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  1. The Real Foundation of Fictional Worlds.Stacie Friend - 2017 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (1):29-42.
    I argue that judgments of what is ‘true in a fiction’ presuppose the Reality Assumption: the assumption that everything that is true is fictionally the case, unless excluded by the work. By contrast with the more familiar Reality Principle, the Reality Assumption is not a rule for inferring implied content from what is explicit. Instead, it provides an array of real-world truths that can be used in such inferences. I claim that the Reality Assumption is essential to our ability to (...)
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  2. Fiction as a Genre.Stacie Friend - 2012 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 112 (2pt2):179--209.
    Standard theories define fiction in terms of an invited response of imagining or make-believe. I argue that these theories are not only subject to numerous counterexamples, they also fail to explain why classification matters to our understanding and evaluation of works of fiction as well as non-fiction. I propose instead that we construe fiction and non-fiction as genres: categories whose membership is determined by a cluster of nonessential criteria, and which play a role in the appreciation of particular works. I (...)
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  3. Imagining Fact and Fiction.Stacie Friend - 2008 - In Kathleen Stock & Katherine Thomson-Jones (eds.), New waves in aesthetics. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 150-169.
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  4. Learning Implicit Biases from Fiction.Kris Goffin & Stacie Friend - 2022 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80 (2):129-139.
    Philosophers and psychologists have argued that fiction can ethically educate us: fiction supposedly can make us better people. This view has been contested. It is, however, rarely argued that fiction can morally “corrupt” us. In this article, we focus on the alleged power of fiction to decrease one's prejudices and biases. We argue that if fiction has the power to change prejudices and biases for the better, then it can also have the opposite effect. We further argue that fictions are (...)
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  5. Fictional characters.Stacie Friend - 2007 - Philosophy Compass 2 (2):141–156.
    If there are no fictional characters, how do we explain thought and discourse apparently about them? If there are, what are they like? A growing number of philosophers claim that fictional characters are abstract objects akin to novels or plots. They argue that postulating characters provides the most straightforward explanation of our literary practices as well as a uniform account of discourse and thought about fiction. Anti-realists counter that postulation is neither necessary nor straightforward, and that the invocation of pretense (...)
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  6. Learning from Fiction.Greg Currie, Heather Ferguson, Jacopo Frascaroli, Stacie Friend, Kayleigh Green & Lena Wimmer - 2023 - In Alison James, Akihiro Kubo & Françoise Lavocat (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief. Routledge. pp. 126-138.
    The idea that fictions may educate us is an old one, as is the view that they distort the truth and mislead us. While there is a long tradition of passionate assertion in this debate, systematic arguments are a recent development, and the idea of empirically testing is particularly novel. Our aim in this chapter is to provide clarity about what is at stake in this debate, what the options are, and how empirical work does or might bear on its (...)
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  7. The great beetle debate: A study in imagining with names.Stacie Friend - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 153 (2):183-211.
    Statements about fictional characters, such as “Gregor Samsa has been changed into a beetle,” pose the problem of how we can say something true (or false) using empty names. I propose an original solution to this problem that construes such utterances as reports of the “prescriptions to imagine” generated by works of fiction. In particular, I argue that we should construe these utterances as specifying, not what we are supposed to imagine—the propositional object of the imagining—but how we are supposed (...)
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  8. Notions of nothing.Stacie Friend - 2016 - In Friend Stacie (ed.).
    Book synopsis: New work on a hot topic by an outstanding team of authors At the intersection of several central areas of philosophy It is the linguistic job of singular terms to pick out the objects that we think or talk about. But what about singular terms that seem to fail to designate anything, because the objects they refer to don't exist? We can employ these terms in meaningful thought and talk, which suggests that they are succeeding in fulfilling their (...)
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  9. Fiction and emotion.Stacie Friend - 2016 - In Amy Kind (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Imagination. New York: Routledge. pp. 217-229.
    Engagement with fiction often inspires emotional responses. We may pity Sethe while feeling ambivalent about her actions (in Beloved), fear for Ellen Ripley as she battles monstrous creatures (in Alien), get angry at Okonkwo for killing Ikemefuna (in Things Fall Apart), and hope that Kiyoaki and Satoko find love (in Spring Snow). Familiar as they are, these reactions are puzzling. Why do I respond emotionally if I do not believe that these individuals exist or that the events occurred? If I (...)
