Debates that revolve around the topic of morality and fiction rarely explicitly treat virtual worlds like, for example, Second Life. The reason for this disregard cannot be that all users of virtual worlds only do the right thing while online—for they sometimes even virtually kill each other. Is it wrong to kill other people in a virtual world? It depends. This essay analyzes on what it depends, why it is that killing people in a virtual world sometimes is wrong, and (...) how different virtual killings are wrong in different ways. I argue that killing people online is wrong if it is an instance of deliberately and non-consensually evoking disagreeable emotions in others. Establishing this conclusion requires substantial conceptual work, as virtual worlds feature new kinds of fictional agency, particular emotional responses to fiction, and unique ways in which the fiction of the virtual world relates to the wrongness of the killing. (shrink)

Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe is the most significant event in Anglo-American aesthetics in many a year, and joins a small pantheon of landmark books such as Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art, Richard Wollheim's Art and Its Objects and Arthur Danto's Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Walton's aim is to provide a comprehensive account of the representational arts—literature, drama, cinema, painting, drawing, sculpture—from both the generative and the receptive points of view. That is to say, he attempts to explain how representations (...) are fashioned, what their representational status consists in, how representations are apprehended and what the experience of them characteristically involves. Inthese aims he is to my mind enormously, if not completely, successful. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue that Radfords real question is not the conceptual one, as it is usually taken, but the causal one, and show that Waltons account, which treats Radfords puzzle as the conceptual question, is not a satisfactory solution to it. I will also argue that contrary to what Walton claims, the causal question is not only important, but also closely related to the conceptual and normative questions. What matters is not that Walton has not solved Radfords (...) puzzle per se, but that he has not recognized the importance of this puzzle. While doing this, I will suggest a revision to the cognitive theory of emotion. (shrink)

A key epistemic puzzle about theatrical performances of fictional narratives has to do with how spectators pick out and recognize the characters they encounter. An adequate solution to the puzzle is constrained by several factors : it should be similar to what we need to say about picking out and recognition of characters in non-fictional narratives ; it should be similar to what we need to say about picking out and recognizing elements in non-narrative performances ; it be it must (...) be sensitive to the fact that most plays do not name or describe their characters ; it must be sensitive to the fact that most spectators have no prior experience or preparation for what they will encounter ; and it must comport with any plausible story we have to tell about the mechanisms we bring to the identification and re-identification of individuals in daily life. In this paper, I review a solution that meets these constraints and, in particular, I show why the proposed solution is likely to be subserved by very basic cognitive mechanisms involved in object perception and recognition in everyday life. I conclude by responding to ontological worries the solution is likely to foster. (shrink)

À partir d’une typologie des formes de connaissance, je soutiens qu’il y a trois formes principales de connaissance littéraire : cognitive propositionnelle, affective et pratique. La conception propositionnelle est erronée : la littérature ne fournit pas directement une forme de savoir que. La conception affective ou expressiviste peut au mieux dire qu’il y a des effets cognitifs des oeuvres littéraires. La conception pratique a le plus de chances d’être correcte, mais seulement si l’on accepte l’idée que le savoir pratique est (...) en partie basé sur le savoir propositionnel. Starting from a typology of kinds of knowledge, I argue that there are three basic conceptions of literary knowledge : cognitive propositional, affective, and practical. The cognitive conception is misguided : literary knowledge cannot be directly a form of knowledge that. The affective or expressivist conception is too weak : it can at best amount to the idea that there are cognitive effects of literary works. The practical conception is the most promising, but only if one accepts that knowing how is partly based on knowing that and propositional knowledge. (shrink)

