Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

On Desiring Fictions

10 March 2010  |  15:00  |  Seminari de Filosofia UB

Abstract

When spectators watch Shakespeare’s play Othello, they imagine that everything that is acted on stage is as if it were real. They imagine that Iago lies to Othello, that Othello falls into Iago’s trap, that he kills Desdemona. These imaginings are usually accompanied by emotional responses such as surprise for Iago’s lies, sadness for Othello’s falling into Iago’s trap and fear for the terrible sort of Desdemona. In one sentence, when imagining that Othello will strangle Desdemona:

 

1. Spectators do not want that Desdemona dies.

 

In the debate on the nature of desires involved in people’s appreciation of fictions are two main alternative options. Peter Carruthers (2006), Shaun Nichols (2006) and (probably) Jonathan M. Weinberg and Aaron Meskin (2006) defend a view for which the attitude of the audience is a genuine desire and its object is the proposition that Desdemona dies. This is the view that I will develop and defend in the essay. Others, however, argue for the recognition of a certain motivational force of desire-like imaginings with a functional role different from that of genuine desires. Original proponents of this view were Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft (2002) and Currie (2002). But I will follow the more recent terminology of Tyler Doggett and Andy Egan (2007) who call this new kind of mental state i-desire. I-desire theorists think that spectators of Othello are in a state that is pretty much like desire, except that it is not a genuine desire, but rather an imaginative counterpart of it. Instead of (1) we would then have:

 

2. Spectators do not i-desire that Desdemona dies.

 

In the essay I will argue for the inconsistency of the distinction between desire and i-desire and I will show how a parsimonious cognitive model of the mind can exhaustively explain the nature of (1) by using as its only resources belief-like imaginings and genuine desires.