Where does character collide?

In narrative theory a character is a fictional agent within a told world: a person-like participant who can act, speak, think, and be described, and who is assembled in the reader's mind from scattered cues in the text rather than existing on their own. Margolin's 1983 Characterization in narrative treated the character as a constructed entity built from a story's direct statements and implied traits, and asked how a reader turns a name on the page into a coherent personality. The referent here is an imagined participant in a story, judged by coherence and vividness, not a real person's moral fibre, a coded letter inside a computer, or a heritable feature of an organism.[1]

Unit

One fictional agent in a narrative, built from the text's cues

Recovery means

Not applicable

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Analysed by tracing the traits, actions, and statements a reader gathers into a coherent figure

In personality psychology character is the part of personality shaped by learning and maturation: a person's self-concept and the goals and values they choose to hold, captured in Cloninger, Svrakic, and Przybeck's 1993 dimensions of self-directedness, cooperativeness, and self-transcendence. Their A psychobiological model of temperament and character deliberately separated character, which develops with age and experience, from temperament, the emotional reactions that appear early and are largely inherited. The referent is a maturing moral and self-directed personality in a real person, rated on questionnaires, not an invented figure in a novel, a unit of coded text, or a trait scored on a branching tree.[2]

Unit

A person's learned self-concept, scored on character dimensions

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Rated by self-report inventories such as the Temperament and Character Inventory

In systematic biology a character is a heritable feature of an organism used as evidence for evolutionary relationships: a describable attribute, such as a bone shape or a pigment, that occurs in alternative forms called character states across different species. Sereno's 2007 Logical basis for morphological characters in phylogenetics set out how such characters and their states should be defined so that shared derived states can group species on a branching tree. The referent is an observable, inheritable feature scored across many species in a data matrix, not a person in a story, a real person's moral character, or a letter stored in a computer.[3]

Unit

One heritable feature scored as alternative states across species

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Coded as discrete states in a species-by-character matrix for phylogenetic analysis

In architectural theory, character refers to the quality by which a building expresses its purpose, a key term of eighteenth-century and later architectural criticism. This meaning comes from Forty (2000) in Words and Buildings.[4]

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