Taking the Fictional Stance

Taking the Fictional Stance 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. I. Two foundational questions of fictions Imagine watching a local performance of Much Ado About Nothing. You see actors playing Benedict, Beatrice, Claudio, and Hero, the scaffolding representing an Italian villa, and papier-mâché rocks and trees portraying the country landscape. Whether in a bustling theater or lounging on a park lawn, what we see on a stage is nothing more than this: scaffolding, papier-mâché, fake wooden tables and chairs, and actors. But it also seems like we “see” something more than the mere stuff on a stage: the fictional world of the play (Figure 1). There is a sense in which the second type of seeing is perceptual; I see Benedict and Beatrice. How is this possible, if physically, there are only actors on the stage, and not fictional entities? I contend that “fictional seeing” of this sort involves a kind of transformation (see also Matravers 2014 and Walton 1990). Of course, we cannot physically transform a papier-mâché tree into a fictional one. The transformation must occur mentally. There is much debate concerning the type of mental activity is involved in an audience’s capacity to see physical materials as the fictional entities they represent. It requires the capacity for object recognition: we recognize the objects on a stage, screen, or painting as people, tables, trees, etc. But the capacity to see things as objects is not enough for us to see the actors on a stage as the fictional entities, Benedict and Beatrice. For what we seem to see does not actually, currently exist. How is this transformation possible? Call this the question of fictional transformation. Figure 1. The Shakespeare Theatre Company's recent production of Much Ado About Nothing. Another issue arises here. We generally know that the object of our engagement isn’t real. How, then, do we take the objects of fiction as the types of things that we can respond to and judge—emotionally, morally, and otherwise? In other words, why is it that we have mental attitudes towards the objects we encounter in fiction? Call this the question of fictional response. Together, these two questions capture the foundational characteristics of our psychological interactions with fiction: how we understand objects as fictional objects, and why we respond to them as we do. Ideally, we can develop answers to both the question of fictional transformation and the question of fictional response with one theoretical framework, as other philosophers have attempted (see, for instance, Currie 1990 and Walton 1990). My goal in this paper is to do just that. Let’s begin by considering several possible answers to the two questions. First, it may be that we pretend that the objects we perceive onstage are fictional characters, places, and things (see Searle 1975 & Kripke 2013). Our mental states about fictional entities are pretend mental states; we pretend to believe that Benedict secretly loves Beatrice, but we do not actually believe this. Likewise, we pretend that we see Benedict and Beatrice, but we know that we don’t actually do so. Second, we may just imagine that we see fictional objects before us; we imagine that something is the case when, in fact, it is not (see Weinberg & Meskin 2006; see Van Leeuwen 2013 for more on different types of imagining). Finally, theories of make-believe involve both pretense and imagining. According to these theories, we make-believe that the objects on stage are actual in a fictional world (see Currie 1990 & Walton 1990). Simulation theorists also appeal to unique mental states, both for real-life and fictional interactions. See Currie & Ravenscroft 2002, Freedberg & Gallese 2007, Goldman 2006, Harris 2000, and Nichols 2004. See also Schroeder & Matheson 2006 and Weinberg & Meskin 2006 for more on the imagination position. See Sainsbury 2010 and Thomasson 1999 for a critique of pretense theories. Theories of imagination and make-believe both posit that we have imaginary mental states about fictional stories (e.g. we have an imaginary belief that Benedict loves Beatrice). Pretense theories, imaginative theories, and theories of make-believe each posit that we utilize mental states during our engagements with fiction that are different in kind from those used during our everyday interactions with people and things. These theorists also generally hold that pretense, imagination, etc. are a part of other capacities as well, such as pretend play and hypothetical thinking. I will focus here on our interactions with fictions, although many of my arguments will transcend to these other areas as well. In each case, we have pretend or imaginary beliefs, emotions, etc. that have similar input, output, and processing mechanism as typical beliefs and emotions, but are not the same type of psychological state. These distinct attitudes allow us to mentally transform the actual objects we encounter into fictional ones. They also explain how we can mentally respond to fictional entities that we know are not real. I call this general position the distinct attitude view (DAV; from Schroeder and Matheson’s “Distinct Cognitive Attitude View”, Schroeder & Matheson 2006). Our emotions, beliefs, judgments, and desires about fictional objects can be easily explained insofar as we pretend (etc.) that these are the types of objects that we can respond to. We have pretend mental responses to fictional entities. The implication, however, is that these mental states are not the same as our regular mental states, but rather are pretend, make-believe, or imaginary ones. The DAV has become the dominant psychological framework in the aesthetics literature; Derek Matravers calls it “the consensus view” (Matravers 2014; see also Schroeder & Matheson 2006). Indeed, is so often assumed that either pretense, make-believe, or imagination is involved in our engagements of fiction that the position is often simply taken for granted. I want to challenge this theoretical complacency. I have argued extensively elsewhere against the DAV. See chapters 1 and 3 of my dissertation, “Puzzles, Problems, and Paradoxes for a Moral Psychology of Fiction” (Tullmann, in prep). For my current purposes, it is enough to list several worries that accompany these theories. One concern with the DAV is that many accounts build their theory on a flawed notion of the nature of the mental states in question, and particularly of emotions. Once we have a clear grasp on the functional role and ontology of mental states then it is unlikely that we will find a distinct attitude warranted to begin with. Furthermore, one can argue from a principle of parsimony that there is no need to posit distinct mental attitudes