Objection 3

``I now see your error, Bringsjord: premise (12) in Arg<sub>3</sub>. If $\cal S$<sup>I</sup> is to be in AH, then your key predicate -- `Interesting'; denote it by `I' -- must be a bivalent one. (More precisely, I must be isomorphic to a predicate that is built via quantification out of the totally computable bivalent predicates of $\Sigma_0$.) But a moment's reflection reveals that I isn't bivalent: different people have radically different opinions about whether certain fixed stories are interesting! Clearly, though Jones and Smith may share the same language, and may thus be able to fully understand ``Shopping," ``Hunger," ``Betrayal," King Lear, and War and Peace, their judgements may differ. ``Shopping" might be downright thrilling to an AInik interested in determining how, upon reading such a story, humans know instantly that the pronoun `He' refers to Jack."²¹

It is important to realize that I am talking about stories qua stories; stories as narrative. Hence a better way to focus the present objection is to note that Jones may find Kind Lear to be genuine drama, but monstrously boring drama (because, he says, King Lear, is but a lunatic), while Smith is transfixed. It's undeniable that differences of opinion like those existing between Jones and Smith are common. But this fact is not a threat to my argument. First, note that such differences are present in all domains, not just in the domain of narrative. Wittgenstein, remember, teased much out of a clash between someone who says that 2+2=4 and someone who flatly denies it -- so even the arithmetical realm, if Objection 3 goes through, would lack bivalent properties, and if anything is suffused with bivalence, it's arithmetic. Moreover, there is nothing to prevent me from stipulating that these agents come decked out with some fixed ``value system" -- for judging stories. In fact, let me heretofore insist that I be read as not just interesting simpliciter, but interesting given (what must surely be one of the world's most refined systems for gauging stories) the knowledge and ability of none other than Umberto Eco.²² Our new predicate, then, can be $I_{\mbox{{\tiny UE}}}$.