ABSTRACT. Nathan Salmon has proposed that expressions such as ‘Sherlock Holmes’ refer to abstract objects in both their object fictional and meta-fictional occurrences, but that when they occur in meta-fictional occurrences we pretend that the object to which they refer is not an abstract object but a concrete one. In this paper, I defend Nathan Salmon’s account of fictional discourse from three objections that question the feasibility of pretending that a certain abstract object has a certain property.