if ordinary ones have the same explanatory power. I will attempt to show that we simply do not need to posit a DAV to answer the two foundational questions of fiction. Finally, the DAV cannot account for our phenomenological—that is, conscious, possibly introspectable—experiences with fictions. Our emotions, beliefs, desires, and other mental states towards fictions feel natural and relatively automatic, not like we are playing a game of make-believe, simulating, or even imagining a possible course of action. In fact, our mental states about fictions often do not seem any different than those about actual things. Because of worries like these, I argue that the answers to the questions of fictional transformation and response are compatible with a standard attitude view (SAV). This is the idea that the mental state types involved in our interactions with fiction are not unique to those contexts, but rather are of the same type as those in ordinary, real-life contexts. We have standard beliefs, emotions, desires, etc. about fictional entities and states of affairs. Rather than positing unique mental states for our interactions with fictions, I will argue that we can explain the two questions in terms of a difference in the intentional objects of our mental states (i.e. fictional objects vs. real-life ones). The SAV can take many forms. In what follows, I will develop my own version: the fictional stance. See also Wolterstorff (1980) and Lamarque and Olsen (1994) on the ‘fictive stance.’ These theories have in common the idea that engaging with fictions is primarily a matter of how we come to recognize the material with which we are engaged as fictional, though they differ in most other respects (including their adherence to the DAV). In brief, we take the fictional stance when we recognize that the object of our engagement is fictional. Doing so allows us to see representations of fictional entities as fictional entities. We do not pretend or imagine that Benedict is on the stage before us; we (in some sense) see and think of him there. Taking the fictional stance also means that we treat fictional objects as the kinds of things that are appropriate objects of our mental engagement. By taking the fictional stance, we see the fictional objects as the real objects that they represent, objects that we would normally pity, care and desire for, feel with, and judge. The fictional stance does not count as an instance of the DAV. Rather than explaining our behavioral and attitudinal responses towards fictions in terms of distinct mental state types, I explain them in terms of a particular kind of intentional content. In other words, we utilize the same types of mental states and mechanisms during our engagements with fictions that we do in our everyday lives, but these mental states are about fictional objects. The following sections flesh out the fictional stance as an alternative to the DAV. The arguments in each section are cumulative, building off each other until we garner a complete picture of our psychological engagements with fictions. The full explanation of the fictional stance will not be complete until §III. The central tenets are as follows: We know that the representation meets three conditions for being a fiction: is non-actual, is created, and depends on particular objects and people in order to persist. We can recognize representations as of or about particular kinds of objects. We recognize these represented objects as being fictional objects. I will argue for each of these points in §II, thus establishing the foundation for the fictional stance. This comes in the form of a commonsense ontology of fiction, an account of representational seeing, and a variation on Arthur Danto’s concept of the ‘is’ of artistic identification (Danto 1964). None of these positions can answer the two foundational questions on its own. Nevertheless, together they form the foundation for the fictional stance which, I argue, can both answer the two questions and serve as a general framework for a psychology of fiction. In §III, I will lay out the fictional stance and show how it answers the questions of fictional transformation and response. §IV applies the fictional stance to a ubiquitous puzzle in the contemporary aesthetics literature: the paradox of fiction. The paradox concerns the nature of our emotional responses towards fictional entities, objects that we do not believe to actually exist. I will argue that the fictional stance approach handles this paradox better than the DAV. I conclude with a brief comment on the explanatory power of the fictional stance. II. Foundations of the fictional stance We spend a great deal of our lives engaging with fictions: films, novels, TV shows, etc. So it is important to develop an account of these engagements that appeals to commonsense ideas and mental capacities. The fictional stance provides just that. Each of the following three concepts may seem like a special skill or type of knowledge. However, I argue that they capture aspects of our experiences with fictions that are easily understood in terms of standard cognitive capacities. Works of fiction It is well beyond the scope of this paper to present a fully articulated ontology of fiction. Nevertheless, it will be important in what follows to understand what we mean by a work of fiction as opposed to nonfiction. There are three ways (at least) to distinguish between fiction and nonfiction. First, the objects of our engagement are not actual. By this, I mean that we do not engage with a concrete object that we can encounter in our spatio-temporal world. This condition leaves open the possibility that fictional entities are abstract artifacts (Kripke 2013, Thomasson 1999, Schiffer 1996, Salmon 1996), possible objects (Lewis 1978, Plantinga 1974), definite descriptions (Russell 1905; see also Quine 1953), or even eternally existing abstracta (Priest 1997; see also Meinong 1904/1981). It also leaves open the possibility that fictional entities could exist or existed in the past. Second, fictional entities, as well as the fictional world in which they are found, have been created by an actual person or group of people (author, playwright, filmmaker(s), etc.)