An Aspie tries to understand Santa Claus

Dialogue

• Ah, yes, Eric, you wanted to learn about Santa Claus. Let’s start at the beginning. You understand what a story is?

• Yes indeed. A story is a fictional piece of language. It may be written or spoken. It’s the sort of thing that adults made me read, or listen to, or write, when I was a child. The concept is very straightforward.

• A lie is also a fictional piece of language. Do you understand the difference between a story and a lie?

• Yes, I do. The essence of a lie is the intention to deceive. The same piece of language may be a story in one context, and a lie in another. A preacher who reads the text of Noah’s Ark to an educated adult congregation is retelling them a story. If the same preacher speaks the same words to a group of young children who have not heard them before, and he does not make it clear that he is telling them a story, then he is telling them a lie, which I disapprove of. And conversely I disapprove of a parent’s saying to a child “I think you’re telling me a story” as a euphemism for “I think you’re telling me a lie.”

• Strong words! Indeed you know the difference between a story and a lie. Whether you know anything about bringing up children is another matter. So, you understand that a story is a piece of language that recounts fictional events?

• Certainly not! A story is made up: it doesn’t recount anything. It merely purports to recount. That’s what I meant by a “fictional piece of language”. I didn’t use the phrase “fictional event”. I’m not sure I understand the phrase “fictional event”.

• You’re joking!

• Not at all. I have little intuition as to what “fictional event” may mean. From the way that other people use the phrase “fictional event” I get a vague notion of their concept, but it seems to me that their concept is built on very shaky ground. It’s a bit like the phrase “alleged crime”. When a policeman asks, “Where were you on the night of the alleged crime?” he really means, “It is alleged that a crime took place on such‐and‐such a night: where were you on that night?” A fictional text is, straightforwardly, a text of a particular sort: but a fictional event, whatever you may mean by that, is certainly not an event of some particular sort, any more than an alleged crime is a crime of some particular sort.

• You’re making difficulties for yourself. The concept of a fictional event is straightforward. Whatever a story does or does not actually recount, you can read a story or listen to a story as though it recounted events: fictional events.

• By no means. You can read a story or listen to a story as though it recounted events: real events. That doesn’t begin to explain to me what a fictional event is.

• But the fictional events are just the events that the story purports to recount!

• Nice try. Unfortunately that’s as meaningful as “I have no dog and its name is Fido.” Think about it.

• Touché. I can see this is going to be hard work. Are you any more comfortable with the concept of a fictional character?

• No. Indeed I’m even less comfortable with the phrase “fictional character” than I am with the phrase “fictional event”. I have no intuition as to what “fictional character” may mean. It certainly doesn’t mean a character of some particular sort. Again, from the way that other people use the phrase “fictional character” it seems to me that their concept is built on very shaky ground.

• Have you got any general difficulty conceiving of abstract objects?

• No difficulty whatsoever. I was educated as a mathematician, and mathematics is full of abstract objects.

• Do you accept that things can exist in a person’s mind?

• Certainly. Things of many kinds exist in my mind: thoughts, feelings, hopes, doubts, fears, regrets, memories, intentions, pieces of knowledge, beliefs, mis­understandings, prejudices, grudges, visual images, pieces of music and so on. And of course pieces of language, both factual and fictional. Every one of these is an abstract object.

• How are your powers of visual imagination?

• Very weak.

• Perhaps then you don’t acknowledge fictional characters and fictional events because you can’t imagine them?

• It is the meaning of “fictional character” and the meaning of “fictional event” that I have difficulty with. I can conjure up in my mind an image of a fat jolly man with a big red coat and a long white beard delivering presents to children, and so that is not the problem. It is probably a much less vivid image than most people can conjure up, but I don’t think that is the problem either. The problem is that it will not develop beyond an image of a fat jolly man with a big red coat and a long white beard delivering presents to children. I do not recognize it as relating to a fictional character called Santa Claus, because I have no intuition of what “fictional character” means. You could say that I have some imagination, but no imaginary world. If things exist in my mind of a sort that other people call “fictional characters” and “fictional events”, I do not recognize them as such.

• I don’t understand how you can have such great difficulty with the concept of a fictional character and the concept of a fictional event, when you obviously have no difficulty with the concept of a fictional piece of language.

