ABSTRACT
Imaginary worlds, and the ontological rules that describe them, can be classified on various levels of abstraction. Aristotle provides a useful starting point by distinguishing the task of the historian, which is to represent what is, from the task of the poet, which is to represent what could be according to possibility and probability. Nonfiction obeys very strict ontological conditions, since for the text to be accepted as true, all the rules that define the Primary World must also define the storyworld. This chapter accounts for the ontological variety of imaginary worlds by distinguishing a number of cognitively important semantic domains, and by dividing them according to various degrees of departure from the implicit standard of the Primary World. This taxonomy draws on Ryan but uses a different formulation of rules. Imaginary worlds can also be distinguished from the real world in matters of biology and physics.