—or, at least have been called into being by some person or persons. I think that the more commonsensical claim is that fictional entities (or representations or descriptions of them) are created by an author (etc.), but at this point I will grant that fictional entities may be eternally persisting abstracta for the sake of theoretical neutrality (i.e. fictional entities may be denizens of a Platonic heaven that authors draw upon but do not, strictly speaking, create; see Wolterstorff 1980; Meinong 1904/1981). The two previous conditions are implicit in how we treat and talk about fictional entities. If asked, I think that audiences would readily grant them. There is also an implication of the first two conditions that is worth stressing. Fictions have dependence conditions. They depend on other things in order to exist (or, if not exist, then in order to be represented). Fictional entities depend on creators in order to come into existence. They also depend on particular media in order to persist, to continue in existence. Represented objects in a painting depend on that painting in order to persist. Film characters depend on tokens of the film, literary characters on tokens of novels, dramatic characters on tokens of plays. A fiction’s persistence also depends on everyday people. If every token of Hamlet was destroyed Fahrenheit 451-style, and every person who knew about Hamlet passed away or had their memory erased, then, arguably, the character Hamlet would cease to exist (again, barring the idea that fictional entities are Platonic abstracta). We think of fictions as depending on particular media and people. In contrast, nonfictions are about actual events and entities (either present or past). The subjects of nonfictions are not created by an author, filmmaker, etc. even if the representation of them are. Furthermore, the subjects of non-fiction do not depend on a particular medium, creator, or audience in order to persist. I argue that we distinguish between fiction and nonfiction in these three ways. Indeed, it is part of our experience of fiction that we understand the object of our engagement to meet these conditions. We are either engaged with a fictional medium, creating one, or recollecting a previous engagement with one. Three questions immediately arise. First, a reader (or viewer) may mistake a fictional representation for a non-fiction. Second, a reader may not know whether a representation is fictional or non-fictional. Finally, it is unclear how the three conditions can deal with fictions that contain actual people, places, or events, such as Napoleon Bonaparte or London, England. I think that the fictional stance can handle these concerns quite easily; unfortunately, I do not have the space to discuss these epistemic and ontological implications of the fictional stance. See Tullmann 2015 for a detailed treatment of these questions. The first feature of taking the fictional stance involves recognizing that the representation with which we are engaged is a fictional one. We must know that we are engaged with a fiction before taking the fictional stance. This does not mean that we must always consciously keep in mind that the objects with which we are engaged are fictional; the point is that this knowledge is consciously accessible. Indeed, as we will see, this knowledge permeates and influences the judgments and emotional responses that we have towards fictional entities. Seeing fictional objects In the opening of this chapter, I claimed that there is a sense in which audiences “see” the fictional characters Benedict and Beatrice during a stage performance of Much Ado. The question of fictional transformation presents us with the challenge of explaining how this is possible, if all we actually perceive are actors on a stage. A further question concerns the difference between seeing a fictional character and imagining seeing that character, or even merely seeing a representation of a character. I maintain that there is a sense in which we literally see fictional entities in visual fictions (film, plays, opera, TV shows, video games, even some paintings and photographs). In the case of nonvisual fictions, we can be said to hear fictional entities (i.e. listening to an audiobook or radio story) or think about fictional entities (as in literary fictions). I will focus on visual fictions for now and return to literary works and auditory fictions in the following subsection. Consider William Blake’s illustration of Milton’s Paradise Lost: Satan Watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve (Figure 3.2). Imagine that a friend turns to you, asking: “What do you see when you look at this painting?” Setting aside any metaphorical interpretations of this question, there are still several ways you could answer. First, you see brushstrokes on a canvas. Even more reductively, you perceive splashes of color, fine lines, and a variety of shapes. Both of these answers are true, but they do not really answer your friend’s question. You may respond by saying: “I see objects: two entwined figures, another flying above with a snake wrapped around him.” This is also a correct answer. Finally, there is a natural sense in which you can respond that you see Satan—you perceive the Prince of Darkness flying over Paradise, looking longingly down on Adam and Eve. Figure 2. William Blake, Satan Watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve (1808). I understand each of the above responses as characterizing different senses of ‘seeing.’ First, there is strictly perceptual seeing. Second, we see objects. Third, there is identification of that object as being a particular thing, or kind of thing. We can straightforwardly refer to the first sense as perceptual. Call the second object seeing. I will refer to the third as recognitional seeing. I will also discuss seeing a representation as an object. Here, ‘seeing as’ can require either the object seeing, recognitional seeing, or both. I will try to make this clear in what follows. The question is, which senses of ‘seeing’ explains our interactions with visual fictions? Let’s examine the three types of seeing in further detail. Recalling my discussion of the perception of fictional entities from the previous chapter, we might ask ourselves what it is that we ever perceive, in real-life or fictional contexts. Philosophers of perception have extensively debated this point. According to many theorists, we only perceive very basic kinds of properties, such as shapes, colors, depth, motion, location, and illumination (e.g. Clark 2000, Brogaard 2013, Dretske 1995,Tye 1995; see Siegel 2010 for an overview). On this view, we do not perceive objects, but rather just the surface of objects (Clark 2000). Low level properties result from retinal stimulation. All other visual properties, including objecthood or object-type, are the result of later cognitive processing (thoughts and judgments) of this basic sensory information (O’Shaughnessy 2000). Our perception of Blake’s painting only includes lines, basic shapes, and shades of green, tan, and red. Further judgments and inferences are required to see the representation as Satan. In contrast, other theorists hold that we do, in fact, perceive properties beyond color, shape, etc. (e.g. Bayne 