 But what might such a distinction look like? What makes a representation like a written text a work of fiction? Dictionaries often contrast fiction with fact or reality, so one tempting thought is that something is a fiction just if it is false, or contains falsehoods: a purely semantic characterization of “fiction”. This seems to have been Nelson Goodman’s view: “Literal falsity distinguishes fiction from true report” (Goodman 1978: 124). As a number of authors have pointed out, however, being false may be one meaning of the word “fiction”, but it is not the only meaning, and it is not the meaning at play when we nowadays call something a work of fiction (Lamarque and Olsen 1994; Cohn 1999). If it were, then any work that contains mistakes, say a physics text book, would count as a work of fiction.