HOW A FORGERY ENDS: The Exit Theorem, the Tense of a Claim, and Why Authority Can Become Legitimate While History Cannot Be Rewritten

A viral gene now builds the human placenta. A harmless butterfly wears the warning colours of a poisonous one, and some mimics of this kind are themselves defended. A trademark became the common name of a drug. A forged imperial donation was exposed by its Latin, more than eleven centuries after it claimed to have been written. A usurping family came, in time, to be regarded as its nation’s lawful princes. A man ordered by a court into decency became decent. Each of these forms was once, in some sense, false. Each is now something else. The literature describes each case in its own field, and none describes what they share: how a forgery ends. This article answers from the programme’s definition of forgery: a form conserved (F1), an origin substituted (F2), a substitution undetectable in the mode in which the form presents (F3). A forgery ends when one condition fails. F1 failing is lapse; F3 failing is detection. F2 is a relation between the form’s producer and the origin the form announces, and it can fail in exactly three ways: the production passes to the announced origin (absorption), the producer acquires what was announced (fulfilment), or the announcement changes to name the actual producer or none (re-attribution). Four endings leave the form in the world, and they are exhaustive (T1, the Exit Theorem). Which endings are available is fixed by the tense of the claim a form makes (T2). A claim about what its bearer is or can do now can be fulfilled. A claim about who produces the form now can be absorbed. A claim about what happened — who made it, when, from what descent — can be neither; it can only be detected or re-attributed. No ending erases the forgery’s history, which remains written in the errors of the forged phase (T3). Authority is a conferred status rather than a historical fact, so a forged claim to authority can be fulfilled by the institutions that confer it, while a forged claim about the origin of that authority cannot (C1). This is Hume’s observation about usurpers made into a corollary, and it explains why the Donation of Constantine could be exposed while the rights it had been used to support were kept on other grounds. Priority is conceded to Goodman on the autographic and the allographic, to Hume and Jellinek on legitimacy by duration, to the mimicry literature on the continuum between Batesian and Müllerian mimicry, and to the genomic literature on domestication. The biological and legal-historical applications (§4, §6 and E1–E3) are offered as speculative extensions pending review by specialists; T1–T3 are derivations from the definition and do not depend on them. Keywords: forgery; authenticity; legitimacy; prescription; usucapion; mimicry; Müllerian mimicry; molecular domestication; autographic; allographic; genericide; Donation of Constantine; Philosophy of Virtues Highlights · A forgery ends in four ways that leave the form standing: detection, absorption, fulfilment and re-attribution. There is no fifth (T1). · Absorption: the host becomes the origin. Fulfilment: the forger becomes what the form claimed. Re-attribution: the form comes to announce its true producer, or none. · The tense of the claim fixes the exits. What a bearer is can be fulfilled; who produces it can be absorbed; what happened can only be detected (T2). · No exit erases history: the forged phase stays written in its errors (T3). · Authority is conferred, so a forged claim to it can become legitimate; the origin of authority is history, so a forged account of it never can (C1). · A test on published orchid phylogenies: deception about reward should end more often than deception about kind (E1). Relevance The study of forgery has been a study of detection: how to catch the counterfeit, and what is lost if it is not caught. But most forgeries that matter are never caught, and many of them stop being forgeries anyway — viral genes become organs, mimics become defended, impostors become competent, usurpers become kings. Biology, law, art theory and political philosophy each describe one of these endings in their own vocabulary. This article gives the complete list, derives it from one definition, and states the rule that decides which ending a given forgery can reach. The rule has a direct consequence for legitimacy: an illegitimate authority can become legitimate by duration, and a false history cannot become true by any means. That is why restoration is urgent where usurpation is recent, and why the historical record matters after the question of legitimacy has been settled.