• You’re using the word “fictional” in two quite different senses. It’s like the word “toy” in the sentence “The young boy keeps his toy aeroplane in his toy box.” The toy aeroplane is not a real aeroplane, but the toy box is a real box, which just happens to contain toys. A fictional piece of language is a real piece of language, consisting of real sentences, rendered with real ink on real paper, or with real speech, expressing real propositions: it just happens to consist of fiction. But what a “fictional event” may be, or what a “fictional character” may be, is a different matter altogether.

• Well, I’ve got news for you, sunshine. I’ll try to express myself more precisely this time. It’s all to do with imagination…

• (I might have guessed.)

• …and, for your information, the vast majority of human beings, including myself, and including everybody I know except you, regard the author of a story as creating fictional characters and fictional events in his imagination. At first these exist only in his mind, but they exist nonetheless. He can then regard the text, when he creates it, not merely as a fictional text, but first and foremost as an account of those fictional characters and fictional events.

• Holy smoke! You mean, not only are there fictional characters and fictional events in his mind, but they are already in his mind before the fictional text is?

• Typically, yes. In practice the fictional characters and fictional events may develop over a period of time in parallel with the text, but in principle the characters and events come first.

• Can I glean just one grain of comfort from all this? You are saying, I hope, that the existence of these fictional characters and fictional events is private to the author: they just act in his own mind as an aid to creating the text?

• At first, yes. However, he may then publish the text: let us say as a book, but it could equally be through speech, through film, or through some other medium. That brings the fictional characters and fictional events into the public domain.

• You mean, his readers read the book and infer the existence of the fictional characters and the fictional events in the author’s mind?

• No, Eric, I don’t mean that. I mean something altogether less intellectual and altogether more profound. In reading the book, his readers rebuild the fictional characters and the fictional events in their own minds. They too regard the book, first and foremost, as an account of those fictional characters and fictional events. The fictional characters and fictional events have been communicated through the medium of the book. Their existence is now public. They have emerged into the public domain from the public text.

• Hey man, that’s weird! I never thought of a story like that! Do most people really think of a story like that? This story, for example…

• I beg your pardon?

• Oh, sorry, when I’m careless I can get confused between the character and the author. I forgot you didn’t know this was a story.

• Eh?

• Forget it. Author’s licence. But, seriously, I never thought of a story as an account of fictional characters and fictional events until recently, when I became interested in linguistics. I still find thinking of a story in that way strange and disorienting.

• But you used to read stories when you were at school: how did you read them?

• With boredom. I enjoyed short poems, and I could just cope with longer poems and short stories. Perhaps the capacity of my imagination is just sufficient for those. But I found reading a novel to be the most boring thing I have ever been required to do. I think there are at least three reasons.

  Firstly, the story in almost all novels consists mainly of purported accounts of social interactions. Asperger Syndrome is, in large part, a social impairment. I have difficulty in understanding any but the simplest of social interactions.

  Secondly, the story in most novels involves romance. I have no experience of romance, no interest in it, and little understanding of it.

  But thirdly – and I think this is the main reason – I never used to imagine that I was reading an account of anything. Indeed I couldn’t do so. My mother, helping me with prescribed literature in the early years of my secondary schooling, tumbled to the fact that I was not imagining what I was reading about, and encouraged me to try. But when I tried, I found that using my imagination in that way was too difficult and distracting. It interfered with the task of reading and attempting to understand the text, which I was required to do, and which was difficult enough for me already. It has been truly said that an author of fiction cannot tell a lie, and by the same token he cannot tell the truth either. He asserts nothing. To a person like me with no imaginary world, that means that the text of a novel has no meaning. I am condemned to read a novel as a long string of statements whose truth is not asserted: a gigantic “if” clause with no consequent.

  Can you picture a 16‑year‐old with those difficulties wading through D H Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers?

• No wonder you were bored. You also wrote stories at school: how did you write them?

• With difficulty. Certainly it never crossed my mind to create fictional events involving fictional characters and then recount them. I merely created a fictional text and then wrote it down. I assumed that’s what everybody did.

• That plainly illustrates the difficulty that people with Asperger Syndrome have with imagination.

• Yes, I accept that. Consequently, at school I always got mediocre marks for English, and I concluded that I wasn’t good at English. I now see that there was nothing wrong with my command of English, but until my final year at school my ability in English was measured almost exclusively by my ability to understand and write stories. I believe it is quite inaccurate to measure the ability in English of a child with Asperger Syndrome by his ability to understand and write stories. He has a very poor grasp of story, and that has little to do with his ability in English. You might as well try to measure a blind man’s ability in English by asking him to read a printed page.

