Fiction and mental ascription

Abstract

Fictive participation gives rise to apparent ascriptions of mental attitudes towards fictional characters and situations. Notable among these are emotional attitudes. Appreciators of fictions will often describe themselves as feeling an emotion for a fictional character. There is a significant literature within the philosophy of the arts that attempts to explain the semantics and substantive psychological features of such mental ascriptions. One of the enduring debates within this literature concerns whether the emotions that arise from fictive participation are 'fictional' or 'genuine' emotions. In this paper I argue that the emotions are both fictional and genuine because philosophers have differing theoretical motivations when they use these seemingly inconsistent descriptions.