IMAGINING EVIL

IMAGINING EVIL S. Yablo I don’t know if kids everywhere go through a stage like this, but I at least had a period where I would not tolerate anything being called impossible. If you asked me whether someone could, say, run a 1-minute mile, here's what I did not say: Are you kidding, that's 60 mph, it cannot be done. I said rather this: Just because you can’t do it doesn’t mean nobody can! There's no contradiction in the idea of running that fast. Whatever the mind can conceive, can in principle be achieved. This would sometimes be qualified a bit in light of a certain objection: “aha, if anything is possible, then in particular it’s possible for some things to be impossible.” This stumped me for a while, I admit. But I seem to remember deciding it only strengthened my position to allow this one exception: nothing is impossible, except that anything should fail to be possible. This was the exception that proved the rule. Another thing I remember is the strange pride I took in this strange position of mine. I say “strange” because normally one only takes pride in things one did or is somehow responsible for. Climbing Mt Everest, that is something to be proud of -- how big Mt Everest is, that's another matter entirely. It's not as though Mt Everest is so big because of me! But the bounds of possibility aren’t my doing either. Two questions this raises. What on earth was I talking about in those days, when I called everything possible? And why was I so convinced of this? And why the strange self-satisfaction? To start with the self-satisfaction. I suppose the reason that running a 1-minute mile stuck us as possible is that I found it imaginable; I could see a way for it to happen. This helps with the pride question because it makes perfect sense to take pride in your powers of imagination. I felt superior because I could see possibilities others couldn't. 1 of 20 Most people eventually outgrow this attitude, but perhaps not everyone. Paul Grice told a story about a long-ago philosopher named Cook Wilson at Oxford, who died in 1913. Cook Wilson was lecturing on possibility and giving examples of propositions that were not only true but necessarily true, for instance, you can’t get from the inside of a plane figure to the outside without crossing the figure’s boundary (staying of course in the plane). A student raised his hand and said, look, I grant you it would be very hard but why do you say impossible? Etc. Now is may be that this student may have got the better of the exchange; that was certainly Grice’s view. But the fact remains that the student was wrong and Cook Wilson was right – you really can’t get from the inside to the outside without crossing the boundary. Likewise it seems pretty clear that my friends and I were wrong to say that everything was imaginable and possible. What would the point be of having these notions in the first place if they automatically applied to everything? I propose to take it as axiomatic that whatever might be meant by “possible” and “imaginable,” there is a non-trivial line to be drawn between the scenarios that are imaginable and possible and the ones that are not. This assumption turns out to be very helpful when we turn to the first question above, not, why were we saying it, but what on earth was the claim, when we said nothing was unimaginable, everything was possible? These words have more than one meaning, and the best way to see this is to notice they put the nontrivial line in different places. Let me try to give some examples to bring this out. I want to look at four statements each of which seems plausible on its most natural interpretation, but which are not plausible if you insist on reading imaginability the same way in each. (I’ll stick to imaginability just to keep things simple.) Context: Baltimore Sun commentator on the 2000 Summit meeting between the heads of North and South Korea. (1) Reunification is not at hand but it is suddenly imaginable. 2 of 20 Here imaginable means something like not unbelievable; there’s (to give a definite number) a 20% chance of its happening. The statement as a whole says the chances of peace have risen above that threshold. Context: reading Descartes’s Meditations, including the evil demon hypothesis and the cogito, “I think, therefore I am.” (2) You find it imaginable that an evil demon is deceiving you, but not that you don’t exist. This seems true but it is false if “imaginable” means what it did in (1); it’s not as though you think there’s a 20% chance that an evil demon is deceiving you! (At least I hope you don't.) Here “imaginable” seems to mean that there’s any chance at all that it’s true; you can’t conclusively rule it out from the armchair. Context is the Jewish saying: “Life is so full of misery and woe – how much better never to have been born at all. But I ask you, how many of us are that lucky!” Thinking about this, (3) I find it imaginable that I should never have existed. This seems right but it is wrong if “imaginable” means what it did in (1) and (2); there is no chance at all from my point of view that I don’t exist. Now a totally different sort of example, lightly adapted from Ken Walton. Context: we're reading a short story, Griselda's Choice, which begins like this: It wasn't easy for Griselda to kill her new baby. She had let herself grow far too attached. But the baby deserved it; after all, it cried a lot, and was a girl…… Something strange happens when we get to