Objection 1

``Look, Bringsjord, you must have gone wrong somewhere! Stories are just strings over some finite alphabet. In your case, given the stories you have put on display above, the alphabet in question is { Aa, Bb, Cc, $\ldots$, :, !, ;, $\ldots$}, that is, basically the characters I see before me on my computer keyboard. Let's denote this alphabet by `E.' Elementary string theory tells us that though $E^\ast$, the set of all strings that can be built from E, is infinite, it's countably infinite, and that therefore there is a program P which enumerates $E^\ast$. (P, for example, can resort to lexicographic ordering.) From this it follows that your $\cal S$, the set of all stories, is itself countably infinite. (If we allow, as no doubt we must, all natural languages to be included -- French, Chinese, and even Norwegian -- the situation doesn't change: the union of a finite number of countably infinite sets is still just countably infinite.) So what's the problem? You say that your students are able to decide $\cal S$^I? Fine. Then here's what we do to enumerate $\cal S$^I: Start P in motion, and for each item S generated by this program, call your students to pass verdict on whether or not S is interesting. This composite program -- call it P': P working in conjunction with your students -- enumerates $\cal S$^I. So sooner or later, P' will manage to write King Lear, War and Peace, and even more recent belletristic narrative like that produced in the United States by Mark Helprin."

There is good reason to think that even if $\cal S$ is in some sense typographic, it needn't be countably infinite. Is $\cal A$, the set of all As, countable? (You might at this point want to return to Figure 1.) If not, then simply imagine a story associated with every element within $\cal A$; this provides an immediate refutation of Objection 1. For a parallel route to the same result, think of a story about $\pi$, a story about $\sqrt{2}$, indeed a story for every real number!

On the other hand, stories, in the real world, are often neither strings nor, more generally, typographic. After all, authors often think about, expand, refine, ... stories without considering anything typographic whatsoever. They may ``watch" stories play out before their mind's eye, for example. In fact, it seems plausible to say that strings (and the like) can be used to represent stories, as opposed to saying that the relevant strings, strictly speaking, are stories.²⁰