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This makes me wonder, David, why you are so-often diguised as a mild-mannered reporter for a daily decentralized news service.

So this is just a question about your "friend" who has an issue with the *his* secret super hero identity.

David, In a linguistics course I took something like this came up. There's two kinds of ways to show that something is the same. Clark Kent and Superman are the same because they NEVER appear in the same place at the same time. (Certain phonetic combinations are considered to be "the same" because they never occur in the same situations, same contexts. I wish I could give you a good example, but an example might be the hard L in lake and the soft L in laundry, which in English we never have to think about, because there's never any choice we have to make between the two. They never make a difference in meaning.) Or they are the same because they ALWAYS appear in the same place at the same time.

Regarding your Bogus Question on your ambiguity book (cool topic!) that's a nice thing to think about. One phrase is "knowledge out of context is worthless" which is to say that "wealth is relationships" and relationships are the context. Another idea is "bootstrapping with somebody in the boots", subjectivity is key ingredient when we abstract, we have to reference back to intuition. Best wishes. Peace, Andrius

Aargh! Sheesh, that's a clear case of the fallacy of "bifurcating the essence,"--equivocation by definition: If a stone is a rock, is a rock also a stone? Jesus!

Yes. Of course. Why not. Even if Superman did write Waverly.

This is a very well-examined question in various stories. You might want to skim over:

"Who Took The SUPER Out of SUPERMAN"
http://superman.ws/tales2/whotook/1/

Some of the problem comes from confusing "Superman" as a identifier for a role, versus function as a name of a person.

Years ago, both "Clark Kent" and "Superman" were each roles for the being better identified as "Kal-El" (an alien from Krypton). "Clark Kent" was a kind of deep-cover ficticious identity for him, somewhat akin to a police officer who goes undercover. "Superman" was what he called himself when he was like a police officer out in public wearing his colorful uniform. It's very clear "Clark Kent" was an act - after all, Clark Kent was a normal Terran, not an invulnerable extraterrestrial - so how could it be otherwise? How much this act let Kal-El indulge in parts of his character that wouldn't be acceptable to express otherwise, even to himself, was the basis for interesting introspective stories of any undercover genre. When written with this understanding, his other close cop friends (i.e. other superheroes), who were on a first-name basis with him, didn't address him as "Clark" OR "Superman" if they were being informal - they called him "Kal".

A while back, in an explicit complete revamp of the character, the person "Kal-El" was eliminated and "Clark Kent" was changed from the role to the person. So now "Superman" is role for "Clark Kent", and "Kal-El" is gone. The problem of how an alien from Krypton can "be" a Terran is papered-over by having him think of himself for all intents and purposes as a strong and tough Terran. Whereas it was clear previously that "Kal-El" was not a Terran, he just played one on TV (literally). The "secret identity" part was toned down dramatically, as a plot element.

This is probably way more than you wanted, but I rarely get a chance to indulge my "FanBoy" aspect :-)

David, by some weird coincidence I just read about this exact question in the excellent Wikipedia entry on Superman. Seth just explained most of this, but this excerpt adds a bit to the story: "In the original series of Superman comics (1940s to 1985), Superman is the real person, and Clark Kent is a phony front he presents to the world, his so-called secret identity....In 1986, after the Crisis on Infinite Earths series, DC Comics hired writer/artist John Byrne to recreate the Superman character from scratch, dumping all the previously established continuity, and offer a fresh retelling of the Superman mythos...In this post 1986 series, Clark Kent is the real person, and Superman is the front that he presents to the world, his so-called secret identity. He adopts this secret identity to prevent his enemies from taking advantage of him by hurting his family or friends. However, most of the world does not know that Superman is hiding his real identity at all because he does not use a mask which suggests that he does not have anything to hide. The concept that Clark is the real man, and a man shaped more by his parent's ethics than his alien power, is a deliberate reversal of the earlier comics."

So the literal answer to your question is "Both, depending on whether you are asking before or after 1986." Now, I realize you were probably not asking for a disquisition on the history of DC Comics. But I'd say that all of us are in Superman's boots, so to speak, from time to time -- especially on the Internet. We develop different personas or "secret identities" depending on where we are or who we're interacting with, and we generally try to keep those different personas separate.

