The paradox of fiction, or the paradox of emotional response to fiction, is a philosophical dilemma that questions how people can experience strong emotions to fictional things. The primary question asked is the following: How are people moved by things which do not exist? The paradox draws upon a set of three premises that seem to be true prima facie but upon closer inspection produce a contradiction. Although the ontology of fictional things in general has been discussed in philosophy since Plato, the paradox was first suggested by Colin Radford and Michael Weston in their 1975 paper How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?. Since Radford and Weston's original paper, they and others have continued the discussion by giving the problem slightly differing formulations and solutions.
The basic paradox is as follows:
- People have emotional responses to characters, objects, events etc. which they know to be fictitious.
- In order for us to be emotionally moved, we must believe that these characters, objects, or events, truly exist.
- No person who takes characters or events to be fictional at the same time believes that they are real.
The paradox is that all three premises taken individually seem to be true, but can not all be true at the same time. If any two points (e.g. 1 and 3) are taken to be true, then the third (e.g. 2) must either be false or else produce a contradiction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_fiction
How is it that we can be moved by what we know does not exist, namely the situations of people in fictional stories? The so-called "paradox of emotional response to fiction" is an argument for the conclusion that our emotional response to fiction is irrational. The argument contains an inconsistent triad of premises, all of which seem initially plausible. These premises are (1) that in order for us to be moved (to tears, to anger, to horror) by what we come to learn about various people and situations, we must believe that the people and situations in question really exist or existed; (2) that such "existence beliefs" are lacking when we knowingly engage with fictional texts; and (3) that fictional characters and situations do in fact seem capable of moving us at times.
A number of conflicting solutions to this paradox have been proposed by philosophers of art. While some argue that our apparent emotional responses to fiction are only "make-believe" or pretend, others claim that existence beliefs aren't necessary for having emotional responses (at least to fiction) in the first place. And still others hold that there is nothing especially problematic about our emotional responses to works of fiction, since what these works manage to do (when successful) is create in us the "illusion" that the characters and situations depicted therein actually exist.
https://www.iep.utm.edu/fict-par/
...Fiction may be, at least in part, a pleasure technology, a co-opting of language and imagery as a virtual reality device which allows a reader to enjoy pleasant hallucinations like exploring interesting territories, conquering enemies, hobnobbing with powerful people, and winning attractive mates. Fiction, moreover, can tickle people’s fancies without even having to project them into a thrilling vicarious experience...
--Steven Pinker
How is Disbelief Suspended?: The Paradox of Fiction and Carroll's The Philosophy of Horror
In The Philosophy of Horror Noel Carroll expounds what he calls the 'Paradox of Fiction', reporting two opposing solutions to the problem, and giving an 'intermediate' solution which he calls the 'Thought Theory of Emotional Responses to Fiction'. In this paper I want to critically assess Carroll's solution in defense of a revised version of one of the other two solutions, namely, one which involves the familiar idea of suspension of disbelief.
http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n46ortega-rodriguez
The Suspension of Disbelief
Suspension of disbelief, sometimes called willing suspension of disbelief, is the intentional avoidance of critical thinking or logic in examining something unreal or impossible in reality, such as a work of speculative fiction, in order to believe it for the sake of enjoyment. Aristotle first explored the idea of the concept in its relation to the principles of theater; the audience ignores the unreality of fiction in order to experience catharsis.
The poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge introduced the term "suspension of disbelief" in 1817 and suggested that if a writer could infuse a "human interest and a semblance of truth" into a fantastic tale, the reader would suspend judgement concerning the implausibility of the narrative. Coleridge sought to revive the use of fantastic elements in poetry and developed a concept to support how a modern, enlightened audience might continue to enjoy such types of literature.
Coleridge recalled: “It was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith…”
The notion of such an action by an audience was, however, recognized in antiquity, as seen particularly in the Roman theoretical concerns of Horace, who also lived in an age of increasing skepticism about the supernatural, in his Ars Poetica (with the quotation Ut pictura poesis). According to David Chandler, Coleridge drew his notion from Marcus Tullius Cicero's Historia Critica Philosophiae, which cited the phrase "assensus suspensione" or "suspension of assent".