Carola Barbero | : Je m’intéresse dans cet article aux émotions que nous ressentons lorsque nous lisons une oeuvre de fiction. Certains philosophes pensent que notre implication émotionnelle dans la fiction constitue un paradoxe, et implique soit une forme d’irrationalité, soit la participation à un jeu de « faire semblant ». Ici, je soutiendrai qu’une Théorie de l’Objet à la Meinong, en défendant une approche réaliste des émotions liées la fiction, permet de résoudre adéquatement ce paradoxe de la fiction. | (...) : This essay concerns the emotions that we feel when reading a work of fiction. Some philosophers think that our emotional engagement with fiction gives rise to a paradox and involves either irrationality or participation in a game of make believe. The aim of this work is to show how the paradox of fiction can be dissolved by making use of an Object Theory in a Meinongian style. (shrink)

In this paper, I set out to answer two foundational questions concerning our psychological engagements with fictions. The first is the question of fictional transformation: How we can see fictional media while also ‘seeing’ those objects as fictional ones? The second is the question of fictional response: How and why we take the objects of fiction to be the types of things that we can respond to and judge? Standard responses to these questions rely on distinct cognitive attitudes like pretense, (...) imagination, and make-believe. I call this position the distinct attitude view. I argue against the DAV, arguing instead that a psychological framework of fiction can answer the two questions without appealing to distinct mental attitudes. Hence, I call my position the standard attitude view. The challenge for the SAV is to explain the two questions in terms of everyday mental states and the intentional content of those states. I do so by appealing to the concept of taking the fictional stance.... (shrink)

Emotional responses to fiction are part of our experience with art and media. Some of these responses (“fictional emotions”) seem to be directed towards fictional entities—entities that we believe do not exist. Some philosophers argue that fictional emotions differ in nature from other emotional responses. (cf. Walton in J Philos 75(1):5–27, 1978, Mimesis as make-believe, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1990, Walton, in: Hjort, Laver (ed.) Emotion and the arts, Oxford University, New York, 1997; Currie in The nature of fiction, Cambridge (...) University Press, Cambridge, 1990; Stecker in Br J Aesthet 51(3):295–308, 2011) The claim is supposed to be supported among others by ‘the argument from action.’ In contrast to genuine emotions, proponents of this argument claim, fictional emotions do not motivate their bearers to act. (cf. Yanal in Paradoxes of emotion and fiction, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 1999; Lamarque in Br J Aesthet 21(4):291–304, 1981; Carroll in The philosophy of horror: or, paradoxes of the heart, Routledge, London, 1990; Currie 1990; Walton 1978, 1990; Suits in Pac Philos Q 87(3):369–386, 2006; Friend, in: Kind (ed.) The Routledge handbook of philosophy of imagination, Routledge, New York, 2016) This claim grounds in what may appear to be an obvious fact: that viewers and readers of are not led to act by their fictional emotions. It is certainly true that viewers and readers of fiction do not form intentions to perform actions directed towards fictional entities. In contrast to the proponents of the argument from action, I will argue that the lack of any such intentions can be explained only with reference to intending’s doxastic conditions, conditions that are unsatisfied in the fictional scenario. Decisively, this explanation does not refer to the motivational force of the agent’s emotions; indeed, it doesn’t refer to emotions at all. Thus, the lack of intentions to perform actions directed towards fictional objects provides no support for the claim that fictional emotions are no genuine emotions. (shrink)

Several facets of the “flimsy pretext” archetype “My dog ate my homework” are analysed. We do so by considering textual accounts of events from real life filteredthrough the media, and we resort to formalisms (episodic formulae, Wigmore Charts) to capture some aspects of their gist. We also analyse several gag cartoons,either one-panel or multi-panel, and either as produced by others, or ones authored by this writer for the very purpose of probing into potential uses of the archetype. Sometimes the archetype (...) can even be used other than as standing for a pretext, but this is only possible when the ‘homework’ metaphor is somewhat overstretched, or then when different idioms are hybridized. Other important topics we consider are intertextuality (textual and possibly also visual); observation levels from Negrotti’s naturoid theory; and ALIBI, an automated inventor of pretexts. (shrink)