that last sentence. We have no problem accepting and imaginatively engaging with the fact that Griselda killed her baby. But then we read that she was right to do it, because the baby cried and was a girl. Crucially this is not to be put in the mouth of a possibly unreliable narrator, but presented as 3 of 20 an unarguable fact about the world of the fiction. We can accept that the narrator is mistaken, but not that the fictional world is as described. (4) We can imagine Griselda killing her baby, but can’t accept that this is the treatment the baby deserved, not even in imagination. Let's now have some names for the notions of imaginability at work in these sentences, The sense in (1) we can call believable; it suddenly becomes not unbelievable that peace will break out on the Korean peninsula. What about in (2)? You don’t find it at all plausible that you are being fooled by an evil demon, but it’s not unbelievable. So let the sense at work in (2) be called thinkable. What about in (3)? The notion that I don’t exist is not believable or even thinkable. I am as sure as I can be that I exist right now. What then? Finding my nonexistence imaginable is having it appear to me that unlike God, I am not a necessary being; there is a possible world where I don’t exist. Put this by saying I find my nonexistence conceivable. More elusive than any of these is the sense at work in (4). The first says I cannot imagine that Griselda's baby deserved to be killed. I suppose in principle the kind of imagination in play could be nothing new: because I probably also find it unbelievable, and unthinkable, and inconceivable, that crying female babies deserve to die. So I need to give some different examples to show why the (4) sense isn’t believability, thinkability, or conceivability. Here is why it isn’t believability or thinkability. Suppose the story had said instead that Griselda had spanked, or maybe caned, her child (an older child) for not saying please and thank you. I myself, let’s say, believe caning is morally impermissible, but I admit it is not out of the question that I am wrong; it’s believable (so thinkable) that caning is A-OK. Still, if the author tries to stipulate that in the world of the fiction, what Griselda did is perfectly fine, I can’t go along with that. I grant of course that that is what I am supposed to imagine qua reader of the story, but I find myself unable to do it. 4 of 20 Here is why imaginability in (4) isn’t conceivability. I find it inconceivable that playing cards should think and talk. It seems to me there are no genuinely possible worlds where that happens. But I have no trouble engaging imaginatively with the parts of Alice in Wonderland where the Queen of Hearts, who whatever else she may be is clearly supposed to be a card, says “Off with her head!” So the (4) sense isn’t any of believability, thinkability, or conceivability. To have a word for it, let’s say that I acquiesce in the idea of Griselda killing her baby but resist the idea that this is (even in the story) the treatment the baby deserves. Now we reach this paper's main topic: Why on earth do I resist? Why can’t I accept that although it’s not true in the actual world, that crying babies deserve to die, they do deserve it in the world of the fiction? Walton observes, “There is science fiction; why no morality fiction?” Imaginative resistance is one possible answer. It’s important to remember here that I gladly swallow almost everything an author throws at me, however nutty or outlandish. There seem at first to be no limits to authorial authority in this regard. For some reason, though, I resist when the topic is morality. I find myself unable to engage with fictional worlds where things I believe to be bad are called good or vice versa. Why? This is the problem of imaginative resistance. Is it so obvious that the problem really exists? The problem is supposed to be that we can’t imagine morally deviant worlds at all. But all we’ve got so far is that we can’t be brought to imagine them by clumsy three-line fictions that do nothing to make the deviant hypothesis plausible or intelligible. Who is to say that we might not have gone along if the author had done more to pull us in, to engage our sympathies? I actually sort of agree with that and I’ll return to it briefly at the end. Notice though that there is still a problem even if the resistance can ultimately be overcome, namely, why is there resistance to be overcome? It doesn’t take a big fancy novel to get us to imagine most things. David Lewis: “There once was a dragon who owned six 5 of 20 golden rings.” There, I’ve imagined it. “There once was a saint who murdered six ducklings.” Not so easy. So, let’s assume the problem is real, at least in connection with clumsy, underdeveloped, amateur fiction. An example of Brian Weatherson’s to make sure we’ve got the concept: Death on the Freeway: Jack and Jill were arguing again. This was not in itself unusual, but this time they were standing in the fast lane of I-95. This was causing traffic to back up a bit…..When Craig saw the cause of the backup had been Jack and Jill, he took his gun out of the glovebox and shot them. People then started driving over their bodies, and while the new speed bump caused some people to slow down a bit, mostly traffic returned to normal… Craig did the right thing, because Jack and Jill should have taken their argument somewhere else… I assume you find it as hard as I do to go