2009, Peacocke 1992, Siewert 1998, Siegel 2006). We can perceive objects and higher-level natural and/or artificial kind properties (e.g. dog or chair, respectively), causal properties (e.g. seeing A cause B), and emotional properties (e.g. being scary). In this case, we may see Blake’s painting as representing certain objects (people, snake, etc.) and not merely shapes, lines, or colors. We can be neutral concerning the content of visual perception. In fact, it is an open question whether object seeing is perceptual as opposed to a cognitive judgment. In our terms, recognitional seeing may go beyond mere object seeing. Recognitional seeing requires further cognitive processing, including a judgment that the perceived object is of a particular kind. Our capacity to recognize part of the Blake’s painting as the Angel of Light involves a mixture of perceptual and cognitive processes, such as judging or inferring that the figure at the top of the painting is Satan. The knowledge that the object of our perception is a fictional representation plays a role here; contextual information, including the title of the painting and a basic familiarity of Paradise Lost, clues us in to the fact that we see Satan, as opposed to some random figure. Once we break down our experience of Blake’s painting in terms of the above capacities, it seems plausible that we see Satan. Seeing a representation as an object utilizes the same perceptual and cognitive capacities as seeing objects in our everyday lives. I must perceive and judge that an object is our neighbor’s dog. Seeing an object as being a particular kind requires that we perceive it its properties and perhaps also judge it to be of that kind. There is nothing perceptually unusual about seeing a representation as Satan. In the fictional case, I do not merely see a representation of Satan; I see the representation as Satan. So there is a sense in which we see an object before us when we perceive its representation. The upshot of seeing fictional entities—as opposed to imaginatively seeing them or merely seeing a representation of them—is that it can explain the immediacy of our visual experience. We do not pretend to, make-believe, or imagine that we see Satan; we do see Satan! That is not to say that we do not also see the representation as well; again, we perceive brushstrokes, lines, colors, shapes, etc., as well as the painting’s canvas, frame, and wall surrounding it. See also the Ernst Gombrich’s discussion of ‘seeing as’ (Gombrich 1960) and Richard Wollheim’s ‘seeing-in’ (1980). See also Dominic Lopes (2005) for a discussion of representational seeing. Nelson Goodman (1976) also discusses these issues, and critiques Gombrich’s position. We never forget that the object we encounter is a representation; we are not deluded into believing that the object of our engagement is real. This will allow us to act in certain ways towards the fictional object, but not others. The task of this subsection is to show that there is a way in which we can be said to see fictional entities and, further, that seeing fictional entities does not require imagination, pretense, or make-believe. Instead, our capacity to see a fictional entity be entirely explained in terms of standard perceptual and cognitive processes. I grant that this is not the same as perceiving an actual, physically present object (see Carroll 2008, Lopes 2010, Matthen 2005, and Tullmann 2015 for a discussion of these differences). Our seeing a representation as an object lacks many of the qualities that actual seeing possesses. However, object-seeing/seeing as is an important part of normal perceptual processing, both in this case and in real life. This is also not to say that we never use our imagination while engaged with visual fictions; surely we do in many cases. The point is that neither imagination, make-believe, nor pretense need not play a necessary role in how we see fictional characters. The ‘is’ of artistic identification In his seminal article, “The Artworld,” Danto asks us to imagine the artistic neophyte Testadura, who encounters Rauschenberg’s Bed for the first time (Danto 1964). Testadura doesn’t quite know what to do with the piece. It’s actually a bed, after all, even if it is an odd one. Should he sleep on it? Why would a bed be in an art gallery? Why does it have splotches all over the comforter, and why is it so oddly shaped? Testadura looks at Bed and all he discerns is a bed, not an artwork. However, as Danto points out, that’s really all there is (ibid, 575). Nevertheless, Testadura has gotten something wrong. Danto contends that understanding just how he went wrong is greatly important for understanding what makes an object an artwork, when the artwork is (physically) nothing but the object. Danto introduces Testadura’s response to Rauschenberg’s Bed in order to motivate his art historical/theoretical view of the nature of art. To recognize that Bed is an artwork, and not a mere bed, we need “something the eye cannot decry—an atmosphere of artistic history, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld” (ibid, 580). To recognize Bed as more than the bed that it is, Testadura needs knowledge of the artworld: art theory, history, artistic intention, the works role in the current art scene, etc. I am interested in Testadura for a slightly different reason. There is an interesting similarity between Danto’s ‘is’ and my notion of seeing represented objects. As Danto points out, we may see a blob of paint as well as see that blob of paint as a person. While watching a film, we see colored, seemingly moving images and see them as people—fictional people. Most interestingly, at a play we see a real person and, somehow, also see that person as a fictional character. How do we do this? The first step is to perceive the object before us. We then see the representation as representing objects (this may involve purely perceptual or a mixture of perceptual and cognitive capacities). But this cannot be the whole story. We need to understand how we see the figure in a painting, the person in a film, and the person on stage not only as objects, but as of fictional objects. This is not, strictly speaking, a perceptual capacity. We do not perceive properties like “being fictional,” even on theories of perceptual content that grant that we can perceive some higher-level properties. Nevertheless, we do see fictional entities. The ‘seeing’ here is more like what I have been calling recognitional seeing, involving a judgment about the particular object that we see. Part of this involves judging that the object is fictional; that is, that it meets the three conditions I posited in §3.1. Figure 3. Pieter Brueghel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c. 