though Holmes doesn’t actually exist. So non-existence is one of Holmes’s (extranuclear) properties despite the fact that in the stories Holmes is as much an existent object as he is a detective living in London. One way of dealing with this apparent tension is to insist that Holmes does have a property like existence, but that this property should be understood as a weaker, ‘watered-down’, version of its extranuclear counterpart, a notion first advanced by Meinong (cf. Parsons 1980: 44, 184–6). We return to the notion of watered-down versions of extranuclear properties below.)