• Interesting. And not just English. Do you think that a story can exist in more than one language?

• Well, you could take a story in one language and translate it into another language, certainly. But you would get a different story.

• Why would you get a different story?

• Because a story is a piece of language, made of words, and if you translate it into another language then you get a different piece of language, made of different words.

• Ah. I think we have to refine your concept of a story. At first I agreed with you that a story is a piece of language, but I now have to reconsider that. Part of the great power of fiction is that, once the fictional characters and fictional events have been privately created and publicly expressed, you can dispense with the particular text in which they were expressed. What we call “the story” is no longer the text: it comes to consist of the fictional characters and the chain of fictional events whose public existence was first established by that text. They take on a life of their own, independent of the particular words that first publicly established them. So you no longer have “a story consisting of an English text” and “a French translation of that story”. Instead, you have a story, rendered in English, and you have that same story, rendered in French. Have you got that?

• Yes, I think so. But isn’t it complicated!

• It’s only complicated if you try to analyse it.

• But, like any person with Asperger Syndrome, I have to analyse it to understand it, as I lack an intuitive grasp of story, in the sense that you are now using the word story.

• So, where have we got?

• I think I now vaguely understand your concept of a fictional character and your concept of a fictional event, and hence your revised concept of a story. It has always struck me as odd, though, the way that an author traditionally introduces a fictional character. A novel might begin:

  Adam Salton sauntered into the Empire Club, Sydney, and found awaiting him a letter from his grand‑uncle.

  That opening immediately poses in my mind the question, “Who is Adam Salton?” My processing of the subsequent text is then crippled until I have found out. Such modes of thought seriously hampered my grasp of fiction at school. Children’s stories are much more honest in this respect. If a similar story were written for small children, it might begin:

  Once upon a time there was a man called Mr Salton.

  That expresses much more logically what is meant. Even now, when I read a short story – I could never cope with any fiction longer than a short story – I consciously make translations of that sort. Do you accept that, logically, translations of that sort have to be made?

• I suppose so. You’re being very pedantic.

• I like to think so. Thank you.

• Eric, that wasn’t meant as… No, forget it. You wrote stories at school. Do you ever write stories nowadays?

• Yes, occasionally. In fact, come to think of it, I’m sitting at my computer writing one right now.

• Oh no you’re not. You’re confusing the character with the author again.

• Yes you’re right: so he is. It’s so puzzling. We’re both called Eric, you see. When do we get on to Santa Claus?

• I think we can do that now. Now that you vaguely understand the concept of a fictional character, does it surprise you to be told that Santa Claus is a fictional character?

• No, that doesn’t surprise me. Someone must have publicly written, or spoken, a fictional piece of language purporting to be an account of a man called Santa Claus. Or, as you would no doubt put it, a piece of language about a fictional character called Santa Claus.

• Good. Lots of pieces of language, in fact.

• So there are lots of fictional characters called Santa Claus?

• No. Why should there be?

• Because I thought I understood that a fictional character emerges into the public domain from a public text. If there are lots of public texts purporting to be accounts of men called Santa Claus, then presumably a fictional character emerges from each one. No no, I see it now. Lots of texts, but just one story, rendered into different texts. I understand.

• Well, no. Actually, there are lots of stories, but they’re all about the one character.

• Then I don’t understand at all. What do you mean by saying that a character in one story and a character in another story are the same character?

• Well, sometimes it’s obvious. For example if an author writes a story called Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and follows it up with a sequel called Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, then obviously it’s the same Harry Potter.

• I’m not yet concerned with how to determine whether a character in one story and a character in another story are the same character. Much more basically, I need to know what you mean by saying that a character in one story and a character in another story are the same character. Surely, if the character is an emergent property of the text, that cannot be?

• Ah. I think your concept of a fictional character needs to be expanded. Yes, up to now we have regarded a fictional character as emerging from a single story. But what sometimes happens in practice is that one author will write or tell a story from which a fictional character emerges, the story becomes widely known and widely liked –

• You mean people like stories?

• Come off it, Eric! – and then the same author, or a second author, writes or tells a story about the same fictional character. Pretty soon, lots of people know lots of stories about the same fictional character. The character has passed from a private existence, through a public existence, into a global existence. It has passed into folklore. Now, Santa Claus has passed into folklore. There are lots of stories about him. Surely you were told stories about Santa Claus when you were a child?

