The Paradox of Fiction and Emotional Engagement with Art

Colin Radford's paper "How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?," published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 49 (1975), gave canonical formulation to what is now called the paradox of fiction. Radford observed that readers and viewers display apparently genuine emotional responses — grief, pity, fear — toward fictional characters and events, such as the death of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (Anna Karenina, 1878), that they know full well never existed and never occurred, in seeming violation of the standard philosophical requirement, inherited from belief-desire theories of emotion, that an emotion requires belief in the reality or existence of its object. Radford's own conclusion was stark: such responses, however psychologically real and widespread, are strictly speaking incoherent or "irrational."