Stacie Friend

C. Thi Nguyen claims that although we can make aesthetic judgements based on testimony or inference, we resist doing so owing to a contingent norm of our social practice. For Nguyen, aesthetic engagement involves a ‘motivational inversion’ similar to games in which we adopt inefficient means of winning so that we can enjoy the process of playing. Similarly, he says, adopting the norm enables us to engage in the autonomous activity of appreciation. I argue that Nguyen is right that the purpose of our practice is appreciation, but wrong to think any motivational inversion is required in pursuing it.

Philosophers and other scholars have often claimed that the arts are not only cognitively valuable but also morally improving (e.g., Nussbaum, 1997). However, their arguments often proceed with little attention to empirical evidence. At the same time, filmmakers and media creators deliberately use devices to direct their audience’s attention, with the intention of impacting viewers’ cognitive, affective, and neurological responses in meaningful ways (Carroll & Seeley, 2013). Whether these devices have the desired effects, and on whom, also remains largely untested. If we want to understand the ways that film and media can have moral impacts, we must step out of our disciplinary siloes. It is not enough for film experts, philosophers, and experimentalists to merely take note of each other’s work; collaborative interdisciplinary research is required, both to improve methods and to examine questions that have not yet been empirically explored. In this article we propose a model for this kind of research, focusing on how media can influence moral understanding. We first outline the challenges that must be met for such research to be successful, including clarifying and operationalizing concepts, measuring moral understanding, and applying empirical methods to media and the arts. We then describe the advantages of interdisciplinary collaboration for meeting these challenges, in the context of some recent examples of interdisciplinary projects on related themes.

Proper names in fiction and in discourse about fiction generate certain puzzles. How can claims like "Raskolnikov is Russian" be true if there is no Raskolnikov? If fiction involves make-believe rather than truth, why say that Nineteen Eighty-Four is about the real London? In my dissertation I argue that the key to resolving such puzzles is by considering the ways in which interpretations of works of fiction generate normative constraints on our imaginings. And I argue that traditional solutions fail both because they operate with inadequate theories of proper names, and because they do not recognize the centrality of interpretation and imagination to fiction-involving discourse. ;After laying out desiderata for my project in Chapter 1, in Chapter 2 I elaborate an account of the contents communicated by utterances that explains how even nonreferring names can be used to "talk about the same thing." In Chapter 3 I argue that to classify a narrative as fiction is to link it to a certain historical practice, one whose standards of interpretation and assessment evolve over time. Because this theory does not define fiction in terms of general semantic properties, it allows us to recognize the variety of roles both referring and nonreferring names can play in different works. Chapter 4 surveys some of these roles, developing an account of our judgments of truth and fictional correctness for particular works. ;In the last two chapters I turn to an analysis of proper names in utterances about fiction. In Chapter 5 I argue that once we recognize the relativity to interpretation of the contents communicated by these utterances, we should maintain that referring names in discourse about fiction designate their ordinary referents in their ordinary way. In Chapter 6 I develop a conception of pretend reference that explains how utterances containing empty names can be true, without assuming that these names have special meanings or that they refer to nonexistent or abstract objects. The result is a unified, systematic theory of proper names across a wide range fiction-involving discourse that does justice to our imaginative engagement with fiction