Carola Barbero

Carola Barbero | : Je m’intéresse dans cet article aux émotions que nous ressentons lorsque nous lisons une oeuvre de fiction. Certains philosophes pensent que notre implication émotionnelle dans la fiction constitue un paradoxe, et implique soit une forme d’irrationalité, soit la participation à un jeu de « faire semblant ». Ici, je soutiendrai qu’une Théorie de l’Objet à la Meinong, en défendant une approche réaliste des émotions liées la fiction, permet de résoudre adéquatement ce paradoxe de la fiction. | : This essay concerns the emotions that we feel when reading a work of fiction. Some philosophers think that our emotional engagement with fiction gives rise to a paradox and involves either irrationality or participation in a game of make believe. The aim of this work is to show how the paradox of fiction can be dissolved by making use of an Object Theory in a Meinongian style.

Gli oggetti fittizi sono quegli oggetti presenti nelle opere di finzione, dalla letteratura al cinema, dal teatro ai dipinti. Questo saggio prende in con­siderazione, prevalentemente, gli oggetti della finzione letteraria. Tali og­getti pongono interessanti quesiti tanto sul versante ontologico quanto sul versante semantico: in primo luogo occorre fare chiarezza sulle condizioni alle quali essi possono legittimamente essere considerati degli oggetti, in se­condo luogo è importante individuare il valore semantico degli enunciati de­signanti oggetti di tal sorta e infine è in­di­spensabile esplicitare lo statuto on­tologico di tali entità al fine di spiegare come avviene che pro­viamo emo­zioni nei loro confronti.Fictional entities are those entities we find in fictional works, from li­te­rature to cinema, from theatre to paintings. This essay will mostly concern li­terary fictional entities. These entities pose interesting questions both for se­mantics and for ontology: first we need to clarify the conditions ac­cording to which they can legitimately be considered as objects, secondly we need to understand the semantical value of sentences referring to ob­jects of that sort, and finally we need to emphasize the importance of those en­tities in order to explain how does it happen that we prove emotions to­wards them.

The so-called "paradox of fiction" stems from an attempt to explain what kind of emotions we feel towards the objects that we find in novels and movies, and which we know perfectly well to be fictitious. It is a classic paradox that came back to the fore in 1975, following the publication of an article by Colin Radford. The article investigated precisely the tears we shed for what is not real (such as a fictional character). Why are we moved by Anna Karenina’s suicide if we know that it is not real? What is the difference between crying for Anna Karenina, crying for a lie, crying for depression and pretending to cry so that whoever looks at us thinks we are sincerely moved? In Piangere e ridere davvero (2009), Maurizio Ferraris offers an interesting theoretical proposal to dissolve the paradox in question and focuses on some fundamental distinctions regarding our emotional reactions to real and fictitious stimuli. This essay is inspired by Ferraris’ theory and aims to clarify what it means to pretend to emotionally respond to something in everyday life and what is the difference between these "fake" emotions and those we feel during the fruition of works that we know to be fiction. Fenaroli’s case (at the heart of the Italian news in the late fifties), Il vedovo by Dino Risi and Scusate il ritardo by Massimo Troisi are chosen as paradigmatic examples.

In ontology, realism and anti-realism may be taken as opposite attitudes towards entities of different kinds, so that one may turn out to be a realist with respect to certain entities, and an anti-realist with respect to others. In this book, the editors focus on this controversy concerning social entities in general and fictional entities in particular, the latter often being considered nowadays as kinds of social entities. More specifically, fictionalists (those who maintain that we only make-believe that there are entities of a certain kind) and creationists (those who believe that entities of a certain kind are the products of human activity) present themselves as the champions of the anti-realist and the realist stance, respectively, regarding the above entities. By evaluating the pros and cons of both these positions, this book intends to focus new light on a longstanding debate.