R. HANLEY MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING: CRITICAL REALISM EXAMINED ABSTRACT. Critical realism is the view that fictional characters are contingent, actual, abstract individuals, ontologically on a par with such things as plots and rhyme schemes, and quantified over in statements such as “A character in Hamlet is a prince.” A strong contender for the correct account of fictional characters, critical realism nevertheless has difficulty satisfying all that we intuitively require of such an account. I. INTRODUCTION Many if not most philosophers of fiction end up embracing fictional realism, the view that Hamlet, Sherlock Holmes, Bart Simpson and their ilk are in good ontological standing. Positing fictional charac- ters usually requires trading off some ontological intuitions, perhaps in favor of semantic ones. But a recent fictional realist view promises to capture many of the semantic desiderata without extreme ontolo- gical sacrifice. I dub this view critical realism, for reasons soon to be apparent. It will suit my purpose to distinguish two possible versions of critical realism, each of which has actual adherents. The chief exemplar of what I shall call the hard line is Peter van Inwagen. The soft line has been most cogently presented by Robert Howell, and has recently been endorsed by Amie Thomasson. 1 The starting point for critical realism is the examination of the statements produced by those who engage in what I shall call fiction criticism theory. 2 Here is the form of some typical fiction criticism theory statements: (1) The plot of fiction A is convoluted; (2) The style of fiction B is more sophisticated than that of C. A plausible semantic interpretation of such statements is that they quantify over plots and styles. So it seems that to take statements of the form of (1) and (2) seriously, to regard them as truth-evaluable, Philosophical Studies 115: 123–147, 2003. © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.