along with that last sentence and imagine that Craig did the right thing. Why? What are some of the theories that have been offered? First an aesthetic theory. The stories we resist do seem to have an aesthetic problem in common, what might be called overbearingauthor-ism, or perhaps just authoritarianism. I am not sure how to state the problem exactly but it’s something like this. Fiction has a fine line to walk. On the one hand we’re supposed to be forming opinions about the characters and their actions; and our conclusions are not supposed to be drawn at random but on the basis of revealing details that are shared with us. But while these conclusions should have a basis in the narrative, and may even be invited by it, the author should not be telling us in so many words which conclusions to draw. Death on the Highway steps over that line. Our so-called resistance to it is just resentment at being bullied. But I suspect that can't be it. Because we resent bullying even when the conclusions being shoved down our throat are conclusions we agree with. This is the case of a moralizing or didactic novel whose heart is in the right place but is pushing its point of view too hard. (Maybe Horatio Alger novels are like this –I’ve never read one.) It 6 of 20 seems to me that there’s no imaginative resistance to this kind of fiction, just imaginative irritation at being led around by the nose. Resistance arises if the conclusions are being pushed on us precisely because we would not reach them ourselves; the fictional facts don’t warrant them. D. H. Lawrence seems to be warning against this when he says The novel is the highest complex of subtle inter-relatedness that man has discovered....Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality (“Morality and the Novel”). Do we resist because we sense the author is putting his thumb on the scale? Maybe so, but this seems more of a redescription of resistance than an explanation of it. Some of what the author stipulates we accept, other stipulations we experience as a thumb on the scale. What’s the difference? And why do we react so differently in the two cases? That was our original question and it remains unanswered. The most popular theory, sometimes called the impossibility theory, is that a fictional hypothesis provokes resistance if there is no genuine possibility however remote of its being true. Ken Walton seems to suggest this at one point: Moral properties depend or supervene on “natural” ones…being evil rests on, for instance, the actions constituting the practices of slavery and genocide…This…accounts…for the resistance to allowing it to be fictional that slavery and genocide are not evil…Our reluctance to allow moral principles we disagree with to be fictional is just an instance of a more general point concerning dependence relations of a certain kind (Walton 1994, 43-46). It sounds like he’s saying that we resist because what we are asked to imagine is just impossible, it happens in no possible worlds. E.g., in Death on the Highway we resist because it is not only untrue in fact but impossible for an action like Craig’s to be right. 7 of 20 The problem with this is that imagining impossibilities, in the fictional sense of imagining, does not seem all that difficult. I am not suggesting that we can take any old attitude towards impossibilities. You may remember that the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, when Alice suggests to her that one can’t believe impossible things, responds, “What? I daresay you haven’t had much practice. … Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” That takes us aback a bit; but it would not be shocking at all to hear that the Queen has sometimes imagined six impossible things before breakfast, in the sense of imaginatively engaging with six impossible fictions. She herself is arguably a character in an impossible fiction; people can function as chess pieces, but they can’t be chess pieces as such, which is how the story represents her. Again, cardboard playing cards can’t think or talk, but that is what they are represented as doing in “Alice in Wonderland,” and it doesn’t arouse the slightest resistance in us. I don’t say these examples are watertight; maybe the White Queen isn’t really supposed to be a person, and maybe the Queen of Hearts isn’t supposed to be really a card. So consider instead a made-up example. Italo Calvino has a story called Numbers in the Dark. I don’t know what actually happens in that story, but suppose for example’s sake that it’s about the numbers 6, 7, 8, and 9 stumbling around in the forest some moonless night. 7 confusing 9 with its dinner eats the larger number. That it turns out is why 6 is afraid of 7; it’s because 7 8 9. This is quite a dumb story but it doesn’t make you seize up like Griselda’s Choice or Death on the Freeway. (Later Gendler, “The Tower of Goldbach.”) It might be thought that the impossibility theory fails because it forgets that imaginative resistance has something special to do with morality. The next theory we look at, due to Tamar Gendler, does not forget this. Gendler starts by noting that most of what is true in a fictional world cannot be divined from the words themselves; a lot of it is just taken over unchanged from how matters actually stand, outside the fiction. It never says in the Holmes stories how many ears Watson has. But we feel safe in assuming that he has two, just because most people do. Call that the import