Here I review the first five essays in Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts, which was edited by Matthew Kieran and Dominic McIver Lopes, and published in 2003. Ah, 2003! I was living in New York City, studying philosophy, and sort of wallowing in loneliness.
1. “Reasons, Emotions, and Fictions,” by Berys Gaut.
Charles is watching a horror movie, and the attacking slime turns menacingly toward him, and his heart races, and his eyes dilate, and his grip on the armrest tightens. Is he afraid of the slime? Colin is reading Anna Karenina, and he learns of Anna’s tragic fate, and his eyes well up; does he pity her? These are famous examples, and around them are drawn the battle lines of the Paradox of Fiction: “realists” say yes, things here are as they seem, while “irrealists” say no, Charles is merely imagining he is afraid of the slime, and Colin is merely imagining he pities Anna. Gaut, answering the realist call for a champion, saunters onto the field.
In his first pass Gaut asserts that irrealism has an “evident disadvantage” over realism, namely “its far greater complexity”:
whereas the realist holds simply that Charlies is afraid of the Green Slime, the irrealist holds that he is in the complex state described above....if there is a simpler account available...we ought on general heuristic grounds to adopt that.
I cannot see, however, that the (irrealist) hypothesis that Charles is imagining he is afraid is very much more complicated than the (realist) hypothesis that Charlies is (actually) afraid.
Focusing on Charles, the best argument for irrealism is that being afraid of something requires believing that it poses a danger to you. If I’m afraid of that angrily-barking dog over there, I must believe that it poses a danger to me. But Charles does not believe he is in any danger, certainly not from any slime. Irrealism in general follows if what goes here for fear goes for other emotions: each requires some corresponding beliefs, which are absent when we engage with fiction.
Gaut answers (as many do in this literature) by alleging examples of emotion-without-belief. Here are two:
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