Alina Wang: 'Being an animal and enjoying fiction'
Abstract: The “paradox of fiction” centers on the question of whether our apparent emotional responses to fictions amount to genuine emotion or make-believe emotion (i.e., our pretending to have emotion). In this talk, I’ll argue that we cannot have emotion for anything we know is fictional. One cannot fear a vampire, rather than only pretend to do so, any more than one can be delighted by the loss of someone beloved, rather than be in grief. There is a hard limit on emotion regulation and what we can get our emotions to respond to— namely, any emotion can respond only to what we sense as part of reality. In particular, I’ll argue that we should understand emotion as partially constituted by the significance we sense as real of our situation—rather than anything we sense as having been merely imagined or made up. In arguing for this, I’ll show that while this puzzle is located in aesthetics, it provides resources that are critical for addressing questions about the architecture of the mind. It lets us better understand what has been called the “conscious” and “unconscious” aspects of the mind and the relationship between these two purported domains. It also lets us locate a certain kind of mental content, i.e., emotional significance, whose character gets obscured by treatments of it in terms of propositional attitudes and intentional mental states.