• No, I was told lies about Santa Claus when I was a child. But even supposing I do accept the notion of two stories about the same fictional character, how do I discover whether two given stories are in fact about the same fictional character? All right, in the case of a sequel by the same author, her authority determines the matter. But suppose two people each write a story about a man called Santa Claus? Are the characters the same, or different? Does that depend on what the authors say about the matter? What if the two authors say nothing about it? What if they disagree about it? As I said before, it seems to me that the concept of a fictional character is built on shaky ground in the first place. It seems to me that your further, extended concept of a fictional character, which may cover stories written by different people, possibly in different countries, in different cultures, in different languages, in different centuries, is just too shaky to stand. Through the centuries, people first heard facts about St Nicholas of Myra, then legends about him, then stories about a fictional character based on him. Where is the borderline between a legend about St Nicholas of Myra and a story about Santa Claus? Across cultures, are the Dutch Sinterklaas, the Spanish Papá Noel, the Russian Grandfather Frost, the German Christkind or Christ‐Child, one character or four? Is the 19th‑century Santa Claus, who used to punish naughty children and reward well‐behaved children, the same character as the modern Santa Claus who bestows gifts on naughty and well‐behaved alike? What about the Finnish Christmas Goat, from a Pagan tradition, which frightened children into giving it presents, and gradually over the generations converged towards “our” Santa Claus? I’m sorry, but it seems to me that you are trying to extend the concept of a fictional character far beyond the point where it has any meaning.

• Eric, you’re making difficulties for yourself again. Hard cases make bad law! People may have different ideas about how many hairs constitute a beard, but that does not invalidate the concept of a beard. Clouds can form gradually, and merge gradually, and divide gradually, and evaporate gradually, but everybody knows what a cloud is. Can we not cut across these theoretical difficulties? In practice, in our country, in our culture, in our language, in our century, everybody knows who is meant by Santa Claus. Even the smallest children can make up stories about him. Perhaps I can persuade you by reading you two such stories from a class of 7‑year‑olds last Christmas. Hazel writes:

  One Christmas, Santa Claus was so busy that he asked his wife to help him…

• Which, being translated, reads, “One Christmas, there was a man called Santa Claus who was so busy…”

• Yes, if you like… No! Not this time. The writer and her reader already know who Santa Claus is: he is the one, global Santa Claus of folklore.

• I still have difficulty with that. So how does the other story begin?

• I like this one: it’s quite sophisticated. Pamela wrote it. She begins:

  Last Christmas, Santa Claus felt very sad. He wished he had a family of his own, but, you see, he had never married…

• Aha! I’ve got you! Two Santa Clauses! Hazel’s one has a wife, and Pamela’s one never married!

• Eric, this is ridiculous. The stories are two different stories about the same Santa Claus. Of course they’re the same Santa Claus. They have to be the same Santa Claus. How many Santa Clauses do you think there are, for goodness’ sake?

• None.

• I give up.

Commentary

The above Dialogue reads as though it has a timescale of about half an hour. To write it took a day or so. But in reality it is a distillation of decades of puzzlement and discovery in my own mind, starting when I was quite a small child.

The word that gave me the most trouble when I was composing the Dialogue was text. I needed a word that meant a piece of language, written or spoken, considered without regard to any series of events that it might recount. At first narrative seemed the natural word to me. But when I checked it, I found that narrative means “an account of a series of events”. Most certainly therefore it would not do. (Indeed, the very fact that I had misunderstood the word narrative for 50 years is clear evidence of a non‐standard perspective.) After I had considered several other words, the choice narrowed to discourse or text. Both these words are used by linguists with the meaning I wanted. Discourse has a slight bias towards spoken language, while text has a slight bias towards written language. However, to the layman, text has a very strong bias towards written language. I would therefore have settled on discourse: but to the layman it is an unusual word with connotations of academia. I have therefore used a hybrid solution. I use piece of language where full generality is required, and I use text where the language is written, or may as well be written.

In the next three paragraphs, to make myself understood I have to fall into line with the mainstream philosophy that a fictional text can be understood as an account of a series of events.

