 Such extended fictionalism about modality could, I think, come in two main varieties. One would maintain that modal operators (and associated pieces of language like essential predication, counterfactual conditionals, and perhaps other things like assignments of probabilities) lacked literal application: that all statements prefixed with a modal operator were either uniformly literally truthvalueless or uniformly literally false. This faces several immediate formal difficulties, given the usual characterisation of the modal  operators.[4] 