  In addition to Vaihinger’s specific analysis of fictions, one might wonder about his precise brand of fictionalism. Contemporary philosophers distinguish between “hermeneutic fictionalism” and “revolutionary fictionalism” (see the entry on Fictionalism). Hermeneutic fictionalism holds that certain domains of discourse are fictional, in the sense that their participants are not aiming at literal truth, but only seeming to do so. Some textual evidence speaks in favor of reading Vaihinger as a hermeneutic fictionalist. For example, he writes: “the axiom and the hypothesis … endeavor to be expressions of reality. The fiction, on the other hand, is not such an expression nor does it claim to be one” (PAO 60). And Vaihinger’s theory of the fictive judgment maintains that many judgements of the syntactic form ‘A is B’ are properly analyzed as, or merely elliptical for, ‘A is to be regarded as if it were B’—“the ‘is’ is a very short abbreviation for an exceedingly complicated train of thought” (PAO 195). On the other hand, in many places Vaihinger clearly indicates that he thinks we often treat what would be better regarded as fictional discourse as aiming at truth. Many disputes, he suggests, can be resolved by reinterpreting such discourse fictionally. Thus, for example, proponents of classical atomism have been wrong to think that their theory is true, but their opponents have also been wrong to believe that the theory should therefore be given up (PAO 53). He makes an analogous point about the dispute between substantivalists and relationalists over the nature of space (PAO 170–71). So, Vaihinger appears to be a revolutionary fictionalist at least about some discourses in which he is interested.