Concept
The traditional concept of the suspension of disbelief as proposed by Coleridge is not about suspending disbelief in the reality of fictional characters or events but the suspension of disbelief in the supernatural. This can be demonstrated in the way the reader suspends his disbelief in ghosts rather than the non-fictionality of the ghosts in a story. According to Coleridge's theory, suspension of disbelief is an essential ingredient for any kind of storytelling.
The phrase "suspension of disbelief" came to be used more loosely in the later 20th century, often used to imply that the burden was on the reader, rather than the writer, to achieve it. This might be used to refer to the willingness of the audience to overlook the limitations of a medium, so that these do not interfere with the acceptance of those premises. These premises may also lend to the engagement of the mind and perhaps proposition of thoughts, ideas, art and theories. With a film, for instance, the viewer has to ignore the reality that they are viewing a staged performance and temporarily accept it as their reality in order to be entertained. Early black-and-white films are an example of visual media that require the audience to suspend their disbelief for this reason.
Suspension of disbelief often applies to fictional works of the action, comedy, fantasy, and horror genres in written literature and visual arts. Cognitive estrangement in fiction involves using a person's ignorance to promote suspension of disbelief.
Psychology
Psychological critic Norman Holland points to a neuroscientific explanation. When we hear or watch any narrative, our brains go wholly into perceiving mode, turning off the systems for acting or planning to act, and with them go our systems for assessing reality. We have, in Coleridge's second, more accurate phrase, "poetic faith" and so humans have such trouble recognizing lies: they first believe, then have to make a conscious effort to disbelieve.
Only when we stop perceiving to think about what we have seen or heard, only then do we assess its truth-value. If we are really "into" the fiction – "transported", in the psychologists' term – we are, as Immanuel Kant pointed out long ago, "disinterested". We respond aesthetically, without purpose. We do not judge the truth of what we perceive even though if we stop being transported and think about it, we know quite well that it is a fiction.
Suspension of disbelief has also been used within a mental health context by Frank DeFulgentis in his book Flux. It is an attempt to describe the phenomenon of forgetting irrational thoughts associated with cases of OCD. In the book, the author suggests 'suspending disbelief' as opposed to forcing ourselves to forget; similar to how one would put a virus in quarantine. We can thereby allow ourselves to be absorbed in the activities around us until these irrationalities vanish of their own accord.
Secondary belief based on inner consistency of reality.
J. R. R. Tolkien says, in "On Fairy-Stories" that, in order for the narrative to work, the reader must believe that what they read is true within the secondary reality of the fictional world. By focusing on creating an internally consistent fictional world, the author makes secondary belief possible. Tolkien argues that suspension of disbelief is only necessary when the work has failed to create secondary belief, saying that from that point on, the spell is broken, and the reader ceases to be immersed in the story, and so must make a conscious effort to suspend their disbelief or else give up on it entirely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief
The Spatio-Temporal Paradox
The definitional paradox of fiction as language without meaning gives rise to a temporal, or spatio-temporal, paradox: the text has a beginning, a middle, and an end — and yet the end is already “there” when we read the beginning, and the beginning is still there when we reach the end. The time sequence of the work is also a quasi-spatial simultaneity, so that reading in sequence also gives us an accumulating sense of the big, still picture. This dual temporality holds regardless of whether the work be written down as a text or memorized and thus “inscribed into the soul,” as Socrates might say. Even oral cultures have a sense of the unchanging song or story and its accurate recitation, and even the changes oral poets make for specific performances work as surprises against the background of the known unchanging essence of the work.
This paradox of dual temporality is, I think, the focus of Sonnet 30, whose themes of memory and debt fit into what I take to be the larger picture of the Sonnets as a whole. On the level of genre, the Sonnets play a game upon the surprising and jarring fusion of the two principle types of sonnet we would encounter in Shakespeare’s day, especially in his Continental models....
http://www.amittai.com/prose/saa.php
Colin Radford’s Argument:
I would like to start by presenting the premises of Colin Radford’s argument; here is the argument (the text of these premises has been copied from the argument’s IEP entry):
(1) In order for us to be rationally moved (to tears, to anger, to horror) by what we come to learn about various people and situations, we must believe that the people and situations in question really exist or existed.
(2) Such “existence beliefs” are lacking when we knowingly engage with fictional texts.
