  If this is Vaihinger’s view, however, it would appear to face a serious difficulty. For, his main interest is in the so-called “real fictions,” which, as noted above, are not merely false, but contradictory. Since everything follows from a contradiction, any counterfactual whose antecedent is a real fiction will be trivially true, and this is to say they cannot possibly do the work Vaihinger envisions (Appiah 2017, 11; Cohen 1923, 485). One way to respond, here, is to note that the logic with which Vaihinger operates is still essentially the version of Aristotelian logic found in Kant and throughout much of the nineteenth century. Such pre-twentieth-century logics often implicitly reject the principle ex contradictione quodlibet. See, e.g., the discussion of conditionals in the influential Port-Royal Logic (Arnauld and Nicole 1996, 100).