The Paradox of Fiction

We take fiction, so to speak, for granted. Movies, books, video games, theater... a huge proportion of the world's already-vast consumption of media, arts and culture consists of stories about events that quite simply never happened, and about people that never lived.

Also, most of these fictional accounts are freely acknowledged to be such. Yet this does nothing at all to dull most people's passionate involvement in their favorite novels, TV series, operas, paintings and so on.

If you stop to think about it, this is kind of puzzling. In most cases, totally making things up gets one into trouble. To fabricate is to be dishonest; to care about things that are not real or true seems, in most of everyday life, like the definition of foolishness, if not madness. But with fiction, this is turned on its head. How can one be deeply moved by something that does not exist--and that, further, one knows does not exist?

This apparent inconsistency actually has a philosophical name: "the paradox of fiction". Though forms of it date back to at least Aristotle, Colin Radford and Michael Weston's 1975 essay, "How Can We Be Moved By The Fate Of Anna Karenina?" (FOAK for short, lol), is often credited with bringing the paradox to wider philosophical attention--though theirs is far from the last word on the matter. So join us as we take a break from our longer readings and explore Radford and Weston's ideas.

A pdf of FOAK can be found here: (https://drive.google.com/file/d/16nMWzeiJVXHJy5mBvCIAj-QUhzdTG3UN/view) It's about 27 pages, so let's read the whole thing. See you soon!