: Re: If I unnofficially create a theory and use it in my story, will it have any validity that I'm the author of such theory? I have some theories that I've contrived, some are philosophical, others

@Cooney417

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Generally the manner of publication makes no difference. If you have published it, you are its author and have the right to get credit for it. This is actually one of the rights that are covered by an international treaty and can't be transferred or lost.

That said...

People will not credit you for work they do not know about. If your philosophical theory is published in a form that few philosophers read, you probably will not get credit, if somebody later independently gets the same idea. That said, eventually somebody will notice that the idea was already published independently before and you will get credited. And plagiarizing work you don't know is even harder than crediting it. Still, it has happened that people have later used an idea they read in an entirely different context and not realized where they got the idea.

You will only get credited for what you actually published. If you fully developed a complex theory and used it in a work of fiction, it is unlikely you used all the work you did on the theory. Long philosophical explanations tend to stall the story to say the least. So it is possible somebody else will get credit for stuff you developed, but did not publish, related to your theory. So if you want full credit for all the work you did, you should publish it somewhere where publishing all the work makes sense and is relevant. Works of fiction are rarely that.

IANAL, though.

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