¹ Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, that is, as opposed to his father, whose first name was also ‘Charles’ (and who was also at one time ‘the Rev.’– though later ‘Archdeacon’).

² Henceforward, we resolve the question of whether to parallel ‘synonymy’ or ‘anonymity’ in the favour of latter, and include the ‘-it-’.

³ A critical presentation of the main options, together with references to the work of their proponents, may be found in Robert, Howell, ‘Fictional Objects: How They Are and How They Aren&t’, in Gustafson, D. F. and Tapscott, B. L. (eds) Body, Mind, and Method, (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1979), 242–94.Google Scholar

⁴ Thus J. Katz (‘The Neoclassical Theory of Reference’), in P. French, Uehling, H. Wettstein, (eds.), Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 103–24, speaks of how to explain ‘the fact that proper nouns like “Mark Twain” and “Samuel Clemens” name the same person’ (112), without for a moment entertaining the possibility that the names are not co-referential. We shall meet this pseudonym again below.Google Scholar

⁵ Note for purists: the quotation marks in this sentence are to be understood as quasi-quotation devices.

⁶ Several of the normative aspects of the bestowing and the use of names are usefully touched on in Allerton, D. J., ‘The Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Status of Proper Names: What are they and who do they belong to?’, Journal of Pragmatics 11 (1987), 61–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷ McFarland and Co.: Jefferson, North Carolina 1989. (Revised version of the same author&s Naming Names (1981).)Google Scholar

⁸ This quotation is from p. 163 of Sheldon Greenberg and Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz, The Spice of Life, Mermaid Books (Michael Joseph Ltd.) 1984.Google Scholar

⁹ And what of children who already know this much? Derek, HudsonLewis Carroll–An Illustrated Biography (London: Constable, 1974; First Edn. 1954) reproduces an account by Mrs A. T. Waterhouse of her encounter, as one of a company of young girls at a tea party, with Dodgson. (p. 249) “We were playing in the garden in an aimless sort of way when Enid Stevens, about my age, told me that perhaps Mr Dodgson was coming. ‘He&s an old clergyman,’ she said, ‘but he&s really Lewis Carroll’.”Google Scholar

¹⁰ A discussion of many such ‘identifications without identity’ may be found in Gilles, Fauconnier, Mental Spaces (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1985), esp. pp. 73–81.Google Scholar

¹¹ The notion of a work&s content employed here should be taken to subsume the narrative presentation rather than simply what is thereby presented. The authorial persona, as here conceived, seems close to Foucault&s idea of the ‘author-function’, though he appears to take the latter category to bear (in ways I do not pretend to understand) on all cases of literary production, pseudonymous or otherwise. See ‘What is an Author?’, in Michel, Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Buchard, D. F., (ed.) (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–38.Google Scholar

¹² Hudson, op. cit., 46.Google Scholar

¹³ Heny, F. W., Semantic Operations on Base Structures, UCLA Ph.D. Thesis, Distributed through University Microfilms Ltd. (Tylers Green, High Wycombe, England) 1970.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Hudson, op. cit., 61; similarly from p.132, talking about Euclid and His Modern Rivals: ‘though it appeared under the name of C. L. Dodgson, it is spiced with the wit more usually found in Lewis Carroll (…)’. See also quoted passage A in the Appendix below.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Scientific American 239, No. 5, May 1978, 24–30; the quotation is from p. 24.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Hudson, op. cit., 96.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Jean, Gattegno, Lewis Carroll: Fragments of a Looking Glass, from Alice to Zeno, (London: Allen and Unwin, 1977), tr. Rosemary Sheed (French Orig.: 1974).Google Scholar

¹⁸ See also p. 288 for more on this theme, and the passage quoted as ‘B’ in the Appendix below, which relates another incident attesting to these sentiments on Dodgson&s part.Google Scholar

¹⁹ This circular is also quoted by Hudson, op. cit., 234, who goes on to say: ‘This may be thought to carry dissimulation beyond all reasonable bounds (...) Considering that his own income, and the generous help that he was able to give members of his own family, were entirely founded on books published under a pseudonym, it was really rather absurd of him–one hesitates to use a stronger word–to issue such a sweeping disclaimer; the circular shows scrupulous accuracy being carried away by a passionate longing for privacy.’