(3) Fictional characters and situations do in fact seem capable of moving us at times.
And I would add Radford’s obvious conclusion from these premises to be,
(4) Therefore, our being moved by fictional characters is not rational.
In the logical sense of the word, this argument is perfectly valid. Given the truth of the premises, the conclusion must be true. But it is both unsound (meaning one or more of the premises is false) and, at any rate, not a paradox…
…I think Colin Radford’s argument is mistaken. And I think its most egregious errors are all contained within his first premise, which is actually the premise most often confronted in the extant responses in the philosophical literature since its publication. Most such objections come from so-called ‘thought theorists,’ who feel that entertaining a notion’s possibility may be sufficient for emotional response without accepting the notion’s truth or reality; I would agree with this response, and would seek to give a more precise account of my version of this orientation toward fiction.
So, what leads me to believe that the first premise is so mistaken and that the thought theorists are moving in the correct direction? Well, to put it bluntly (and more than a little manipulatively), I am led to believe the first premise is false by my knowledge of biology, psychology, and common sense. In order to see this, let us think about another time when a person experiences emotions: when considering the future.
If Colin Radford contends that emotional responses to non-real events are irrational, constituting a paradox of fiction, then surely Radford would also have to conclude that it is “illogical, irrational, even incoherent” that a human can experience emotional responses to considerations of the future. When imagining a close family member some day going through a horrible illness or injury, it seems perfectly consistent to feel intense sadness. The fact that the imagined scenario is fictional (and may never—depending on the illness, even hypothetically—come to pass) is no obstacle to feeling that this emotional response is rational.
Its rationality derives from our need to generate the appropriate practical response in order to better understand, plan for, and/or avoid the elements of the fiction (whether that fiction is future or art). Such future-planning takes place primarily in areas of the brain which evolved very recently, and are exclusive to highly intelligent species with well-developed forebrains; far from a paradoxical contradiction of humanity’s emotional response systems being in working order, humanity’s capacity for what one might term ’empathetic simulation learning’ is a vital part of what makes humans the skilled thinkers, and thus dominant species, that they are today.
In keeping with the above, I would modify his first premise as follows:
(1′) In order for us to be rationally moved (to tears, to anger, to horror) by what we come to learn about various people and situations, we must believe that the people and situations in question really exist, existed, or could exist.
https://thegemsbok.com/art-reviews-and-articles/philosophy-articles-friday-phil-colin-radford-paradox-of-fiction/
Paradox of Fiction - Philosophy & The Matrix
The “Comprehension of Narrative” hypothesis;
...Understanding how narrative undermines the distinction between reality and fiction does, however, make the paradox disappear in a certain sense. That is, the problem that we respond differently to fiction and reality no longer holds because the distinction between them has changed. If we put the fiction-reality distinction aside and look to what it is that connects our understanding of both, namely how we comprehend narrative, we can begin to work with a more unified problem, one that will not always, ultimately, lead us to a paradox.
Experiencing Neo’s Narrative
I am not suggesting that fiction and reality are the same or even that they are at times indistinguishable. There is a clear distinction between the epistemological (knowing what is real) and the ontological (the existence of things as they are) that will forever differentiate those for us. But what I am suggesting is a much stronger emphasis on how we make sense of both—that is, through narrative and story-telling. The way the story is told, or how it is that we create the story and make sense of it is similar for both fiction and reality. If it is the narrative that we are ultimately responding to, then it does not matter how we construe the emotions to work in response to real experiences and fictional ones—this is a false dichotomy that will continue to leave us in a paradox.
Further, if it is the narrative that we respond to, and the narratives are getting better or at least more vivid through technological developments, then it would make sense that we have increasingly stronger affective responses, even though we “know” what we see or experience is not “real.” With the current state of the technology, especially with the kinds of special effects The Matrix provides, we are able to more fully experience both worlds and respond emotively to both. By moving the focus of the debate away from the belief requirement needed for “justified” emotions and understanding the role of stories more fully we can connect the divergent spaces of the real and the representational. We can further see how it is that we function in similar ways to the characters in The Matrix. Neo experiences a new reality as we experience it along with him in parallel ways we never before imagined...
