The paradox of fiction: a defense

1.

It is Act III of Romeo and Juliet, and Tybalt is hunting Romeo. Tybald finds him and demands that Romeo “turn and draw,” but Romeo refuses—always a lover not a fighter, he has also just married Juliet, Tybalt’s cousin—so Mercutio answers the challenge. Swords are drawn, Tybalt stabs Mercutio, and Mercutio says those famous last words: “A plague on both your houses! ... Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.”

Watching this from the third row is your friend Smith, and he has tears streaming down his face. He sobs and whispers to himself, “poor Mercutio!” What’s going on? Why the tears, why the sobbing? It seems obvious:

A. Smith is sad that Mercutio has died.

But wait: sadness, like many emotions, has a belief as a component. You cannot be sad that such-and-such, without believing that such-and-such. If a friend tells you that his mother has lost several fingers in a car accident, and you believe him, and you become sad that she lost some fingers, then it is no coincidence that your sadness coincides with that belief: the sadness depends on the belief and could not exist without it. If, a second later, the doctors told your friend that the earlier report was wrong and that his mother’s fingers were fine, you would stop believing that she has been maimed—and then immediately also stop being sad that she has been maimed. In Smith’s case, this belief condition on sadness means that:

B. If Smith is sad that Mercutio has died, then Smith believes that Mercutio has died.

But Smith is watching a play. He knows that neither Mercutio nor Romeo nor Tybalt is a real person. He knows that the actor playing Mercutio is just pretending to be wounded. So

C. Smith does not believe that Mercutio has died.

With each of (A), (B), and (C), there are good reasons for thinking it is true; but they cannot all be true. It is impossible to be sad that Mercutio died, if being sad about that requires believing that Mercutio died, and you lack that belief. This is one instance of the paradox of fiction.

There are plenty of other instances, differing over which (part of a) story, and which emotion, is in question, but the basic structure is always the same: reading a story or watching a film, someone appears to feel a certain emotion; that emotion requires a certain belief; but that person lacks that belief. A reader of Pride and Prejudice might say they admire Mr Darcy for his nobility, but surely if you admire him for this, you believe he is noble, and no one believes that Mr Darcy even exists. Watching Alien, one might fear that the alien will kill Ripley, but surely if you fear this, you believe that Ripley is in danger of being killed by the alien, and no one believes that Ripley or the alien even exist. Solving any one version of the paradox of fiction means saying which of its three component statements is false, and why we were duped into thinking it is true; solving the paradox itself means giving a general strategy for solving any version.

2.

The really great paradoxes are deep and hard to solve; they tend to be very old, and the solutions to them tend to invoke complex ideas. The liar paradox consists of a trio of statements about the sentence “This sentence is false”: (i) if the sentence is false, it is true; (ii) if it’s true, it’s false; but (iii) it is either true or false and is not both. Philosophers have been working on this paradox since around 400 BC, and a 2008 book about it was 400 pages long and had a section titled “More on the never-collapsing hierarchy of determinacy operators.”

The paradox of fiction, by contrast, is usually dated to 1975, and the key papers credited with bringing it into the world have been accused of not actually discuss it at all. Some think that the paradox deserves to be as forgotten as “Love Will Keep Us Together,” 1975’s biggest selling single in America (it also topped the Easy Listening chart). There are, these people agree, hard and interesting philosophical questions about our emotional responses to fiction, but “what is the solution to the paradox of fiction?” is not one of them.

Why this hostility to admitting the paradox of fiction to the pantheon of paradoxes?  A good paradox consists of a collection of statements all of which seem true—each has strong reasons supporting it—which cannot all be true. But in the “paradox” of fiction, the standard complaint goes, statement (B) is quite obviously false. Sadness does not require belief, and in general feeling some given emotion does not require a certain kind of belief, and anyone can confirm this with just a few minutes’ thought.

3.

Maybe in the end we should accept that statement (B) is false, but this is not so obvious that the paradox of fiction does not deserve the name. The case that (B) is obviously false is, as far as I can tell, quite thin. Here is the kind of thing people say (this quote is aimed at a version of the paradox that focuses on fear, and a belief requirement on fear, rather than on sadness):