If you have a text recounting a series of events, does the word story properly refer to the text, or to the series of events? General dictionaries give its primary meaning as the text, and a secondary meaning as the series of events. (Sometimes the word is used in a poetic mixture of the two meanings, as in the advertisement for a genealogy service which uses the slogan, “The stories of your past are waiting to be heard.”) I was surprised to discover that, in linguistics, the word invariably means the series of events, as contrasted with the text. In my Dialogue, the “series of events” meaning eventually prevails. In the next two paragraphs, I use the word story to mean the series of events.

It may be quite revealing that, when I wanted to quote the first sentence of a typical novel, I had to search for one on the Internet. I have over 400 books in my house, but I don’t think there is a single one of them that consists of a novel or other fictional text. On second thoughts, there is one: Stephen Leacock’s Nonsense Novels. I love that book. The stories are trivial, and the fun is in the language.

My two snatches of confused‐level dialogue, where the character Eric is confused with the author Eric, were put in to make a point. The point is that, true to form, I was writing a piece of language, not a story. As pieces of language, the snatches of confused‐level dialogue are quite unexceptionable. As story, they are absurd. If my reader reads them as story and finds them silly, then I have made my point.

Update

I wrote the above Dialogue and Commentary in 2002. In the Dialogue I confessed, honestly, that I did not “get” the phrase “fictional character”. From 2008 I studied philosophy and linguistics at university for 2½ years, and I feel that that experience has equipped me to develop my understanding of the phrase “fictional character”. I will now try to explain my current understanding. I will use Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights as a model.

Ontology is the study of existence. Your ontology is your understanding as to what kinds of thing exist. In the context of a work of fiction such as a novel, what can be said to exist? Plainly the novel exists, and the text of the novel exists. Plainly also the text of the novel expresses propositions, which exist. (A proposition, in this context, is the semantic content of a declarative sentence: the sentence “Snow is white” expresses the proposition that snow is white.) Philosophers widely hold that the novel expresses what they call a “possible world”, but they are divided as to what such “possible worlds” consist of. Many philosophers take what I will call the conservative view, that a possible world merely consists of propositions. Others take what I will call the liberal view, that a possible world includes things like events, states of affairs, and persons. In the Socratic Dialogue above, I take the conservative view and I refuse to acknowledge anything beyond the propositions. My “friend” takes the liberal view, and considers it to be obvious that what is expressed by a story includes events and persons.

We must be careful not to be misled by the adjective fictional. The possible world expressed by a work of fiction is often called a fictional world. But nobody is saying that it doesn’t exist. The consensus of philosophers is that possible worlds do exist, even if only as collections of propositions. In the same way that a fictional text exists and is a work of fiction, so a fictional world exists and is a possible world that is expressed by a work of fiction.

Language is very peculiar. We speak and write, all the time, as though things exist that we have no good ontological grounds for positing. In particular most philosophers, whether or not they embrace the liberal view that a possible world includes things like events and states of affairs and persons, nevertheless accept that the most convenient way of discussing possible worlds is to talk as if they do. For example, we could take the conservative view and say:

The text of the novel includes the sentence “Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff’s dwelling,” purportedly in the words of the narrator of the novel, thus expressing the proposition that, according to the narrator, Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr Heathcliff’s dwelling; and nowhere does the text express, imply or even suggest a contrary proposition.

But it is much more convenient to adopt the liberal view, regardless of our ontological take on the matter, and say:

In the novel, Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr Heathcliff’s dwelling.

In this Update, I remain agnostic as to the composition of fictional worlds. I will mostly take the conservative view, to show that the liberal view is not necessary. But I will sometimes adopt the liberal view, for convenience, if that significantly simplifies what I have to say.

The novel Wuthering Heights, then, expresses a fictional world featuring a girl called Catherine. Now, we say “Catherine is a fictional character.” What do we mean by that?

That is a very tricky question. In the fictional world of the novel, Catherine is not anything that we might call a “fictional character”: she is a regular person. In the fictional world of the novel, if someone asks “Who is Catherine Earnshaw?” then the answer might be “She is the girl who fell in love with Heathcliff;” the answer could never be “She is a fictional character who fell in love with Heathcliff.” But in the real world, the name Catherine Earnshaw refers to no one at all, indeed perhaps no entity at all. It is by no means clear that there is any world, fictional or not, in which we can say “Catherine exists and is not a regular person.”