principle: relevant 8 of 20 truths about the actual world are preserved into the fiction unless something prevents it. Second, one can in many cases go in the opposite direction, concluding that something is actually true from its being true in the fiction. (Moby Dick, Ulysses as a guide to how to get around Dublin.) Call that the export principle: unless the fiction represents itself as distorting relevant facts, infer from truth in the fiction to truth in reality. Now generally when we encounter descriptive information we know is false (say that people can read each other’s minds, as seems to happen in Virginia Woolf’s, The Waves), we assume the author is aware of this, and just making it up; the false part is not intended for exportation. But it’s different, Gendler thinks, when we encounter what we take to be moral misinformation, because while we can assume rough agreement about how the world is descriptively, people disagree vehemently about morality. The author may think the morally deviant hypothesis she is presenting is actually true, and to that extent up for exportation. Resistance occurs because we feel that having adopted a repellent moral perspective on the world of the story, we might then be tempted to extend it to the world outside the story, and that is not a chance we are prepared to take. Call that the contagion theory. Note a crucial difference with the impossibility theory. That theory has us unable to imagine what we are asked to; Gendler thinks we “are unwilling to follow the author’s lead because in trying to make that world fictional, she is providing us with a way of looking at this world which we prefer not to embrace.” It’s a prediction of this theory, she thinks, that we’ll find “cases of something akin to imaginative resistance whenever we feel that we are being asked to add to our repertoire…a way of looking at the world that we prefer not to have available.” Examples: “Don’t you see how Aunt Ruth looks just like a walrus!” “Let’s call this big strong chair the papa chair, and that frail one the mama chair.” One problem with this is that there is still resistance even if the hypotheses in question are clearly marked as not for export. E.g. suppose we train intelligence officers by having them read made-up 9 of 20 stories embodying the enemy’s moral perspective. That the enemy’s perspective is explicitly not for export – they’re the enemy after all – seems like it is going to make imaginative engagement with it harder, not easier. But more important, there are lots of hypotheses we resist imagining that having nothing moral about them. Suppose we encounter the following joke in a story: “Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” …….. I think you’ll agree that that joke (I learned it from Tyler Doggett) is not very funny. But the story might call it funny. If so, then our view, I take it, is that the story is just wrong, even about its own fictional world. The only explanation Gendler can give is that we are unwilling to laugh even in jest, as it were, because we are horrified of being seduced into finding the joke really funny. I like Doggett’s comment about this: what kind of comic prude would refuse to laugh for that reason? It seems like a big problem for Gendler’s theory if it works mainly for moral misinformation, and we balk at comic misinformation as well. Actually we balk at more than that. Consider a very bad story that begins like this: The Rally All eyes were on the twin Chevy 4 x 4's as they pushed purposefully through the mud. Expectations were high; last year's blood bath grudge match of doom had been exhilarating and profound, and this year's promised to be even better. The crowd went quiet as special musical guests ZZ Top began to lay down their sonorous rhythms. The scene was marred only by the awkwardly setting sun. Reading this one thinks: If the author wants to stage a monster truck rally at sunset, that's up to her. But the sunset's aesthetic properties are not up to her, nor are we willing to take her word for it that last year's blood bath grudge match of doom is a thing of beauty. Also epistemic misinformation: the plausible thing to think is that the next emerald will be blue. Do we resist because the to-be-imagined scenario is repugnant along some evaluative dimension or other: comic, aesthetic, or …? No, 10 of 20 because it is not only evaluative suggestions that are resisted. Imagine you are reading to your daughter from a book the teacher recommended and hear yourself saying the following: Scavenger Hunt They flopped down under the great maple. One more item to find, and yet the game seemed lost. Hang on, Sally said. It's staring us in the face. This is a maple tree we're under. She grabbed a jagged five-fingered leaf. Here was the oval they needed! They ran off to claim their prize. I think you would try to get your daughter into another class. If the author wants it to be a maple leaf, that's her prerogative. But the leaf's physical properties having been settled, whether the leaf is oval is not up to her. She can, perhaps, arrange for it not to have the expected maple-y shape. But if it does have the expected shape, then there is not a whole lot she can do to get us to imagine it as oval. Likewise if we are asked to imagine something jagged as smooth, or a left-facing letter as right-facing. It’s not that we are unwilling to imagine these things -- we are unable, and Gendler’s theory doesn’t seem to explain why. Concerns