Terms of fiction and ontological commitment

In this article I examine the problem of the ontological commitment of sentences that contain fictional names. I start by distinguishing between fictive, parafictive and metafictive uses of sentences that contain fictional names, and consider a dilemma that brings to the surface the problem of the ontological commitment to fictional entities for those uses. Next, I argue that the dilemma has no strength insofar as fictive and parafictive uses are concerned. However, it does have full strength in the case of metafictive uses. Finally, I propose a dissolution of the dilemma that consists in adopting an irrealist stance towards fictional entities in these sentences.