The Paradox of Fiction – A Brief Introduction into Recent Developments, Open Questions, and Current Areas of Research, including a Comprehensive Bibliography from 1975 to 2018

Abstract

Exactly forty years ago, readers of the Journal of Philosophy first heard about a certain guy called Charles who was sitting in his chair watching a movie. At some point during the film, a green slime started approaching the camera. Charles’ pulse quickened, his palms started to sweat, and he clutched the arms of his chair. After the movie, he reported that he was really afraid of the slime. Apart from the observation that both monsters and moviegoers have come a long way since the seventies, nothing about this case seems to be particularly interesting. Charles, however, has become famous – at least among philosophers, aestheticians and literary critics. The reason is, of course, Kendall L. Walton’s seminal paper »Fearing Fictions« in which he both doubts that Charles’ judgement about his affective state is correct and raises the general question of whether affective responses which are directed towards fictional entities (we will call them »fictional emotions« from now on) are structurally identical to emotions directed towards real entities (cf. Walton 1978). Together with Colin Radford’s article »How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?« Walton’s paper led to a debate about fictional emotions that still goes on today, and in particular about a problem which is often referred to by the term »paradox of fiction«. The paradox is constituted by three apparently plausible premises that cannot be conjointly true at the same time: