Propositional logic is impeccable, but it does not address why the proposition matters. The story delivers the impact experientially—and empathically—rather than expressing it argumentatively. The distinction “philosophical overlay” (Boylan) is further elaborated in terms of alethic truth. How this relates to the use of literary fiction to show what matters—and what is elaborated as “the matter of mattering”—is engaged. An example of a narrative reduction to absurdity of the empathic fallacy found and elaborated in Jorge Luis Borges story, “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote.” Borges’ story exemplifies radical translation. The roots of radical empathy lie in radical translation. In modeling empathizing as translating one gets to “radical empathy” by leveraging the deep work of Davidson and Wittgenstein on radical translation. Wittgenstein’s private language argument (PLA) exemplifies translating between words (signs) and nonlinguistic phenomena such as experiences of personal sensations (what Roman Jakobson would call “intersemiotic translation”). Radical translation is a bridge between self and Other and becomes a model for progressing from standard empathy to radical empathy. While many of the examples of radical empathy engage with dramatic events that are readily describable as traumatically confronting, Henry James gives the reader examples of slow trauma in What Maisy Knew.