The Paradox of Fiction #300

Why are we scared by things that don’t exist?

Dear friends of Daily Philosophy,

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After we’ve had many great guest articles in the past weeks, today I’m happy to bring you one of my own for a change. It is about a famous problem in aesthetics, which is called the Paradox of Fiction: why are we scared of monsters in movies when we know very well that they don’t really exist? The question is more interesting than one might think, and it is a real conundrum, so let’s jump right in!

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The Paradox of Fiction

The paradox of fiction asks how we can experience genuine emotions for things that are not real. How we can fear a monster in a horror movie, or shed tears for a tragic hero in a play? After all, we know that these characters are just made up.

The paradox of fiction arises from three seemingly true but incompatible claims:

1. We have emotional responses to fictional characters, objects, and events that we encounter in works of art.

2. To have emotional responses to something, we must believe that it exists.

3. We do not believe that fictional characters, objects, and events exist.

The paradox is that we cannot accept all three claims at the same time without contradiction.