1590-95). Let’s further draw out the analogy between seeing fictional objects and the ‘is’ of artistic identification. Imagine standing in front of Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (Figure 3). You scan the painting for the doomed young man. He isn’t easy to find. You finally spot him and, pointing to the painting, you proclaim: “That white dab of paint is Icarus.” Danto notes that this “is” needs explaining: There is an is that figures prominently in statements concerning artworks which is not the is of either identity or predication; nor is it the is of existence, of identification, or some special is made up to serve a philosophic end. Nevertheless, it is in common usage, and is readily mastered by children. It is the sense of is in accordance with which a child, shown a circle and a triangle and asked which is him and which his sister, will point to the triangle saying "That is me"; or, in response to my question, the person next to me points to the man in purple and says "That one is Lear" (ibid, 576). Danto calls this the “is of artistic identification.” Mastering the ‘is’ of artistic identification is required for us to understand that Rauschenberg’s Bed is not merely a bed, that Warhol’s Brillo Box is not merely a Brillo box, and that Duchamp’s Fountain is not merely a urinal. It allows us to understand that these are artworks. In fact, recognizing any artwork as not merely the physical stuff of which it is composed, but also as an artwork requires that we master the ‘is’ of artistic identification. Danto argues that the ‘is’ of artistic identification is essentially the ‘is’ of metaphor, not of predication or identity (Danto 1981). When we hear that “Juliet is the sun” or “All the world is a stage,” the special use of is in each cases invites the audience to consider the subject of the sentence as something else. Likewise, recognizing that an object is also an art object “transfigures” the object into a new, glorified status: an artwork. We now consider the object in a new way. Danto’s ‘is’ has garnered a fair amount of critique. For instance, it is unclear that recognizing an object as an artwork does, in fact, require application of a metaphor. I want to be neutral here, especially since I think that Danto’s suggestion depends on a theory of metaphor, a determination of which is beyond the scope of the current discussion. Luckily, I think that we can distance ourselves from this debate for our present purposes. I understand the ‘is’ of artistic identification in terms of representation rather than metaphor. When I say “that is Icarus” or “that one is me” I mean that Icarus is represented there, by that white dab of paint, or that the stick drawing represents me. In each case, some transfigurative process occurs; I now consider the object in a way I didn’t before. The same basic idea applies to Rauschenberg’s Bed. What I once thought of as merely a (physical) bed, I now know to be an artwork. I understand now that the object represent certain artistic ideas or intentions. I want to make the case that the ‘is’ of artistic identification is a special application of seeing represented objects. Awareness of a representation as a fictional representation requires knowledge of a particular kind. According to Danto, to think of an artwork as an artwork will in each case require that the audience master the ‘is’ of artistic identification. I want to make a similar claim about how we see objects in artworks as fictional entities and, likewise, we see representations as representations of fictional things. During every encounter with fiction we perceive whatever physically comprises the fictional representation (film, paint, physical person, or even words on a page). We also see the representation as presenting objects. Finally, applying our knowledge that the work is fictional, we recognize that the objects we see are fictional. My proclamation that “That white dab of paint is Icarus” not only points out where the subject is located in the painting, but also implies that I see and understand Icarus as a part of the representation (as a part of its fictional world, if you will). When watching a production of Much Ado, I may point to a brown-haired actress on stage and tell my companion, “That one is Beatrice.” Statements like this indicate that I have mastered a special kind of ‘is.’ Following Danto, let’s call this the ‘is’ of fictional transformation. I see the represented object as a fictional entity. I judge that the representation before me is fictional. This allows me to think and speak about the represented objects in terms of their being fictional. We can posit an implicit fictional operator in our speech acts about fictions. When I say “I believe that Demetrius treated Helena very poorly” after watching A Midsummer’s Night Dream, I mean “I believe that Demetrius treated Helena very poorly [in the fiction]” (see Kripke 2013 and Thomasson 1999). The same holds for our mental attitudes; the fictional operator is implicit in our beliefs, thoughts, and desires about fictional entities (see also Matravers 1991 & 2014, Neill 1993). So I may believe “that Beatrice secretly loves Benedict [in the fictional world].” The recognition that the object of our mental attitudes is fictional forms the backdrop against which these attitudes are formed. The ‘is’ of fictional transformation doesn’t only apply to visual representations. It also explains how we interact with non-visual fictions, like literature. Unlike paintings, films, or photographs, you cannot point to anything in a novel and proclaim “There is Elizabeth Bennett.” We would never mistake a word on a page for a fictional character. However, we still need to recognize that the object of our engagement is a fictional representation in order to get our literary experience off the ground. One needs to recognize that the words on a page are designed to be taken up and considered as a fiction. This requires utilizing the ‘is’ of fictional transformation; we perceive the words on a page and also recognize that those words represent fictional objects that we can directly think about and respond to. This causes us to treat the statements found in the literary work as representing a fictional story. III. The fictional stance The three concepts we have discussed so far—the ontology of fiction, seeing represented objects, and the ‘is’ of fictional transformation—form the backbone of the fictional stance. I offer the fictional stance as a general account of our psychological interactions with fictions, including how we understand objects as fictional and how we come to mentally respond to them. By taking the fictional stance, we recognize a work as fictional. This recognition shapes our