Chapter 6

What characters know

Most of drama lives in the gap between what's true and what someone believes is true. The mark trusts the grifter. The audience knows better. A reveal lands precisely because a character's picture of the world was wrong, and now it's corrected. TropeLang takes this seriously: a story holds ground truth plus every character's separate, possibly-false model of it.

Four tiers of truth

Any fact sits at one of four epistemic levels, and a pair of markers around a fact says which:

`!…!`	absolute	narrator ground truth — canon, unshakeable.
(plain)	asserted	ground truth an observer actually knows.
`…`	contingent	a subjective reading — what someone perceives it as.
`?…?`	latent	true, but hidden from the observer — unknown or only partly known.

char vale [+Grifter]
char renn [+Mark]
scene the_appraisal {
  beat 1 {
    !vale [+Grifter]!
    *vale [+Trustworthy]*
    ?vale [+Grifter]?
  }
}

Read those three lines as one moment seen three ways. !vale [+Grifter]! is the canon: he is a grifter, full stop. *vale [+Trustworthy]* is what renn perceives — a contingent reading, how renn sees him. And ?vale [+Grifter]? is that same true fact sitting latent in renn's world: present in the story, hidden from him. The whole tension of the scene is encoded in the brackets.

Perspectives are a lens

There's no separate file per character. The facts are written once, each marked with what an observer knows, and a perspective then views the graph through one observer's eyes. Looking through ground truth surfaces everything, latent facts included; looking through renn drops what he doesn't know and keeps the false beliefs he holds in their place — a strictly smaller, possibly-wrong picture. Same graph, one lens swapped, a different head.

Two things follow from this. Dramatic irony is the gap between two perspectives at the same moment: the audience's view shows the grifter; renn's doesn't. A reveal is a fact changing tier over time — that latent ?grifter? becoming asserted the instant renn catches on. Nothing special is needed to model either; they're consequences of facts wearing the right brackets.

Partial knowledge needs no fifth tier — "knows some of it" is just the latent transform applied to the details a character hasn't pieced together yet. Four levels cover the whole spectrum from secret to canon.

Epistemic levels are about who knows what inside one world. The next chapter is about something adjacent but distinct: facts that live in different worlds entirely — a tale told inside the story, or the table where the players actually sit.