Ed Armitage

The 'paradox of fiction' is derived, roughly, from the apparent incompatibility between our emotional responses to fictional events and our belief that those events are fictional. Kendall Walton famously attempts to resolve the paradox by claiming that fiction only elicits what he calls 'quasi-emotion’ in us – emotions whose evaluative content essentially belongs within the ‘make-belief’ world of the fiction. Contrary to this, I here defend the claim that we respond to fiction with genuine emotion. I do this by highlighting a structural analogy between our emotional responses to fiction and our emotional responses to what I label 'anticipatory imaginings'; acts of imagining future events that we don’t believe will (or perhaps even can) occur. Doing so, I argue, allows for the following simple yet convincing claim: since we’ve no reason to doubt that our emotional responses to anticipatory imaginings are genuine, the same is plausibly true of emotions elicited by fiction. This should give us reason to think that our emotional responses to fiction are as genuine as any other.

Akratic action is voluntarily acting against one’s better judgement. Akratic belief is believing against one’s better judgement. We here provide an account of a phenomena that sits somewhere between the two: ‘akratic thinking’. This is where we engage in a thought process against our better judgement. While the idea of akratic thinking has been tentatively considered before, no account has yet been offered of it. This is what we’ll offer here. Our account will seek to show how akratic thinking is possible, the different forms it can take, and the kind of irrationality involved. We’ll also explore how the notion of akratic thinking can provide an alternative explanation for some ostensible cases of akratic belief, and the implications it may have for our understanding of certain mental disorders.

The question of what exactly is irrational about recalcitrant emotions—those that occur in tension or conflict with our beliefs—has been widely debated. Sabine Döring claims that such irrationality only emerges if we act on our recalcitrant emotion or engage in emotion-relevant reasoning in light of it. I here provide an account that acts as an extension to the latter part of this claim by considering in more depth the question of what is irrational about that reasoning, i.e., emotionally recalcitrant reasoning. In doing so, I offer a somewhat alternative explanation to Döring's as to the form of irrationality involved. Where Döring argues that emotionally recalcitrant reasoning involves epistemic irrationality by way of conflicting judgments that are involved, I argue that our engagement in this reasoning is, in fact, practically irrational. This is because, I claim, it involves us “accepting”—treating as true—propositions that we do not believe to be true, in the absence of the kind of reasons that would usually rationalize doing so. Doing so constitutes a form of practical, rather than epistemic, irrationality. This is a conclusion I arrive at through a consideration of the nature of the reasoning our emotions in general tend to motivate.

We all find ourselves worrying at one point or another, and we have an intuitive sense of what is communicated by phrases such as ‘I’m worried about this’ or ‘I can’t stop worrying about that’. Despite worry’s ubiquity, however, it is not altogether clear what exactly worrying is, or why it is we worry. And, surprisingly, there has been no dedicated philosophical account given of the nature of worry specifically, although there is a body of psychological literature concerned with it as well as a recent insurgence of philosophical literature concerned with the nature of anxiety. My aim in this paper, therefore, is to provide such an account. I here provide an account of the nature of worry. On the view I develop, worry is to be understood as a form of affectively motivated cognition. More specifically, I argue that worrying is a cognitive activity constituted by our engagement with forms of practical or epistemic reasoning, supplemented by imaginative engagement and motivated by anxiety. I develop this view primarily by marrying together considerations from the psychological literature on worry and the philosophical literature on anxiety. With this characterization in place, I then go on to make some novel claims about why exactly it is that we worry. The upshot should be an account of worry that addresses the questions of what it is and why we do it.