mental states and allows us to understand and interpret the story. It also allows us to have beliefs, desires, and emotions towards fictional objects even while we know that those objects are not real. We know that the objects of fiction are not actual denizens of our world, but we think of and respond to them in similar ways notwithstanding. In sum, by taking the fictional stance we recognize, both perceptually and cognitively, that a representation is fictional. This means: We know that the representation meets three conditions for being a fiction: is non-actual, is created, and depends on particular objects and people in order to persist (the commonsense ontology of fiction). We can recognize representations as of or about particular kinds of objects (representational seeing). We recognize these represented objects as being fictional objects (the ‘is’ of fictional transformation). When we engage with a fiction we perceive objects, images, and words—in other words, the physical medium of which the fiction is constructed. We also see fictional entities. We do not pretend to see them or imagine that we do. We actually see representations as fictional objects. I see the actor who portrays Benedict and Benedict the fictional character (either simultaneously or by switching cognitive focus; see footnote 5). I see the physical stuff that makes up the dramatic props: the scaffolding, the papier-mâché, the painted wood comprised the furniture, even the actors’ bodies. It’s not that I ever stop seeing those materials. Rather, I also see them as fictional entities. I can identify each physical thing as a fictional one: that boulder is a rock in Italian countryside, that brazier is a torch on the walls of the Italian villa, that man is Benedict. I have argued that an extra step is needed in order for us to understand these objects to be representations of fictional entities, beyond object recognition. This step is the ‘is’ of fictional transformation, through which we come to understand that the object of our engagement is fictional. This is similar to Robert Hopkin’s notion of “collapsed seeing in” according to which film audiences typically see the events represented in the film’s story, but not the representation of those events (the actors, props, etc.). (Hopkins 2008). We see representations as fictional entities. We also have emotional responses towards these entities, morally judge them, desire things for them, and believe certain things about them. Importantly, nothing about the fictional stance requires that we analyze these mental attitudes as being different in kind from ordinary mental attitudes. I contend that our mental attitudes towards fictions are standard mental states. Our mental states contain fictional content (they are about fictional entities), but are of the same type as typical mental states and they utilize the same cognitive mechanisms. That is not to say that there are no differences between how we respond to fiction and real-life objects. Consider, for example, the differences in how we would behave towards these different types of objects. As Katherine Thomson-Jones (2008) points out, I do not run screaming from a movie theater when I see a frightening serial killer hiding in the shadows, as I likely would if I encountered the killer in real-life. Such discrepancies in our behaviors towards real-life and fiction are typically used to motivate the DAV. Assuming functionalism about mental states (mental states are individuated, at least in part, by their functional role), then a lack of motivation to act suggests that the mental state itself is not present, or runs ‘off-line’ (Currie 1995; Currie & Ravenscroft 2002). This amounts to a pretend or imaginative belief in the presence of the fictional killer, but not a genuine belief. Genuine beliefs motivate action, fictional beliefs do not. The fictional stance offers a different interpretation of these behavioral discrepancies. We do have ordinary mental attitudes towards fictional objects. Our mental processes are not taken off-line. Instead, behavioral discrepancies can be explained in terms of a difference in the intentional content. We recognize that the objects of our engagement are not literally present to us (they are non-actual). This recognition informs our responses to fictional entities. As I stated in §II, our mental attitudes towards fictions have a kind of fictional operator; we have beliefs, emotions, desires, etc. about a fictional character/fictional world. My belief about the serial killer on the movie screen states: “I believe that there is a serial killer lurking in the shadows [in the fictional world].” This belief does not functionally motivate a fleeing response, as it likely would in real-life contexts. It may, however, motivate other kinds of behaviors, such as covering one’s eyes, turning from the movie screen, etc. I think that the same sort of story can explain all of our mental attitudes towards fictions, including emotions. A further worry arises here in terms of the question of fictional response. If we know that the object of our engagement is fictional—non-actual, created, dependent—then why do we have any mental states toward it at all? This a question concerns the appropriateness of our mental attitudes towards fictional entities. I have two thoughts here. First, I have argued that we see representations as fictional characters. We see the actor portraying Hamlet, but we also see the fictional character Hamlet. This means that see Hamlet as a person. We do not stop seeing him as a person when we also acknowledge that he is a fictional character. It is likely, then, that we will interact with Hamlet as we would if he were a real person—if not physically, then at least in terms of our psychological engagement. This means that we will emotionally respond to Hamlet, judge his actions, etc. Perhaps this is all that we need to get our psychological responses off the ground; we recognize fictional characters as the types of things that we would typically respond to in our everyday lives. This may take place subconsciously and unintentionally. Recall that object seeing (in my sense) can take place before we judge whether the object is fictional or not. Maybe some emotional responses, behavioral motivation, and even judgments also occur before we make that judgment. Certainly other judgments occur after we judge (consciously or unconsciously) that an object is fictional. We have beliefs and desires while recognizing that the object of our belief and desire is not actual. I grant that the fictional stance is not a complete explanation of our mental responses to fictions, especially our emotional and moral responses. Simply recognizing an object may sometimes be enough