²⁰ Searle, John R., ‘The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse’, New Literary History 6 (1974–1975), 319–332; reprinted in French et al., op. cit., 233–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²¹ Gregory, Currie, ‘What is Fiction?’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43 (1984–1985), 385–392.Google Scholar

²² In a similar vein, we have Kendall Walton&s suggestion (Mimesis as Make-Believe, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 39): ‘Briefly, a fictional truth consists in there being a prescription or mandate in some context to imagine something. Fictional propositions are propositions that are to be imagined–whether or not they are in fact imagined.’ Walton later (p. 87) goes on to object to ‘speech act’ theories of fictionmaking such as Currie&s ‘invitation’ account on the grounds that we can imagine cracks appearing in some rocks which (mysteriously enough) spell out the words of what we can read as an engaging and suspenseful story: fiction without an author. But in the first place, the possibility (even if conceded) of unauthored fiction can hardly tell against a proposal of what is being done by the author of a fiction, and, in the second place, there is, in the evisaged situation, no ‘prescription or mandate’ any more than there is an invitation. So the supposed possibility tells no more strongly against Currie&s proposal than it does against Walton&s own. And, as Currie remarks in his more recent elaboration on these themes The Nature of Fiction, (Cambridge Universty Press, 1990, 36), it seems more appropriate to say that we may treat the cracks in the rocks as if they constituted a work of fiction.Google Scholar

²³ ‘Pretending’, in Austin, J. L., Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 253–71 (Orig. publ. 1957). An aside: in the course of his discussion of pretense-related concepts, Austin has occasion to remark that the usage of ‘pretend’ in ‘pretending to be a hyena’ (in a party game, say) is very recent, ‘perhaps no older than Lewis Carroll’ (p. 265).Google Scholar

²⁴ Actually he says ‘plagiary’ rather than ‘plagiarism’. (Very quaint.)

²⁵ ‘The Minimal Modal Logic: A Cautionary Tale About Primitives and Definitions’, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 19 (1978), 486–488. This information was divulged to me by Hazen, prompted by our discussing material in a recent publication of my own in which I had cited (unaware of its true authorship) the paper in question; I am grateful to him for allowing me to make use of it here.Google Scholar

²⁶ Even if the someone in question is called ‘John F. Kennedy’ because the writer was thinking of the U.S. President of that name in creating the character. Cf. Currie, The Nature of Fiction, p. 129: ‘Authors of fiction frequently ‘have in mind’ some real person when they introduce a name into their fictions, but that need not prevent the name from being a fictional name. We know that Lewis Carroll had Alice Liddell in mind when he used the name ‘Alice’ in Alice&s Adventures in Wonderland. But it is not true in the story that ‘Alice’ refers to Alice Liddell, and ‘Alice’ as used by Carroll in the story is a fictional name.’

²⁷ Chapter 2 of Currie, The Nature of Fiction, provides a sophisticated account of this matter, as well as a critical survey of some alternatives; for further refinements, see Alex Byrne, ‘Truth in Fiction: The Story Continued’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71 (1993), 24–35.

²⁸ Mary Lassiter, Our Names, Our Selves (Heinemann, London 1983),

²⁹ A comprehensive account of the literature on this matter, together with a positive proposal (altogether perhaps more than one ever wanted to know about the subject), may be found in Boer, S. E. and Lycan, W. G., Knowing Who (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1986).Google Scholar

³⁰ Room, op. cit., 43; in Room&s alphabetical listing of pseudonyms (and name changes–though the latter do not conern us here), many-one cases may be found under the following entries: Francis Beeding, Launcelot Langstaff, Martin Marprelate, David Pilgrim, Ellery Queen, J. H. Rosny, Paul Temple, P. B. Yuill.Google Scholar

³¹ Donald Baxter (‘Many-One Identity’, Philosophical Papers 17 (1988), 193–216) has defended talk of several things being identical with one thing in cases in which the former are parts of the latter–but this does not seem to the point in the present context.Google Scholar

³² J. Fang, Bourbaki, Paidea Press, N.Y. 1970; the quotation is from p. 25. (I should have preferred ‘used by a group of rather than ’for a group of.)Google Scholar

³³ See Fang, op. cit., n. 19 on p. 60 (and text thereto, p. 48) for the details here alluded to.

³⁴ I assume here that the according to the fiction involved, Norton and Flowers are distinct individuals. Of course it does not follow logically from the statement that such and such a work was produced by Norton and Flowers that the the work was produced by two individuals, but even with an explicit written fiction, truth in the fiction isn&t a matter of following logically from the text. (See the works cited in note 27.)

³⁵ See the entry in Room, op. cit., 136, under ‘Dito und Idem’; from his description, this at least appears to have been a many-many pseudonym.

³⁶ As indeed one may on p. 134 of Demitri Coryton and Joseph Murrells, Hits of the ‘60s–The Million Sellers (London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1990).

³⁷ The previously quoted remark pertains to a brief period when Keith Richards went by the name ‘Keith Richard’.Google Scholar

³⁸ Enlightenment on the history of these pseudonyms may be found on pp. 51, 53, and 86 of Christopher Andersen dagger Unauthorised, Simon and Schuster, London 1993; the collective vs. individual question about them–that is, whether Jagger and Richards thought of them as their (or each other&s) separate pseudonyms or as a joint indissoluble pseudonym– is not, however, resolved (or raised).Google Scholar

³⁹ The idea that a description may function to fix the reference of a name was developed in Kripke, S. A., Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980) (orig. publ. 1972).Google Scholar