hand the idea of the soul is 'indispensably necessary' for the acquisition of inner experience, and on the other hand it has a 'regulative use' with respect to inner appearances in that it projects a unity that guides the use of the understanding but falls short of determining a mental unity (cf. Kraus p. 172). According to Kraus, the noumenalist and fictionalist interpretation of the idea of the soul have in common that they take the regulative use of the idea to result in the generation of 'descriptive st atements about a given reality' (p. 187) which are either taken to be true or as truth -apt (so potentially false). The noumenalist view takes these statements to pertain to an underlying noumenal reality, to describe or involve the description of the soul as the sort of simple substance that was under discussion in the Paralogisms chapter. Given this apparent inconsistency with the negative part of Kant's project, Kraus notes that this view is not well -represented in the literature. It has recently gained defenders (such as Wuerth and Proops) even if this is at the cost of diluting the significance of, for instance, the concept of substance at issue (and, to my mind, consequently squandering any wished-for continuity with a recognizably metaphysical project). The fictionalist view, by contrast, takes these descriptions as primarily of heuristic usefulness since it allows that they could turn out to be false and the idea of the soul on which they are based to be 'an untrue fiction (or mere illusion )' (K p. 188). Kraus will depart from both of these views, since she takes the regulative use of the idea of the soul to issue in merely prescriptive rather than descriptive statements. But she also thinks that both fall afoul of the two features noted above: the noumenalist view in offering an presuming an overly (or illicitly) metaphysical view of the 'indispensable necessity' requirement, and the fictionalist view in offering too weak a reading of the regulative feature to be effective. I will return to Kraus' criticism of the fictionalist view later (I will not return to a consideration of the noumenalist view, since I share her doubts about its plausibility). Before that, I think it's important to get clear on what fictionalism is, at least in one of its variants, since I am among those charged with holding the view. I must say that I do not see my own interpretation reflected in Kraus' description, though this is not perhaps for the reasons one would expect. Put simply, my own view is not that the idea of the soul might be an untrue fiction or could turn out to be an illusion, but that in fact it is a fiction, and (at least some) descriptive statements generated through it are in fact false. (I think 'fictionalism' might be an apt term for my view of the idea of the soul, when understood according to our ordinary understanding of 'fiction,' but it is rather more committed than the version canvassed by Kraus.) To avoid misunderstanding, but also to effect the contrast with Kraus' own cont ext-of-intelligibility view, it will be important to make a few distinctions here. First, and most importantly, we might distinguish between two sorts of descriptive statements that