We might be tempted to explain “Catherine is a fictional character” by saying, for example, “Catherine is not real.” But what could we mean by that? Surely every person is real! Do we mean she’s not a person? Well, if not a person, what sort of thing is she? She’s certainly not a duck or a basketball. It doesn’t advance the explanation to repeat “She’s a fictional character,” because “fictional character” is the very phrase we’re trying to explain. We seem to be getting nowhere.

We need to borrow a couple of words from the discipline of semiotics. Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols, what they mean, and how they are used. When I read in a newspaper the words Mount Etna, the printed words Mount Etna are known as the signifier, the concept that the words evoke is known as the signified, and the mountain itself is known as the referent. When I read in Wuthering Heights the printed words Catherine Earnshaw, those words are a signifier, the concept that the words evoke is the signified, and on the conservative view that the fictional world of the novel consists solely of propositions, there is no referent. I won’t be using the word signified any further, and I won’t be using any semiotic theory: I will merely be borrowing the words signifier and referent.

In discovering what we mean by “Catherine is a fictional character,” I believe the correct approach is to look at the scope of the signifiers of Catherine within the novel. Within the novel, Catherine is of course referred to by name, for example as Catherine or as Catherine Earnshaw. Now these names for her – these signifiers – have a scope that is local to the fictional world of the novel. In the real world outside of the novel, if someone asks “Who is Catherine Earnshaw?” then in strict philosophy the answer can only be “I don’t know who you are talking about,” because the signifier Catherine Earnshaw is out of scope. So I believe that part of the meaning of “Catherine is a fictional character” is that The scopes of the signifiers of Catherine are local to the novel. By contrast, the first paragraph of the novel contains the word England as the signifier of a country, but even though that signifier is part of the fictional text of the novel we don’t say “England is a fictional country,” because the signifier has global, real‐world, scope.

Now that shows, I believe, that the phrase “fictional character” is linguistically complex. As I say in the Socratic Dialogue, “fictional character” certainly doesn’t mean a character of some particular sort. If I say that John is a cheeky character, I am specifying an attribute of John. If I say that Mary is a dour character, I am specifying an attribute of Mary. But when I say that Catherine is a fictional character, I am specifying an attribute not of Catherine but of her signifiers.

But I believe there is a second part also to the meaning of “Catherine is a fictional character.” And here I have to introduce the concept of outscoping. I think I can introduce this concept more vividly in the context of pictures than I could in the context of stories.

Look at Figure 1:

Figure 1 is a picture of a man. But we can say more than that. Prince Harry is a member of the British Royal Family, and Figure 1 is a picture of him. The picture – the pattern of pixels on the screen in front of you – is the signifier, and Prince Harry is the referent. Since Prince Harry inhabits the real world, the scope of the signifier is the real world.

By contrast, look at Figure 2:

Figure 2 is a picture of a frying pan. I presume that the artist was competent enough to create the picture from her memory of what frying pans in general look like, without having any particular frying pan in view, or in mind, as she did so. I therefore assert:

Figure 2 is a picture of a frying pan, but there is no frying pan that Figure 2 is a picture of.

That assertion uses simple, direct, low‐level language. It does not use any phrases such as “generic frying pan”, “specific frying pan”, “hypothetical frying pan”, or “imaginary frying pan”. These phrases express higher‐level concepts that I wish to avoid at this stage. Nor does it use the concept of a “possible world”. I’ll say it again in simple, direct, low‐level language: Figure 2 is a picture of a frying pan, but there is no frying pan that Figure 2 is a picture of. The picture is a signifier, but there is no referent.

Now look at Figure 3. Things get more complicated here.

Again I might assert:

Figure 3 is a picture of a boy, but there is no boy that Figure 3 is a picture of.

That assertion is the strict truth. But it does not sit well with our social minds. The picture is just so real, so vivid, that our social minds impel us towards the illusion that there is a boy that Figure 3 is a picture of. We want to know: What is he looking at? Why is he in a jungle? Why is he so happy? How old is he? What is his name? (Mowgli.) We know, intellectually, that we see a boy only because of a pattern of pixels on the screen of an electronic device. That pattern of pixels is a signifier. We also know that (in the real world) there is no such boy as Mowgli, so that the scope of the signifier here is local to the picture (or, more generally, local to the fictional world of The Jungle Book and other stories, of which the picture expresses a part). Ontologically we have no right to lift the signifier out of its scope, but psychologically we are impelled to do so. We move from “Figure 3 is a picture of a boy called Mowgli” to “There is a boy called Mowgli, and Figure 3 is a picture of him.”