to bring about a moral or emotional response, but it often it will not be. The fictional stance lays the foundation for further explanations of why we respond to fictional objects as we do; it makes such responses possible. In sum, taking the fictional stance involves the application of several mental abilities. First, we see representations as objects. To make this the fictional stance, we must also realize that the object with which we interact is fictional, that it has non-actual content, was created by someone, and depends on particular people and things in order to persist. All this occurs implicitly and naturally upon learning the conventions of fiction. We then apply the ‘is’ of fictional transformation which allows us to see representations as being of fictional entities. Our psychological interactions with fictions rely upon our general capacity to see objects in fictional representations and respond to such objects; we see the representation of the fictional entity as an object that thinks, feels, acts—in short, as an object that we would respond to in our everyday lives. We mentally interact with fictional entities in much the same way we would real-life entities even though we acknowledge that, strictly speaking, fictional entities are not the sorts of things that possess mental states or have things happen to them. IV. The paradox of fiction The fictional stance is an important theoretical tool for understanding our psychological engagements with fictions, one with far-reaching implications. I contend that we can solve many of the puzzles of fiction that have plagued philosophers for decades now that we have this psychological framework in place. This includes the paradox of fiction, which concerns the nature of our emotional responses towards fictional entities. I will conclude this paper by demonstrating how the fictional stance can easily explain the paradox of fiction—and can do so better than leading DAV accounts. Suppose that you are watching The Walking Dead. You witness the rugged band of survivors—Rick, Maggie, Daryl, and friends—trek through the inhospitable woods of the American South, under the constant threat of attack from walkers (zombies) and other human clans. A ‘herd’ of walkers appears in front of them. You watch as the decaying zombies stagger clumsily towards the group. Some of the survivors scream in terror and run off, while others bravely stand to fight. You certainly seem to feel afraid when the zombies appear. But are you really afraid? Kendall Walton (1978) and Colin Radford (1975) famously asked this question in the 1970’s, kick-starting a challenge in aesthetics that has puzzled philosophers ever since: the paradox of fiction. Cognitive belief-based theories of emotions were in full-sway when the paradox was first introduced (Radford 1975, Walton 1978, Currie 1990). According to these views, an emotion towards an object X requires that we have some relevant belief Y concerning X’s relation to our well-being. For example, experiencing fear requires that I believe that there is an object in my environment that could harm myself or (importantly) those I care about. If the belief is absent, then there is no emotion (Solomon 1993). The wording of the paradox reveals an adherence to a belief-based theory of emotions. The paradox states: 1. We have genuine emotions about fictions all of the time. 2. We do not believe that fictional characters exist. 3. We can only have genuine emotions about things we believe to exist. The paradox captures a very natural thought concerning our emotions: if we know that we are engaged with a fiction (a non-actual object), then we should not have the emotionally relevant belief. No emotion should arise, but they seem to nonetheless. One interpretation of the paradox states that there is something fundamentally irrational about our responses towards fictions. Radford notoriously argued that our emotions towards fiction force the reader into adopting two contradictory beliefs: she both believes and does not believe that the fictional object of her emotion exists. On another interpretation, it could be that our beliefs concerning fictions are different kinds of beliefs than those we possess about the real world. This is the motivation behind the DAV; there are significant differences between our emotional responses to fictions and real life such that they are actually two different types of mental state. Thus, a proponent of the DAV could “solve” the paradox by denying the first proposition while maintaining the cognitivist position that emotions are constituted by beliefs. Still other philosophers have opted to deny the belief-based theory of emotions (eliminated the third proposition). There are several ways to do this. First, one can deny that beliefs are a necessary component of emotions, but still maintain a cognitivist position that emotions are comprised of thoughts (Carroll 1990 & Lamarque, 1981) or judgments (Solomon 1993). For example, when we engage with a fiction, we generally have various thoughts about the characters. While watching The Walking Dead, I may contemplate the nature of the zombie and the unavoidability of attack. This thought fills me with terror. Importantly, thoughts do not have the same assertoric requirement that beliefs do. We do not need to believe that the object of our thought actually exists in order to contemplate and respond emotionally towards it. Alternatively, one can deny that any higher-order cognition is required for emotions. This is the route taken by non-cognitive perception and feeling-based emotion theorists. According to these views, an emotion does not require that a thought, judgment, or belief about an object in our environment constitutes an emotion (although such cognitive states may cause, influence, or co-occur with emotions). Rather, the bodily changes, perception of those changes, or the feelings one experiences constitute an emotion (Goldie 2000, James 1890/2007, LeDoux 1996, Prinz 2004, Robinson 2005). The ontological status of the object of the emotion is more or less irrelevant to whether or not the emotion itself is of a standard type; if the feeling or perception of bodily changes is roughly the same, then the emotion is as well. So there are two standard approaches to dissolving the paradox of fiction: deny that we have genuine beliefs about fictional entities and maintain the belief-based emotional cognitivism (the DAV approach) or deny belief-based emotional cognitivism altogether. Both of these positions face their share of problems. Denying belief-based emotional cognitivism (as well as cognitivism in general) is highly controversial in the philosophy and cognitive science of emotions. Indeed, there is no settled account of the