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  10. Fictive Utterance And Imagining II.Stacie Friend - 2011 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 85 (1):163-180.
    The currently standard approach to fiction is to define it in terms of imagination. I have argued elsewhere that no conception of imagining is sufficient to distinguish a response appropriate to fiction as opposed to non-fiction. In her contribution Kathleen Stock seeks to refute this objection by providing a more sophisticated account of the kind of propositional imagining prescribed by so-called ‘fictive utterances’. I argue that although Stock's proposal improves on other theories, it too fails to provide an adequate criterion (...)
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  11. Falsehoods in Film: Documentary vs Fiction.Stacie Friend - 2021 - Studies in Documentary Film 15 (2):151-162.
    I claim that we should reject a sharp distinction between fiction and non-fiction according to which documentary is a faithful representation of the facts, whilst fiction films merely invite us to imagine what is made up. Instead, we should think of fiction and non-fiction as genres: categories whose membership is determined by a combination of non-essential features and which influence appreciation in a variety of ways. An objection to this approach is that it renders the distinction too conventional and fragile, (...)
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  12. Elucidating the Truth in Criticism.Stacie Friend - 2017 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 75 (4):387-399.
    Analytic aesthetics has had little to say about academic schools of criticism, such as Freudian, Marxist, feminist, or postcolonial perspectives. Historicists typically view their interpretations as anachronistic; non-historicists assess all interpretations according to formalist criteria. Insofar as these strategies treat these interpretations as on a par, however, they are inadequate. For the theories that ground the interpretations differ in the claims they make about the world. I argue that the interpretations of different critical schools can be evaluated according to the (...)
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  13. The Fictional Character of Scientific Models.Stacie Friend - 2019 - In Arnon Levy & Peter Godfrey-Smith (eds.), The Scientific Imagination. New York, US: Oup Usa. pp. 101-126.
    Many philosophers have drawn parallels between scientific models and fictions. In this paper I will be concerned with a recent version of the analogy, which compares models to the imagined characters of fictional literature. Though versions of the position differ, the shared idea is that modeling essentially involves imagining concrete systems analogously to the way that we imagine characters and events in response to works of fiction. Advocates of this view argue that imagining concrete systems plays an ineliminable role in (...)
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  14. The pleasures of documentary tragedy.Stacie Friend - 2007 - British Journal of Aesthetics 47 (2):184-198.
    Two assumptions are common in discussions of the paradox of tragedy: (1) that tragic pleasure requires that the work be fictional or, if non-fiction, then non-transparently represented; and (2) that tragic pleasure may be provoked by a wide variety of art forms. In opposition to (1) I argue that certain documentaries could produce tragic pleasure. This is not to say that any sad or painful documentary could do so. In considering which documentaries might be plausible candidates, I further argue, against (...)
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  15. Getting Carried Away: Evaluating the Emotional Influence of Fiction Film.Stacie Friend - 2010 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 34 (1):77-105.
    It is widely taken for granted that fictions, including both literature and film,influence our attitudes toward real people, events, and situations. Philosopherswho defend claims about the cognitive value of fiction view this influence in apositive light, while others worry about the potential moral danger of fiction.Marketers hope that visual and aural references to their products in movies willhave an effect on people’s buying patterns. Psychologists study the persuasiveimpact of media. Educational books and films are created in the hopes of guidingchildren’s (...)
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  16. Real People in Unreal Contexts: Or Is There a Spy Among Us?Stacie Friend - 2000 - In Hofweber Everett (ed.), Empty Names, Fiction, and the Puzzles of Non-existence. CSLI Publications. pp. 183-203.
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  17. Reference in Fiction.Stacie Friend - 2019 - Disputatio 11 (54):179-206.
