  Appiah’s interpretation allows those who are wary of paraconsistent logics to salvage something philosophically promising from Vaihinger’s talk of contradictions. It also perhaps has the advantage of doing greater justice to the multifarious character of Vaihinger’s theory of fictions. For, while Vaihinger claims that the fictive judgment has a “hypothetical element,” he does not simply reduce fictive judgments to conditionals (PAO 194).  On the other hand, the interpretation stumbles against texts in which Vaihinger suggests that the contradictions of real fictions exist within theories or models, not between them. For example, the concept of a (classical) atom is supposed to be a real fiction because it is absurd to suppose something which occupies space, but nevertheless has no extension. This is to say that the atomistic fiction is itself contradictory, not merely that it conflicts with other ways of modeling matter. Another way of putting the worry is to note that the interpretation blurs the apparently sharp distinction between semi-fictions and real fictions: any model will be a real fiction as long as we use it together with another model incompatible with it.