nature of emotions; each theory of emotions faces its own challenges. Ideally, we can dissolve the paradox of fiction without siding with any one theory of emotions, thus forestalling any potential counterexamples on that front. The DAV solution to the paradox faces problems that we have already encountered. First, and most pressing, is that the DAV explanation of the paradox requires us to appeal to a wider variety of mental state types than is necessary; our emotions towards fictions are not standard emotions, but rather imaginative, make-believe, or pretend ones. Second, the DAV explanation does not seem to be able to account for the immediacy and automaticity of our emotional responses to fictions. Many of our emotional responses towards fictions seem to occur automatically—or at least so rapidly that it is unlikely that pretense, imagination, or make-believe are involved. For instance, we may scream out in terror or flinch, cover our eyes, etc. at the sight of the herd of walkers. The proponent of the DAV could deny that these affective responses are full-fledged emotions. They could be right about this, but these reactions nevertheless must be instigated by some kind of mental state. Due to the automaticity of many of our affective responses, it is unlikely that this mental state (no matter what type it actually is) is either run off-line or is mediated by imaginative processes. Finally, there is a phenomenological worry about the DAV. It simply does not seem like our emotions towards fictions are mediated by the imagination, pretense, or make-believe. That is, it does not feel like our emotions are imaginative or that we are make-believing or pretending to have them. The DAV does not seem to capture our actual, conscious emotional experiences of fictions. The proponent of the DAV may dismiss the phenomenological worry by arguing that the imaginary game or pretense takes place unconsciously and, after some practice, quite rapidly. Some of the imaginings involved in a game of make-believe or imagining are often deliberate and consist in conscious, occurrent mental states. But others are spontaneous, unconscious, and automatic. We do not tell ourselves to begin imagining what is going to happen to our favorite television character. We simply do it, sometimes without realizing it. Walton says that when this happens our imaginings “have a life of their own” and we feel less like an author than a spectator to the imagining (Walton 1990, 14). It is hard to imagine that we engage in an unconscious game of make-believe—how would the game work? What would the rules be, and how would it be initiated? Now, Walton and other theorists of make-believe and imagining claim to have a theoretical answer these questions. What they do not seem to be able to explain is the phenomenology of our actual experiences. Luckily, the fictional stance allows us to dissolve the paradox of fiction and understand the nature of our emotional responses towards fiction without appealing to a distinct cognitive attitude and while remaining theoretically neutral concerning the nature of emotions. When we watch a fictional television show (or read a fictional novel, watch a fictional play, etc.) we recognize it as a work of fiction. Generally we know this even before we begin watching. For example, we are aware that The Walking Dead is a show about zombies, we know that zombies do not exist in our world, and we infer that The Walking Dead takes place in a fictional world. This knowledge informs our experience of watching the show; we do not forget that we are engaged with a fiction. We see the representation of zombies on the television screen in much the same way we would see a zombie if it was really before us. We judge that the objects on the screen, including the zombies, are fictional. This informs how we speak about and respond to them. Our emotional responses take whatever shape they normally would in real-life contexts, but with a different intentional content. So, on belief-based cognitivism, we believe that there is a zombie in the fictional world that could harm the characters we care about. This belief causes other affective responses as well as certain behaviors. A non-cognitivist could say that we see an emotionally-laden object on the screen (the zombie), which in turn triggers fear responses in us. The fictional stance is compatible with either position. Our emotion towards the walkers in The Walking Dead are of the same type as they would be if we encountered walkers in real-life. Indeed, our fear of the walkers is the same type of emotion as our fear towards any real-life object that could cause us harm, like a bear or shark. In each case, the difference lies in terms of the intentional content of our fear: we fear a fictional entity, not a real-life one. This shapes our behaviors towards the fictional walkers; we do not run from the room or call the police because we recognize that the objects represented on the screen are not real. The fictional stance dissolves the paradox of fiction by resisting the motivations behind it. There is no reason to think that we have non-genuine emotions about fictional entities once we correctly understand the functional role of our emotional responses towards fictions. Importantly, we can make this move while remaining neutral about the nature of emotions. Emotions may be constituted by beliefs, perceptions, thoughts, judgments, feelings, or some combination thereof. In any case, the mental state is a typical, standard psychological state. Furthermore, I think that the fictional stance explanation best captures our actual conscious experiences of fictions. Whereas we need not always be consciously calling to mind that the walkers are not real, we can do so at any point. We never forget or disbelieve in the fictionality of the represented objects. The fictional stance accounts for the immediacy and sense of presence that we have with fictional entities; I see Rick, Daryl, Maggie, and the walkers and automatically respond to them. These feelings are immediate and visceral, occurring without the mediation of pretense, make-believe, or even imagination. V. Summary In this paper, I have offered a revisionist psychological account of our engagements with fiction. I have shown how my GAV can answer the question of fictional transformation and the question of fictional response. The fundamental concept here is the fictional stance. By taking the fictional stance, we recognize that the narrative with which we engage is fictional—that is, its content is non-actual, is created, and has dependence relations on particular people and objects. This means that our mental states have fictional content. 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