Emotional imagining and our responses to fiction
The aim of this article is to present the disagreement between Moran and Walton on the nature of our affective responses to fiction and to defend a view on the issue which is opposed to Moran's account and improves on Walton's. Moran takes imagination-based affective responses to be instan...
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2011 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona |
| Repositorio: | Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ddd.uab.cat:68943 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://ddd.uab.cat/record/68943 https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.5565/rev/enrahonar/v46n0.197 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Imagining Imagination Fiction Emotion Affective states Representational art Kendall Walton Richard Moran Experiential imagining Emotional imagining Propositional Imagining Imaginar Imaginación Ficción Emoción Estados afectivos Arte representativo Imaginación experiencial Imaginación emocional Imaginación proposicional Ficció Emoció Estats afectius Art representatiu Imaginació experiencial Imaginació emocional Imaginació proposicional |
| Sumario: | The aim of this article is to present the disagreement between Moran and Walton on the nature of our affective responses to fiction and to defend a view on the issue which is opposed to Moran's account and improves on Walton's. Moran takes imagination-based affective responses to be instances of genuine emotion and treats them as episodes with an emotional attitude towards their contents. I argue against the existence of such attitudes, and that the affective element of such responses should rather be taken to be part of what is imagined. In this respect, I follow Walton; and I also agree with the latter that our affective responses to fiction are, as a consequence, not instances of real emotion. However, this gives rise to the challenge to be more specific about the nature of our responses and explain how they can still involve a phenomenologically salient affective element, given that propositionally imagining that one feels a certain emotion is ruled out because it maybe done in a dispassionate way. The answer -already suggested, but not properly spelled out by Walton- is that affectively responding to some fictional element consists in imaginatively representing an experience of emotional feeling towards it. The central thought is that the conscious and imaginative representation of the affective character of an instance of genuine emotion itself involves the respective phenomenologically salient affective element, despite not instantiating it. |
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