of this sort these lead Brian Weatherson to his virtue theory. He notes that all of our cases involve some kind of interplay between lower-level properties and higher-level ones, with the latter holding in virtue of the former. A thing’s evaluative properties, be they moral, aesthetic, comic, or epistemic, hold in virtue of nonevaluative properties at a lower level. A thing is oval or left-facing because of its lower-level geometry. Engaging with fiction we try our best to respect these relations. Here’s how he puts it: we can only imagine the higher level claim some way or other, …, [but] the instructions that go along with the fiction forbid us from imagining any relevant lower level facts that would constitute the truth of the higher level claim. …not only are we instructed to imagine something that seems incompatible with Craig’s action being morally acceptable, we are also instructed (tacitly) to not imagine anything that would make it the case that his action is morally acceptable. But we simply can’t imagine moral goodness in the abstract, to imagine it we have to imagine a particular kind of goodness. 11 of 20 But, one, why can't I imagine goodness in the abstract? "Penelope was a very good person. Everyone who knew her agreed about this." And two, “Death on the Freeway” doesn't ask us to imagine moral goodness in the abstract. One is supposed to imagine that Craig’s action is right in virtue of being the killing of people who wouldn’t get out the way. Why can’t we imagine that? Weatherson seems to assume that actual in-virtue-of relations have to be imported into the world of the fiction, and it’s not clear why that would be. In fact it seems that they don’t always have to be imported into the fiction. Gendler gives an example: The Tower of Goldbach. It’s a little long to repeat in full but the gist is this. Goldbach conjectured that every even number is the sum of two primes. (That part is true.) All the mathematicians of the world labored together in an effort to prove this hypothesis. Their efforts were not in vain…”Hoorah!” they cried, “we have unlocked the secret of nature.” When God heard this display of arrogance, he was angry. “My children, you have gone too far…From this day forth, no longer will 12 be the sum of two primes.” And God’s word was made manifest. It goes on. God agrees to relent if the people can find twelve righteous men. They find seven in one village, and five in another, but when they try to bring them together, they don’t get the expected result, because 12 is no longer the sum of two primes. Etc. The point for us is that outside the fiction the righteous men would have been twelve by virtue of being seven over here and five over there; but inside the fiction that connection is broken. Some distortions of actual in-virtue of relations we resist, others we don’t. What’s the difference? I suggest that it has to do with the sort of concept involved. Let me creep up on this slowly. Philosophers have wanted to distinguish primary qualities like NUMBER and SIZE from secondary qualities like SMOOTH or SWEET or RED. One way of drawing the distinction is in terms of the concepts involved. Number and size concepts apply on the basis of objective criteria; there aren't twelve eggs in the carton because I say so, rather I say so because there are twelve eggs in the carton. It 12 of 20 is different with the other concepts mentioned: a thing qualifies as sweet or red because of human responses -- because of how it strikes us. I don't say the distinction is clear but I do think it is real. How is the distinction between "objective" and "response-dependent" concepts relevant to the problem of imaginative resistance? An author can dictate whether a bunch of men are twelve in number because we have no say in the matter -- their falling under the concept TWELVE has nothing to do with us. An author cannot similarly dictate whether a joke is funny, or a line is jagged, because what falls under these concepts is determined by our responses, and she cannot dictate our responses. I can make this a teeny bit more precise by distinguishing three grades of response-dependence. The first grade is advocated by Colin McGinn in his book The Subjective View. His formula for response dependence is (BASIC) no matter which world had obtained, the Fs would have been the things that were disposed to seem F. This has the result that had there been nobody around, nothing would have been F, and different things would have been F had people been put together differently. There are concepts that do seem to work this way: irritating and comfortable for instance. But McGinn wants to apply (BASIC) to color concepts, and many have found this objectionable. It is one thing to say that poached eggs would have been irritating if our nervous systems had been suitably different. It is another to say that ripe bananas would have been red, or colorless, had our nervous systems (or normal viewing conditions) been suitably different. Intuition says that being yellow doesn’t go in every possible world with looking yellow, because (quoting Kripke) if we had had different neural structures, if atmospheric conditions had been different, if we had been blind, and so on, then yellow objects would have done no such thing [as look yellow] (141) Kripke’s own view is that 13 of 20 the reference of ‘yellowness’ is fixed by the description ‘that (manifest) property of objects which causes them, under normal circumstances, to