I suggest that we use the idea of a single "entity" to cover the two Superman/Kent identities. This would also allow me to represent a corporate entity as the official spokes person without compromising my identity.

I've got to ask if David got a sneak preview of Kill Bill 2. This whole question of Superman as the only comic book super hero who's real identity was the guy in his baby blanket and whose Clark Kent persona was a taken on role as opposed to vice versa for all the other superheros like Peter Parker, Bruce Wayne, etc. was a topic of discussion by, if I remember right from my Sunday morning visit to the cinema (10 am on Sunday is the BEST time to see a big movie on its first weekend -- only about 15 people in the audience), Bill, or was it Budd? (god, what an ugly sentence)

Q: If Superman is Clark Kent's secret identity,
is Clark Kent Superman's secret identity?

A: yes.

Neither admits to being the other; both are.

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet" -William Shakespeare.
If it's not clear, my answer would be "SURE" :))
Heather

Hi, I have a question more than a comment. Was Wondering how the Superman/ Clark Kent question relate to the digital identity issues you were working on. Thanks

Ivan, it was a light-hearted way of asking whether on the Net we need to have a primary or "real" identity. The comments to the blog entry were far more insightful than the blog entry itself.

Roger Clarke, the Australian privacy (etc) guy, has useful thoughts on this kind of question. He distinguishes between "entity" - for people, the unique human being - who would be "entified" by a biometric that could point only to that human being. But an entity has many identities, and the one you want depends on why you want to know. Only rarely will you need to drill down to the entity level.

So I may have an identity as an employee of my company, and as a customer to the corner store, and as a member of the health club, and as a husband to my wife, and as a father to my kids, and as a son to my parents, and as a patient to my doctor - and not all of these people know all my identities nor need to.

So the parking lot attendant in David W's blog needs to know only the driver's identity as a person who has bought a product at the mall. The police need to know the identity of a person who was seen breaking into a house last Friday night - and to tie that identity to other qualities, like criminal record etc.

There is only one entity who is Superman and Clark Kent (and in MY day he was still Kal-El... the new story line comes as news to me - 20 years later - and a shock, I must say). Both Superman and Clark Kent are identities of this entity. The question of which identity is "secret" depends on "secret from whom?" And can you match one identity of the same entity with the other identity? Theublic knows one thing, Lois Lane knows two things, but can't match them...

Tis resembles data matching issues that privacy advocates worry about. Can you match my identity as consumer with my identity as holder of credit card number 1223*** and with my identity as [AIDS patient][politician][judge][etc]? Who has the right to know which connections?

I agree with David's orginal posting, that people asking for "identification" should not get any closer to the entity than they need to ,and they should not be able to make any more links between identities than they need to either. That's one reason that privacy advocates don't like biometric "identifiers"- they get too close to the entity, which may make matching other identities easier than it should be.

John G

David W., he's still Kal-El in the comics.

Anywho, as has been stated Superman and Clark are two names for the same entity and secret identity is relative to secret from who.

Classically, Clark Kent was more or less an act (the bumbling) and the character was an alien superman, with human traits both physical and mental.

In the re-interpretation in 86, things were changed so that the alien kal-el thought of himself identity wise as Clark Kent raised by the Kents of Kansas. Then the question is: so what? Just because he thinks of himself as human, certainly doesn't make him one. He's still something other than human; a superman.

So he's not human no matter what. Then the question is the old nature v. nurture deal. Does his mental self and concept of himself more reliant on his genetics or his upbringing?

I'd say it's the former. Remember, Supes isn't JUST an adopted child, he's an adopted alien. His physiology are so radically different that he'd probably have a virtually different state of consciousness that matches his physical power.

It's conceivable he could try actively to think of himself as Clark Kent, that is a human whose identity is mostly that of his raising, but it's just as conceivable that he'd be wrong or simply tricking himself for one reason or another.

Either way you slice it, he's not Clark Kent (the human) because he's not human; and he would be a superman if not found by the Kents; but maybe not Superman.