Believable Fictions: On the Nature of Emotional Responses to Fictional Characters

In this essay, I address the long-standing debate within aesthetic philosophy on the nature of readers’ emotional responses to fictional characters. After reviewing some theories that regard fiction-generated emotions as considerably different from emotions that we experience in our everyday lives, I elaborate my own view that we bring many of the same intuitions and forms of evaluation to our encounters with fictional characters that we use with real people. With this in mind, I attempt to show that our emotional responses to fictional characters more greatly resemble real-life emotions than some aesthetic theorists would like to concede.