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"Factitious" means, to me: the product of art, of making, of arti-faction.
It has a similar perjorative connotation to the expression "made up". All
poetry is made up. Its "facticity" is its made-up-ness.

How does this differ from "fictitious"? Well, all fictions are factitious,
insofar as they are made things, but not all artifacts are fictions. True
stories are also the product of craft, of an act of making, an exercise of
"factive virtu". The narrative that pays scrupulous attention to the world
of fact, and never makes anything up (as far as the facts are concerned), is
still a made-up narrative. This is what *some* of the people who say that
all of our truths are "constructs" mean: that they are factitious, not that
they are fictitious.

Obviously there are scrupulous and unscrupulous makers of television
documentaries, for instance, but the scrupulosity of the former does not
make their work any less factitious.

- Dom



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