The Matrix & Philosophy
https://www.thriftbooks.com/series/popular-culture-and-philosophy/38166/
The Seven Basic Plots
...Booker believes we tell stories as a mechanism of passing a model for life from generation to generation; that in essence, all stories are archetypal family dramas, and that their core message is that we must resist selfish evil (Booker doesn’t use this term, preferring ‘ego-centred’, according to his Jungian framework). I find this a lovely belief system, although it will likely be quite unpalatable to those who idolise testability.
What follows are the skeletons of his ‘seven basic plots’. The word ‘plot’ as used by Booker may give people pause, as he does not use it to mean the literal events of the story, but rather the symbolic events of the story, and note that not every story follows the template perfectly...
http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2005/10/the_seven_basic.html
Knowing How vs Knowing That
...there is an important distinction between "knowing that" (know a concept), "knowing how" (understand an operation), and "acquaintance-knowledge" (know by relation)...
...Bertrand Russell stressed the distinction between "knowledge by description" and "knowledge by acquaintance". Gilbert Ryle is also credited with stressing the distinction between knowing how and knowing that in The Concept of Mind. In Personal Knowledge, Michael Polanyi argues for the epistemological relevance of knowledge how and knowledge that; using the example of the act of balance involved in riding a bicycle, he suggests that the theoretical knowledge of the physics involved in maintaining a state of balance cannot substitute for the practical knowledge of how to ride, and that it is important to understand how both are established and grounded...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
The Lost Arts of Memory
BEFORE the printed book, Memory ruled daily life and the occult learning ...The inventor of the mnemonic art was said to be the versatile Greek lyric poet Simonides of Ceos (c. 556-46878.0.). ...Once at a banquet in the house of Scopas in Thessaly ...a message was brought to Simonides that there were two young men at the door who wanted him to come outside. ...Castor and Pollux ...to pay Simonides for their share of the panegyric. ...at the very moment when Simonides had left the banquet hall the roof fell in, burying all the other guests in the ruins. When relatives came to take away the corpses for the burial honors, the mangled bodies could not be identified. Simonides then exercised his remarkable memory to show the grieving relatives which bodies belonged to whom. He did this by thinking back to where each of the guests had been seated. Then he was able to identify by place each of the bodies...
...He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written on it. Simonides' art, which dominated European thinking in the Middle Ages, was based on the two simple concepts of places (loci) and images (imagines)...
...A treatise (c. 86-82 B.C.) by a Roman teacher of rhetoric known as Ad Herrenium, ...He described the "architectural" technique for imprinting the memory with a series of places. Think of a large building, Quintilian said, and walk through its numerous rooms remembering all the ornaments and furnishings in your imagination. Then give each idea to be remembered an image, and as you go through the building again deposit each image in this order in your imagination. For example, if you mentally deposit a spear in the living room, an anchor in the dining room, you will later recall that you are to speak first of the war, then of the navy, etc. This system still works...
...Petrarch (1304-1374) also had a great reputation as an authority on the artificial memory and how to cultivate it. He offered his own helpful rules for choosing the "places" where remembered images were to be stored for retrieval. The imagined architecture of Memory, he said, must provide storage places of medium size, not too large or too small for the particular image...
...At the beginning of the sixteenth century ...Peter of Ravenna advised that the best memory loci were in a deserted church. When you have found your church, you should go around in it three or four times, fixing in your mind all the places where you would later put your memory-images. Each locus should be five or six feet from the one before. Peter boasted that even as a young man he had fixed in his mind 100,000 memory loci, and by his later travels he had added thousands more. The effectiveness of his system, he said, was shown by the fact that he could repeat verbatim the whole canon law, two hundred speeches of Cicero, and twenty thousand points of law...
...After Gutenberg, realms of everyday life once ruled and served by Memory would be governed by the printed page. ...the printed book was far more portable, more accurate, more convenient to refer to, and, of course, more public. Whatever was in print, after being written by an author, was also known to printers, proofreaders, and anyone reached by the printed page. A man could now refer to the rules of grammar, the speeches of Cicero, and the texts of theology, canon law, and morality without storing them in himself...
The Discoverers - Daniel Boorstin - Pages 480-488
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679743758/
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180503-our-fiction-addiction-why-humans-need-stories
