Abstract
In this paper I want to hold, first, that one may suitably reconstruct the relevant kind of mental representational states that fiction typically involves, make-beliefs, as contextually unreal beliefs that, outside fiction, are either matched or non-matched by contextually real beliefs. Yet moreover, I want to claim that the kind of make-believe that may yield the mark of fictionality is not Kendall Walton’s invitation or prescription to imagine. Indeed, in order to appeal in terms of make-believe to a specific form of imagination that fiction distinctively involves, one must move away from the realm of norms in order to attain a cognitive realm; namely, one must look at a specific form of metarepresentational state. This metarepresentational state of make-believe is a second-order representation that is about both real beliefs and make-beliefs, as the first-order representations it compares by acknowledging their contextual distinctness.
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Notes
More cautiously, for Walton (2013) an invitation to imagine is a merely necessary condition for fictionality.
For Kind (2013, pp. 147–148), the postulation of i-beliefs and i-desires is a common practice among many simulationists about imagination. Goldman suggests that i-beliefs and i-desires actually are modifications of real beliefs and real desires in the sense I have pointed out. For imagination “is an operation or process capable of creating a wide variety of mental states” (2006, p. 47).
One might immediately retort that mental representational states in fiction cannot be the same states as in real life, for they do not play the same inferential role (for example, fear in attending a horror movie does not prompt one to get out of the cinema). As I will say later, this is not the case. Indeed, in the next Section I will show how one’s entertainment of make-states in fiction has in the same context the same consequences. For the time being, however, it is enough to observe that, when mental representational states, notably emotions, are entertained in fiction qua (naturalistic) actors and not qua spectators, the very same sort of behavior is activated. Cf. Saint (2014, pp. 362–363).
I am here following Predelli (1997).
Also Kind (2013) suggests that there is a kind of imagination that, as supporting our modal epistemology, must be distinguished from the imagination that amounts to a modification of belief.
One may distinguish imaginations both from beliefs and from make-beliefs even in an utterly different approach. Cf. Langland-Hassan (2012, 2014). Unlike this approach, however, I do not hold that imagination differs from belief not as an attitude, but merely in terms of its specific kind of content (a counterfactual implication).
The fact that make-beliefs prompt one to act in their unreal fictional context is hardly noticed, since make-believers often are spectators of what happens in the world of the context, not protagonists of that context. Yet the distinction between spectators and protagonists is feeble, since spectators may be invited to join the protagonists (e.g. in a play).
This inferential commonality is the affinity that many people hold as subsisting between belief and imagination (cf. e.g. Currie and Ravenscroft 2002) and that, in my account, should instead be applied to beliefs and make-beliefs.
Walton himself (1990, pp. 43–50) draws a comparison between dreams and fiction.
Clearly enough, these are the extreme cases. Many intermediate cases can be figured out in which the relevant metarepresentation tends to be pushed back in one’s mental background, so that the motivational force of the relevant representation in the unreal narrow context (the unreal belief) is not entirely suppressed. Cases of transportation go in this direction. Transportation is the phenomenon in which readers turn out to be immersed, both cognitively and emotionally, in the world of a narration, independently of whether the story that is narrated is real or fictional. As a result, their habits and stances, as well as their reactions, are affected by the story content. In particular, such readers may know that the story that is narrated to them does not concern the real world. Yet this does not prevent them from cognitively bracketing the real world while being absorbed by the world of the narration as if it were the real world, by endorsing a sort of Coleridgean ‘suspension of disbelief’. Cf. Green and Brock (2000).
Subjects described as entertaining forms of weak imaginative superstitions (cf. Ichino 2020) may be compared to those dissociated people.
Incidentally, this shows that the form of metarepresentational awareness that is involved in make-believe is very thin. Some people would indeed object that appealing to this form of metarepresentation in order to account for fictionality is too demanding. For it entails that people involved with fiction must master the relevant concepts (i.e., FICTION, MAKE-BELIEVE, PRETENSE). As regards young children, this is implausible. Cf. Langland-Hassan (2012). But it is not necessary that the relevant metarepresentation involves such concepts. For, as Meini and Voltolini (2010) have shown, that representation may simply be a singular metarepresentation that THAT [a representation in a certain narrow context, involving a certain world parameter] does not go along with THAT [another representation, or another token of that representation, in another narrow context involving another world parameter].
Kind (2013) has also suggested that the imagination that qualifies fiction must be distinguished both from the kind of imagination that supports modal epistemology and from the kind of imagination that amounts to a modification of a belief.
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Acknowledgements
This paper has been originally presented at the conferences The Fiction/Nonfiction Divide: Fact or Fiction?, University of Auckland, March 19 2018, Auckland; Belief and Imagination in Fiction, Department of Philosophy and Education Sciences, University of Turin, December 4 2018, Turin. I thank all the participants for their very stimulating remarks. I also thank Fred Kroon for his important comments to a previous version of the paper.
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Voltolini, A. Beliefs, make-beliefs, and making believe that beliefs are not make-beliefs. Synthese 199, 5061–5078 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-03015-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-03015-1