The path ends where the title always pointed: at figures of speech. In the finale, Yablo answers the objection that his repaired fictionalism is too baroque for anyone to want. The answer isn't a defence; it's a reframing that changes what the whole theory was for. The machinery was never a revolution asking for recruits; it's an anatomy of something every speaker already does. When you say the prof put hurdles in your path, or that Italy is a boot, you're doing the exact thing arithmetic does with numbers.

In Part 3, Solomon and Clementine bring in Kendall Walton's prop-oriented make-believe to build the tool the paper leans on but never assembles, then watch figuralism take on platonism's showcase argument — that only real numbers can make arithmetic objective — and dismantle it with a dilemma. They trace the six things figuralism  ...