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Oa, B tries to conceal the similarity between the two objects and does not try to prove their identity. When a Claimant says that the two objects are identical, he or she acts as a Judge and says so, not in order to deceive anybody, but rather in order to uncover B's maneuver. When B makes his or her dependency on A's work evident, there is no plagiarism but rather parody, pastiche, homage, intertextual citationnone of these being an instance of forgery. A variation of these examples of pseudo plagiarism are the works made à la manière de . . . (see section 4.3).
(iii) Aberrant decoding (see Eco 1976:142): when a text O was written according to a code C1 and is interpreted according to a code C2. A typical example of aberrant decoding is the oracular reading of Virgil during the Middle Ages or the erroneous interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphs by Athanasius Kircher. Here one is concerned, not with the identification between two objects, but rather with different interpretations of a single one.
(iv) Historical forgery. In diplomatics there is a distinction between historical forgery and diplomatic forgery. Whereas the latter is a case of forgery (see below, section 4.3.1), the former is a case of mere lie. Historical forgery occurs when in an original document, produced by an author who is entitled to do so, something is asserted which is not the case. A historical forgery is not dissimilar from a false piece of news published by a newspaper. In this case (see below, section 5), the phenomenon affects the content but not the expression of the sign function. 2
Let us now consider three main categories of False Identification, namely, Downright Forgery, Moderate Forgery, and Forgery Ex-Nihilo.
4.1. Downright Forgery
We must presuppose that Oa exists somewhere, that it is the unique original object, and that Oa is not the same as Ob. Certainly such assumptions sound rather committing from an ontological point of view, but in this section we are dealing with what the Claimant knows, and we must take such knowledge for granted. Only in Section 6 shall we escape such an ontological commitment by discussing the criteria of identification to be used by the Judge.
Additional requirements are these:
(i) The Claimant knows that Oa exists and knowsor presumes to know on the grounds of even a vague descriptionwhat Oa looks like

 
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