Discrepant Affects

This chapter addresses a puzzling feature of one’s engagement with certain kinds of fictions. This is the problem of discrepant affects: one sometimes takes pleasure in fictional events that one would deplore in real life; one aligns oneself with or even admires fictional characters whom one would find despicable if encountered in the actual world; and one forms desires for events to occur in fictions that, in actual experience, one would want to prevent. Highlighting certain dimensions of simulative and empathetic processes, this chapter explains such normatively deviant responses as reflecting an appropriate fiction-motivated breakdown in the quarantine separating how one really values things from how one only imagines doing so.

Tragedy and Desire

This chapter addresses the question of normative invariance vis-à-vis the desires people have for fictions, particularly tragic dramas for which one’s desires are often mutually inconsistent. One wants, e.g., for the tragic heroine to thrive and yet also for the story to culminate in her narratively mandated fate. In probing the kinds of rational constraints that may apply to one’s desires, including the apparently contrary desires elicited by tragic drama, this chapter asks whether what we want to happen within a fiction is—or should be—consistent with what we want to happen outside of it.

Defending Discontinuity

This chapter introduces and diagnoses the inadequacy of two prima facie plausible, but ultimately inadequate, arguments for the discontinuity thesis based on framing effects. The chapter then develops and defends a more powerful argument in discontinuity’s favor based on the functions of fictions. The chapter also looks at what turns on the debate between continuity and discontinuity, i.e., what consequences its resolution on the side of discontinuity has for the experimental study of the emotions; the role of responses to works of art as evidence of moral character; and the putatively edifying value of engaging with fictions in educating and refining attitudes about the real world.

Apt Emotions and Normative Continuity

This chapter characterizes a set of parallel assumptions. One, shared by many otherwise different contemporary philosophical treatments of the emotions, is that our affective responses are susceptible to assessments of rationality, fittingness, or some other notion of aptness. The other is that analogous norms of fittingness apply to those emotions directed at what is only fictional, or what is only imagined to be the case. This chapter identifies the relevant concept of emotional aptness that is at play in both kinds of assumptions, and which is at the core of the disagreement between the theses of normative continuity and normative discontinuity. The chapter then develops and assesses arguments in favor of the continuity thesis: the claim that the criteria determining such aptness of responses to contents of artistic representations apply invariantly to responses to analogous states of affairs in real life.

Artistic Functions

Chapter 9 seeks to underwrite an explanation mooted in earlier chapters of the existence of inconsistent affective norms across fictions and real life: the norms that are recognized to govern affective, desire-like, and evaluative engagements with works of art follow from the distinctive functions by which those works are constituted. This functional view of art, articulated in general aesthetic and ontological terms, is defended against both those who assert that works of art have no function (committing to a version of artistic autonomy) and those who would identify a set of particular functions all works of art have qua art. This chapter concludes by showing that that functional view has the resources to explain how ethical considerations can bear an internal relation to the evaluation of fictions in artistic terms.

Epistemology of Fiction and Rational Imagining

Earlier chapters addressed whether the norms governing our emotions are invariant across fictional and real-world contexts. There the question of continuity was asked of an emotion as a whole. Here the focus is on the cognitive bases upon which emotions, and other affective attitudes, depend. Philosophers and psychologists have worked out a substantial picture of the kinds of normative constraints that are constitutive of epistemic rationality when applied to beliefs—what rational criteria govern a person’s formation, maintenance, transitions among, and relinquishing of her beliefs. This chapter asks whether the norms that govern the formation of our truth-apt representations of the real world apply invariantly to analogous (doxastic) imaginative representations of the world of a fiction. In short, is “make-belief” rational in the same sense as belief?

Cognitive Imagining and Literary Fictions

This chapter offers a sketch of the book’s general explanatory framework: a cluster of theories and commitments about mental representation identified as the cognitive theory of the imagination. This chapter shows where that general theory must be modified and supplemented to be employed in the characterization and explanation of the particular kind of imagining constitutive of engagements with works of literature. In particular, this chapter identifies a neglected explanatory significance for theories of the imagination and truth in fiction of attending to fictions from an external standpoint (one that attends to, e.g., its genre, plot, style, and functions).

Evaluative Emotions

This chapter outlines a theory of the emotions intended to accommodate both traditional philosophical conceptions of emotions as cognitively inflected evaluative appraisals and more recent empirical approaches that highlight their subdoxastic dimensions. Here some empirical evidence is introduced to demonstrate that affective mechanisms of the mind and brain process the contents of imaginings in ways that are parallel to how they process the contents of beliefs and other veridical representations. This chapter then shows how the general theory of the emotions oriented toward objects of belief and perception must be modified and supplemented to account for (i) the particular kinds of emotions elicited in the imaginative experiences elicited by works of art; and (ii) certain asymmetries in the conditions under which fiction-directed and real-world-directed emotions are formed.

Introduction

This chapter identifies a general dilemma in descriptive and explanatory claims about the arts. On the one side is the pull of continuity, in which responses to the contents of fictions and other imagined creations are said to be modeled (morally, affectively, epistemically) on responses to ordinary real-world states of affairs. On the other is the pull of discontinuity, in which such engagements are posed as offering potentially sui generis sorts of experiences that resist assimilation or reduction to those encountered in the everyday. This chapter identifies the place of the book’s discontinuity thesis within that general tension, and discusses the thesis’s main rivals: (1) those who argue that our affective states are not the same kind across encounters with fictions and the real world; and (2) those who argue for continuity or invariance of affective states across those contexts.