According to some, there is a problem concerning the emotions we feel toward fictional entities such as Anna Karenina, Werther and the like. We feel pity, fear, and sadness toward them, but how is that possible? “We are saddened, but how can we be? What are we sad about? How can we feel genuinely and involuntarily sad, and weep, as we do know that no one has suffered or died?” (Radford, in: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1975). This is the (...) paradox of fiction which is based on the assumption that emotions, to be genuine and rational, should be directed toward existent beings. But if beliefs about existence are necessary for us to be rationally moved by something, and such beliefs are lacking when we are moved by fiction (because we do not believe fictional characters and events to be real), then our capacity for an emotional response to fiction is irrational. Consequently, our emotional attitude toward future generations should be considered as irrational as well. But is this really the case? Are there good arguments to consider future and fictional entities as similar from this point of view? Or would it be better to distinguish the two? Is there such a thing as a paradox of the future? If so, how does it relate to the more famous paradox of fiction? (shrink)

In this paper, I review developments in discussions of fiction and emotion over the last decade concerning both the descriptive question of how to classify fiction-directed emotions and the normative question of how to evaluate those emotions. Although many advances have been made on these topics, a mistaken assumption is still common: that we must hold either that fiction-directed emotions are (empirically or normatively) the same as other emotions, or that they are different. I argue that we should reject this (...) dichotomy. (shrink)

This paper responds to two arguments that have been offered against the positing of ‘i-desires’, imaginative counterparts of desire supposedly involved in fiction, pretence, and mindreading. The Introspection Argument asks why, if there are both i-desires and desires, the distinction is so unfamiliar and hard to draw, unlike the relatively clear distinctions between perception and mental imagery, or belief and belief-like imagining. The Accountability Argument asks how it can make sense to treat merely imaginative states as revealing of someone’s psychology, (...) the way we do with responses to fiction. I argue that carefully considering the relationship between other states and their imaginative counterparts sheds light on how we should expect i-desires to differ from desires, and suggests that we may often be in states that are _indeterminate_, in limbo between the two categories. This indeterminacy explains why the distinction is often hard to draw, and why these states can be revealing about us even without (determinately) being real desires. (shrink)

The folk explanation of self-deception is that one mental subsystem deceives another. Deflationists appeal to motivated irrationality rather than deceptive subsystems to offer nifty accounts of many sorts of self-deception. However, I shall show that deflationists cannot explain the self-deception embedded within (1) impulsive, (2) vacillating, or (3) long-term akrasia. These akratic actions are respectively too short, too variable, or too long for motivated irrationality to do its dirty work. Nor can deflationists explain the self-deception required for motivating oneself to (...) (4) suspend disbelief and lose oneself in fiction, (5) bother to make negligible contributions to very large projects, (6) accomplish daunting tasks by taking them one day at a time, or (7) cope with psychologically traumatic truths. In these four cases, the truth is undeniable, yet agents must also hold contravening false beliefs. Thus, the folk explanation of self-deception is preferable, despite its invocation of deceptive mental subsystems. (shrink)

When engaging with magic, we are moved by seemingly impossible events that contradict what we believe to be possible in the real world. We are surprised, curious, and baffled when we cannot explain how the magic we are witnessing is possible. We generally understand the events to be illusions. But how is it possible to be moved by something we know to be unreal? This problem is related to the paradox of fiction in aesthetics. Here, we introduce the problem in (...) the domain of theatrical magic, discuss possible solutions, and present a tentative account that allows us to accommodate inconsistent, seemingly incompatible beliefs at different representational levels in the viewers’ mind. (shrink)

O objetivo geral desta contribuição é elucidar um dilema envolvido no debate sobre a relação entre o conhecimento teórico-prático e o valor estético da literatura. Para atingir esse objetivo, são analisados os argumentos defendidos por Peter Lamarque contra a redução epistêmica do valor literário. Em primeiro lugar, mostra-se que a defesa do valor cognitivo da literatura não necessariamente implica um compromisso com uma teoria proposicional do valor estético da literatura. Em segundo, que o que determina o valor estético da literatura (...) é a forma específica com que ganha a “batalha pelas ideias”. Portanto, segundo esta interpretação desse dilema, a opacidade narrativa não só não exclui de maneira alguma o nosso conhecimento de mundo, como a forma específica de conhecimento literário que ela constitui é o que explica o valor estético das obras literárias. (shrink)