Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema

Abstract

Colin Radford's contention that our emotional responses to fictional events and entities are irrational can be challenged. Such a claim cannot be established on the exclusive ground of inconsistency between some cognitive constituent of emotion and our beliefs, since this would render much of our hypothetical thinking irrational. Neither can this claim be established on the basis of an argument from analogy, since emotional responses to fictions differ from paradigm cases of irrational emotion (e.g., phobic reactions) in significant respects.