be seen as yellow (i.e., to be sensed by certain visual impressions) (140). He seems to be saying here that the extension of ‘yellow’, rather than depending counterfactually on our responses, depends on them counteractually in the sense that what turns out actually to be yellow depends on what turns out actually to seen as yellow. Some have seen here the outlines of a subtler sort of response-dependence than was advocated by McGinn: (INTERMEDIATE) no matter which world does obtain, the Fs are the things that are disposed to seem F This has the result, not that bananas would have been red, say, had they looked red to us, but that they are actually red, in the unlikely event that they actually do look red to us, appearances to the contrary due to an evil demon’s been surrounding them in a thick yellow fog. But while intermediate response-dependence may make sense for (some) secondary quality concepts -- we are perhaps willing to put their extension at the mercy of our responses, whatever those responses may be -- the picture changes when it comes to evaluative concepts. Here we seem much less willing to let the chips fall where they may, allowing the extension to be dictated by our responses whatever those responses may be. What is the extension of “funny,” for instance, on the hypothesis that nothing makes people laugh longer and louder than a good knock-knock joke. (There would need to be an explanation of why we don’t realize this: maybe we’ve momentarily forgotten what we laugh at, maybe some kill-joy has been slipping us anti-laugh pills wheneve these jokes are told.) Do we conclude that knock knock jokes really are funny, even if their funniness for some reason right now eluding us? It seems to me that we are just as likely to reason backwards that since knockknock jokes are clearly not funny, whoever laughs at them has to that extent a bad sense of humor; hence we ourselves have a bad sense of humor on the (highly implausible) hypothesis that we find knock-knock jokes hilarious. 14 of 20 So there is a distinction to be drawn between concepts like red and sweet that give our responses unconditional authority -- the extension is at their mercy -- and concepts like good, funny, and plausible that give our responses what I’ll call presumptive authority. Our responses get to call the shots because we presume (rightly) that we are good judges; who knows what happens on hypotheses that call that presumption into question. This points the way to a third form of response dependence: (ADVANCED) in this world, the Fs are the things that are disposed to seem F -- assuming, as why shouldn’t we, that we are decent judges of Fness. Concepts we grasp via a condition like (BASIC) or (INTERMEDIATE) are response-driven, because the extension is dictated by our responses whatever those responses may be. Concepts we grasp via a condition like (ADVANCED) are responseenabled, because our responses only give us access to the extension; what enables us to have the concept in the first place is that we are by and large good judges of Fness. Now I can make the “concept” theory of imaginative resistance a teensy bit more precise (as promised). I hold that resistance arises for response-enabled concepts as opposed to response-driven concepts. Consider for instance a clearly response-driven concept, the concept IRRITATING. A thing is irritating in a world w if its world-mates are irritated by it. So to make poached eggs irritating in the world of the story, just populate that world with people who are irritated by hard boiled eggs. Likewise the concept RED. A thing is red in a world w iff its world-mates experience it as red. To make ripe bananas red in the world of the story, just stipulate that they are in that world experienced as red. No problem of imaginative resistance in either case. The concept FUNNY is very different in this respect. Surrounding a knock-knock joke with people who crack up when they hear it does not make it funny; it makes the people around it into goofballs, or anyway bad judges of funniness. A funny joke, even in the story, is a joke we outside the story find funny. Other response-enabled 15 of 20 concepts behave the same way. A jagged line is a line that looks jagged to us; an evil act is an act that arouses in us a certain kind of anger and resentment. Imaginative resistance is the natural result. If it's our responses that are calling the shots, it only makes sense that we would reject any seeming intelligence on these matters coming from other sources. First there’s the part where you say in, then there’s the part where you take it all back. I have been assuming throughout that we respond to fictional situations the same way as we would to corresponding real ones. Sometimes an author can get us to respond differently. Part of what’s great about The Sopranos, so I'm told, is that it entices us into adopting Tony's point of view on his world. Gino went behind Tony’s back, he knew the consequences, so good riddance to him. Harold loyally committed the fifteen murders he was asked to, so he deserves a new car. It’s fine with us when a James Bond villain gets ripped apart by sharks because we are by then just so angry at the guy. (Revenge fantasies, etc.) These are the exceptions that prove the rule. The fact that resistance weakens when the author twists our spontaneous responses around suggests that it is the untwisted responses that explain resistance in the normal case. 16 of 20