However, like the digital clock, thinking can create uncertainty if we believe the situation can be perceived more finely or be qualified by other relevant information. Intentional constructs are indeterminate, in the sense that it is pointless to ask how many times Juliet sneezed in the year before she met Romeo, because such details are not included in Shakespeare's script. Juliet, being an intentional creation rather than a real person, is sparsely defined. If she ever sneezes at all, it is only at the times indicated in the play. If she seems to come to life for us as more than a cardboard character or a mere outline, it is because her author, and the skilled actresses who render her part, have sensitively exploited the ways in which the audience fills in her silhouette with their own feelings and imagination.
Explanation plays a similar interpretive role in science.
A mathematical theory is a script for the behavior of matter. A cognitive system has its own properties as a self-contained system of propositions. It rides on the analog world in the way that a drama, with its own sort of reality, rides on the primary reality of material stage, actors and props. In the theatre, the fiction is interpreted in terms of the real experience of actors and audience jointly. Prisoners within the play of life are obliged to project the world of their script into the unknown reality offstage.