    Most discussions of proper names in fiction concern the names of fictional characters, such as ‘Clarissa Dalloway’ or ‘Lilliput.’ Less attention has been paid to referring names in fiction, such as ‘Napoleon’ (in Tolstoy’s War and Peace) or ‘London’ (in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four). This is because many philosophers simply assume that such names are unproblematic; they refer in the usual way to their ordinary referents. The alternative position, dubbed Exceptionalism by Manuel García-Carpintero, maintains that referring names make a distinctive semantic (...)
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  18. How I Really Feel About JFK.Stacie Friend - 2003 - In Matthew Kieran & Dominic Lopes (eds.), Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts. New York: Routledge. pp. 35-53.
    The most well-known and controversial solution to the paradox of fiction is Kendall Walton’s, according to whom pity of (say) Anna Karenina is not genuine pity. Walton’s opponents argue that we can resolve the paradox of fiction while preserving the intuition that our response to Anna is ordinary, run-of-the-mill pity; and they claim that retaining this intuition explains more than Walton’s approach. In my view, the arguments of Walton’s opponents depend on idiosyncratic features of examples involving purely fictional characters like (...)
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  19. Hermeneutic moral fictionalism as an anti-realist strategy.Stacie Friend - 2008 - Philosophical Books 49 (1):14-22.
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  20. Narrating the Truth (More or Less).Stacie Friend - 2006 - In Matthew Kieran & Dominic McIver Lopes (eds.), Knowing Art: Essays in Aesthetics and Epistemology. pp. 35-50.
    While aestheticians have devoted substantial attention to the possibility of acquiring knowledge from fiction, little of this attention has been directed at the acquisition of factual information. The neglect traces, I believe, to the assumption that the task of aesthetics is to explain the special cognitive value of fiction. While the value of many works of nonfiction may be measured, in part, by their ability to transmit information, most works of fiction do not have this aim, and so many conclude (...)
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  21. Fictionality in Imagined Worlds.Stacie Friend - 2021 - In Sonia Sedivy (ed.), Art, Representation, and Make-Believe: Essays on the Philosophy of Kendall L. Walton. New York: Routledge. pp. 25-40.
    What does it mean for a proposition to be "true in a fiction"? According to the account offered by Kendall Walton in Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990), what is fictionally true, or simply fictional, is what a work of fiction invites or prescribes that we imagine. To say that it is fictional that Okonkwo kills Ikemefuna in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, for example, is to say that we are supposed to imagine that event. Yet Walton gives no account of the (...)
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  22. Judgements of Co-Identification.Stacie Friend - forthcoming - In Alex Grzankowski & Anthony Savile (eds.), Thought: its Origin and Reach. Essays in Honour of Mark Sainsbury. Routledge.
    A popular way for irrealists to explain co-identification—thinking and talking ‘about the same thing’ when there is no such thing—is by appeal to causal, historical or informational chains, networks or practices. Recently, however, this approach has come under attack by philosophers who contend that it cannot provide necessary and/or sufficient conditions for co-identification. In this paper I defend the approach against these objections. My claim is not that the appeal to such practices can provide necessary and sufficient conditions for co-identification, (...)
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  23. Real Portraits in Literature.Stacie Friend - 2019 - In Hans Maes (ed.), Portraits and Philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 213-228.
    Many works of fiction include portraits in their storyworlds. Some of these portraits are themselves fictional, such as the portrait of Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde's novel. Others are real, such as the Darnley portrait of Elizabeth I in A. S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden. When authors invent portraits, they expect us to visualise them. When they refer to real portraits, they exploit our familiarity with how they actually look. Like representations of other real entities in fiction, references (...)
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  24. Collaboration in the Third Culture.Stacie Friend - 2018 - Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 12 (2):39-49.
    In Film, Art and the Third Culture, Murray Smith articulates and defends a naturalized aesthetics of film that exemplifies a “third culture,” integrating the insights and methods of the natural sciences with those of the arts and humanities. By contrast with skeptics who reject the relevance of psychology or neuroscience to the study of film and art, I agree with Smith that we should embrace the third-cultural project. However, I argue that Smith does not go far enough in in developing (...)
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  25. Disagreement and deference: Is diversity of opinion a precondition for thought?Stacie Friend & Peter Ludlow - 2003 - Philosophical Perspectives 17 (1):115–139.
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