Katie Tullmann

Problems, Puzzles, and Paradoxes for a Moral Psychology of Fiction
By Katherine Tullmann

Adviser: Dr. Jesse Prinz
The goal of my dissertation is to provide a comprehensive account of our psychological engagements with fiction.  While many aestheticians have written on issues concerning art and ethics, only a few have addressed the ways in which works of fiction offer problems for general accounts of morality, let alone how we go about making moral judgments about fictions in the first place. My dissertation fills that gap. I argue that the first challenge in explaining our interactions with fiction arises from functional and inferential arguments that entail that our mental states about fictional entities are non-genuine. This means that our mental states during our engagements with fiction are different in kind from typical beliefs, emotions, desires, etc. that we have in real-life contexts. I call this position the Distinct Attitude View (DAV). In its place, I propose a common-sense, standard attitude view (SAV): the idea that our psychological interactions with non-real entities can be explained in terms of the intentional content of those states as opposed to a distinct type of mental state. In expanding the SAV, I develop several independent accounts of social cognition, emotions, and moral judgments. I also show how the SAV can dissolve standard problems in the philosophy and psychology of aesthetic experience: the paradox of fiction, the problem of imaginative existence, and the sympathy for the devil phenomenon, amongst others.

The goal of my dissertation is to provide a comprehensive account of our psychological engagements with fiction. While many aestheticians have written on issues concerning art and ethics, only a few have addressed the ways in which works of fiction offer problems for general accounts of morality, let alone how we go about making moral judgments about fictions in the first place. My dissertation fills that gap. I argue that the first challenge in explaining our interactions with fiction arises from functional and inferential arguments that entail that our mental states about fictional entities are non-genuine. This means that our mental states during our engagements with fiction are different in kind from typical beliefs, emotions, desires, etc. that we have in real-life contexts. I call this position the Distinct Attitude View (DAV). In its place, I propose a common-sense, standard attitude view (SAV): the idea that our psychological interactions with non-real entities can be explai...

In 2017, the artist Dana Schutz presented her painting, Open Casket, at the Whitney Biennial. Both the painting and the painter were subsequently subjected to criticism from the art world. A central critique was that Schutz usurped the story of Emmett Till (the subject of Open Casket) and that, as a white woman, she had no right to do so. Much can—and has—been said on the appropriateness of Schutz's painting. In this article, I argue that Open Casket is a site of oppression, an object that both reflects and reinforces dominant racial hierarchies. Specifically, I argue that Open Casket is a case of what Linda Alcoff calls “the problem of speaking for others”: when a member of a privileged social group speaks on the social experiences of an oppressed group, effectively silencing that group. I explore the moral and epistemic implications of Open Casket and related works and provide some reasons to think that socially privileged persons should not depict the experiences of socially ...

Abstract 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 (DAV). 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 (SAV). 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. We take the fictional stance when we recognize that the object of our engagement is fictional. I bolster the fictional stance with a commonsense ontology of fiction, a notion of representational seeing, and an analogy with Arthur Danto’s ‘is’ of artistic identification. I conclude by showing how the fictional stance helps to solve the paradox of fiction: a puzzle concerning the nature of our emotional responses towards fictions.