A thought experiment occurs designed to open a gap between intentionality and literary meaning. The intentional fallacy (Wimsatt and Beardsley) imposes asceticism on empathy. The empathic fallacy is defined as endorsing (fallaciously) the possibility of the reader reaching through the text to reproduce the experiences of the author (including intentions) in producing the work. Such a “reaching through” would require “a miracle of empathy,” that one really has a transparent access to the consciousness of the author as described by Dorrit Cohn. The author has such access by definition (unless the author pretends not to have it as with an unreliable narrator), but the reader does not and must work at understanding the Other the hard way. What is needed is a Turing test for textual empathy. One exists—and in a fictional universe: Philip K. Dick’s masterpiece and fantasy of the future Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep describes the Voight-Kampff Empathy Test (a fiction within a fiction). Science imitates art. The real-world individual, Helen Riess, MD, and her neuroscience colleagues at Empathetics, Inc., a real-world corporation, have really developed a bio-feedback-like set of protocols to train medical doctors in empathy. Meanwhile, no necessary connection, logical or otherwise, exists between what an author experiences in producing a piece of writing and what the reader gets from it. The intentional fallacy and the related empathic fallacy lead like a slippery slope in the direction of the unavailability (“death”) of the author. Empathy in the touch of a hand is exemplified in Thomas Mann and Edith Stein.