Amie Thomasson (2021) contends that we should reject a widespread descriptivist picture of modality. According to descriptivism, the primary function of modal discourse is to track and describe modal facts and properties, which supposedly exist independently of our expressive capacities and make true our modal statements. Instead, according to Thomasson’s Modal Normativism (MN), modal discourse is distinctively normative, in that it serves the function of expressing, teaching, conveying, or (re-) negotiating semantic rules (or their consequences) in particularly advantageous ways. (2021: S2087)

Thomasson (2013) is a recent extended discussion of the relation between fictionalism and her own preferred ontological view, which is argued for by what she calls “easy arguments”, a kind of ordinary language arguments. Thomasson’s ontological deflationism says, roughly, that all manners of philosophically controversial entities exist, and do so in some sense trivially

Necessarily, for all x and all artifactual kinds K, x is a K only if x is the product of a largely successful intention that (Kx), where one intends (Kx) only if one has a substantive concept of the nature of Ks that largely matches that of some group of prior makers of Ks (if there are any) and intends to realize that concept by imposing K-relevant features on the object. (Thomasson 2003: 600)