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Problems, Puzzles, and Paradoxes for a Moral Psychology of Fiction City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2015 Problems, Puzzles, and Paradoxes for a Moral Psychology of Fiction Katherine Tullmann Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1164 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] Problems, Puzzles, & Paradoxes for a Moral Psychology of Fiction by Katherine Tullmann A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York. 2015 i © 2015 KATHERINE TULLMANN All rights reserved. ii The dissertation has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Philosophy to satisfy the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Noël Carroll _________ ___________________________________ Date Chair of the Examining Committee John Greenwood _________ ___________________________________ Date Executive Officer Jesse Prinz (adviser) Noël Carroll David Rosenthal ______________________________ Supervisory committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Problems, Puzzles, and Paradoxes for a Moral Psychology of Fiction By Katherine Tullmann Adviser: Dr. Jesse Prinz The goal of my dissertation is to provide a comprehensive account of our psychological engagements with fiction. While many aestheticians have written on issues concerning art and ethics, only a few have addressed the ways in which works of fiction offer problems for general accounts of morality, let alone how we go about making moral judgments about fictions in the first place. My dissertation fills that gap. I argue that the first challenge in explaining our interactions with fiction arises from functional and inferential arguments that entail that our mental states about fictional entities are non-genuine. This means that our mental states during our engagements with fiction are different in kind from typical beliefs, emotions, desires, etc. that we have in real-life contexts. I call this position the Distinct Attitude View (DAV). In its place, I propose a common-sense, standard attitude view (SAV): the idea that our psychological interactions with non-real entities can be explained in terms of the intentional content of those states as opposed to a distinct type of mental state. In expanding the SAV, I develop several independent accounts of social cognition, emotions, and moral judgments. I also show how the SAV can dissolve standard problems in the philosophy and psychology of aesthetic experience: the paradox of fiction, the problem of imaginative existence, and the sympathy for the devil phenomenon, amongst others. iv Acknowledgements Many thanks to the following people who edited and commented on various chapters of this dissertation: my advisor, Jesse Prinz; my committee, Noël Carroll and David Rosenthal; my readers, John Greenwood and Barbara Montero. I also thank Berit Brogaard, Stephanie Ross, Nickolas Pappas, Ryan Dechant, Zoe Jenkin, Josh Keton, Jamie Lindsay, Rachel McKinney, David Neely, Jake Quilty-Dunn, and Denise Vigani for their comments. I am incredible grateful for their support as I worked on this dissertation. Many thanks also to my parents, Dennis and Karen Tullmann, for their continued and loving support. v Contents Chapter 1: The Distinct Attitude View ......................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2: The fictional illusion theses ....................................................................................................... 39 Chapter 3: Taking the Fictional Stance ....................................................................................................... 66 Chapter 4: Understanding fictional characters .......................................................................................... 112 Chapter 5: Genuine, Rational Fictional Emotions .................................................................................... 158 Chapter 6: Moral Appraisals of Fictions ................................................................................................... 213 Chapter 7: Sympathy for the Devil ........................................................................................................... 255 Chapter 8: The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance..................................................................................... 280 Chapter 9: (Im)moral Learning from Fictions .......................................................................................... 312 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................................. 339 vi Chapter 1: The Distinct Attitude View 1. Stranger than Fiction You wake up early one morning and turn on the television. A newscaster informs you of a pair of brothers, known on the streets as “the Saints,” who have committed multiple murders in the name of God. You haven’t heard of the Saints and you are intrigued. The newscaster describes how the brothers only kill “bad people”: Russian mobsters, murderers, hitmen, and the like. You then watch as the newscaster interviews people on the streets of your city. Their reactions to the Saints vary widely, from open approval of their actions (“Where can I sign up?”, “Love the Saints, man! I think they’re doin’ a great job!”; “They’re making the world a safer place”) to revulsion (“Who are they to be judge and jury?”; “Killing for good?!”; “This is going to create something so much worse…”) to fear (“I’m afraid to leave my house at night!”), and even social awareness (“You’re giving them the power!”; “You’ll walk into a kid’s bedroom, it’s gonna’ be there—Batman, Superman, and the Saints”). You, too, develop an opinion of the Saints as the broadcast continues. Maybe you think that their vigilante crime-fighting is good for society. After all, it’s not like they are killing innocent people. Or maybe you are appalled by the hypocrisy of religious fanatics “playing God.” Or perhaps you just worry about even more crime in the city. The thought of a mob war or underground street fight fills you with apprehension and anxiety for your own safety. 1 Then the screen cuts to credits. Slightly abashed, you realize that the news story was just that—a story. As the credits role, you discover that the newscast was a scene from a film called The Boondock Saints, a story about two Bostonian, Irish-Catholic brothers who decide to take the law into their own hands after the murder of a close friend. Your interpretation of the Saints broadcast has changed. You now know that the events portrayed are a part of a fictional story. Before you believed that the Saints and their actions were real; now you know that they are not. You realize that the people and future consequences that you were afraid of are not actual threats. But what about your appraisal of the Saints? Has that changed as well? Say that you decided that the potential cost of the Saints’ vigilante justice outweighs the benefits. While watching the clip, you pronounced a moral judgment that their actions were wrong. Now, after the clip is over, are you forced to accept that this moral judgment was not a real judgment? There are some philosophers (Walton 1990, Currie 1995, Currie and Ravenscroft 2002, amongst others) who would answer this question with a resounding “yes.” Our moral judgments of fictions—as well as our beliefs, desires, and emotions—are not genuine judgments. Rather, our evaluation of the Saints is a pretend, imaginary, or judgment-like mental state. This claim leads to a peculiar, yet surprisingly popular, interpretation of the previous example. When we watch a fictional film, read a novel, or see a play, the beliefs, desires, judgments, and emotions that we experience are not standard or stereotypical beliefs, desires, judgments, or emotions. Yet, when we consider a similar—even an almost exactly similar—event on BBC or in The New York Times, our mental states are stereotypical simply because their object is part of the actual world. I will call this the Distinct Attitude View (DAV; based on Schroeder and Matheson’s Distinct Cognitive Attitude View, or DCAV. See Schroeder and Matheson 2006). The DAV holds 2 a dominant position in both the philosophical and psychological work in aesthetics. As we will see, some versions of the DAV claim that our mental states towards fictions are not ordinary states because they arise from functionally and inferentially different input and result in distinct cognitive and behavioral outputs from analogous real-life scenarios. We can contrast this view with a standard attitude view, or SAV, which states that we utilize the same types of mental states during our engagements with fictions and real-life; differences in behaviors and responses to fictions can be explained in terms of the content of standard beliefs, emotions, judgments, etc. I will defend a version of the SAV in this dissertation. Proponents of the DAV typically focus on the nature of our emotions or beliefs about fictions. I am interested in our moral evaluations of fiction, like our judgment of the Boondock Saints. While many philosophers and psychologists have accepted
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