I believe that that is an important psychological and linguistic process. It is called outscoping. The signifier – the pattern of pixels on the screen – has as its scope a fictional world, but we think and speak as though its scope is the real world. We have outscoped the signifier.

Now that we have seen that process happening in the context of pictures, I think it is easier to see it happening in the context of stories. In the text of Wuthering Heights, the name Catherine Earnshaw is a signifier. It has no referent in the real world: its scope is local to the novel. In the text of the novel, the name Catherine Earnshaw refers to a girl; but there is no girl that the name Catherine Earnshaw in the text of the novel refers to. But our social minds are impelled to lift the name out of its scope. “In the text of the novel, the name Catherine Earnshaw refers to a girl” becomes “There is a girl called Catherine Earnshaw, and the text of the novel refers to her.” We have outscoped the signifier.

Notice that we must outscope the name if we are even to use it outside of the fictional world of the novel. Without outscoping we cannot talk about Catherine outside of the fictional world of the novel at all.

Here I am encouraged by what I find in the academic literature. I discovered the above process by my own introspection, and I privately called it outscoping. Now I find that the process is discussed in philosophy of language, albeit not in the context of pictures or stories as far as I can discover, and outscoping is exactly what it is called. I seem to be on the right lines.

It is important to note that our minds do not do this psychological and linguistic outscoping with every signifier whose scope is local to the novel. In Chapter 1 of the same novel we read:

…a lusty dame, with tucked‐up gown, bare arms, and fire‐flushed cheeks, rushed into the midst of us flourishing a frying‐pan…

I would guess that the minds of all of us are quite comfortable here with the strict truth, that in the text of the novel the phrase a frying‐pan refers to a frying pan, but there is no frying pan that the phrase a frying‐pan in the text of the novel refers to. We’re not interested in the frying pan. We don’t stop to wonder how many meals have been cooked in it over the years. We don’t ask ourselves what shop it was bought in. Our minds are quite content to gloss over it and move on. We are not impelled to outscope the signifier a frying‐pan from the fictional world of the novel into the real world.

It should be plain, I think, that the reason we are impelled to outscope the phrase Catherine Earnshaw and not the phrase a frying‐pan is that we ourselves are persons and not frying pans. We have social minds that have evolved to care deeply about persons, and have not evolved to care much about frying pans. That is why we outscope signifiers of persons and not signifiers of frying pans. And that, in turn, I believe, is why we talk about “fictional characters” and we don’t talk about “fictional frying pans”.

So I propose that the sentence “Catherine Earnshaw is a fictional character” means something like:

The signifier Catherine Earnshaw in the text of the novel has a scope that is properly local to the novel, but for psychological and linguistic reasons our minds outscope the signifier so that we imagine there is a person to whom the signifier Catherine Earnshaw in the text of the novel refers.

I’m not pretending that that’s easy, but I don’t think that the meaning of “fictional character” can be adequately explained in any other way.

Having outscoped the name Catherine Earnshaw from the novel into the real world so that we can speak in the real world of a girl called Catherine Earnshaw, why do we not go the whole distance and say “In the real world, Catherine Earnshaw is a girl”? We don’t do that, because the phrase “in the real world” in that context would be understood as implying that we claim to outscope as a matter of ontological right. We have no such ontological right: we outscope as a matter of psychology and language. Saying “Catherine is a fictional character” appropriately hedges our claim to outscope.

At this point there are some who would posit a new category of being, the category of “fictional character”, bringing their ontology into line with their social thinking and their language. No doubt if I were a literary critic I would do that. But I am not.

My position, therefore, is that the sentence “Catherine Earnshaw is a fictional character” has a meaning and is true, but there are no such entities as fictional characters. That position may have the seeming of a paradox, but I believe it is sound. I remarked earlier that we habitually speak and write as though things exist that we have no good ontological grounds for positing, and here we have an instance. We say “Catherine Earnshaw is a fictional character,” and we say it truly, as though there were a class of entities denoted by the term “fictional character”, but there isn’t. Language is very peculiar.

And at long last it is clear to me why I grew up with no intuition of what is meant by “fictional character”. I have Asperger Syndrome, and the social part of my mind is underdeveloped. So, with very few exceptions, when I am presented with a story, whether in a book or in any other medium, my mind is not impelled to outscope the signifiers of the persons in the story, any more than the frying pans.