Two of the many puzzles that have concerned philosophers of language since the origins of analytic philosophy regard the semantic content of fictional names and the truth-value of sentences containing them. Descriptivist theories of fictional names have been usually indicated as the standard solutions for the puzzles. But there are good arguments to reject both the strong (synonymous) and weak (reference-fixing) versions of them. It will become clear that the alternative Millian solution does not offer a complete and coherent account of fictional discourse unless we introduce an appropriate notion of semantic content for fictional discourse and a further meta-semantic constraint on fictional names.
Fictional Reports. A study on the Semantics of Fictional Names