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76The Genuine Attitude View of Fictional BeliefIn Ema Sullivan-Bissett, Helen Bradley & Paul Noordhof (eds.), Art and Belief, Oxford University Press. 2017.The distinct-attitude view of fictional narratives is a standard position in contemporary aesthetics. This is the view that cognitive attitudes formed in response to fictions are a distinct kind of mental state from beliefs formed in response to non-fictional scenarios, such as pretend or imaginary states. In this paper we argue that the balance of functional, behavioral, and neuroscientific evidence best supports the genuine-attitude view of belief. According to the genuine-attitude view, cogni…Read more
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41Mental Theorizing about Fictional CharactersJournal of Aesthetic Education 56 (2): 78-100. 2022.Mindreading is the ability to attribute mental states to others and predict their behavior. Mindreading is commonplace in our daily lives, as well as our engagements with fictions. In this paper, I provide an account of how we mindread fictional entities that draws upon a version of theory-theory (TT). TT states that we attribute mental states through a process of inference-drawing from tacit folk psychological knowledge about mental states and information about our current environment and then …Read more
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26Open Casket and the Art World: A Cautionary TaleHypatia 37 (1): 27-42. 2022.In 2017, the artist Dana Schutz presented her painting, Open Casket, at the Whitney Biennial. Both the painting and the painter were subsequently subjected to criticism from the art world. A central critique was that Schutz usurped the story of Emmett Till (the subject of Open Casket) and that, as a white woman, she had no right to do so. Much can—and has—been said on the appropriateness of Schutz's painting. In this article, I argue that Open Casket is a site of oppression, an object that both …Read more
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48Varieties of Pictorial IllusionJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74 (3): 265-278. 2016.This article focuses on a potentially perplexing aspect of our interactions with pictorial representations : in some cases, it seems that visual representations can play tricks on our cognitive faculties. We may either come to believe that objects represented in pictures are real or perhaps perceive them as such. The possibility of widespread pictorial illusions has been oft discussed, and discarded, in the aesthetics literature. I support this stance. However, the nature of the illusion is more…Read more
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86Sympathy and FascinationBritish Journal of Aesthetics 56 (2): 115-129. 2016.Why do we form strong emotional attachments to unlikeable and immoral characters during our engagements with fictions? These pro-attitudes persist even as we realize that we would loathe these people if we were to encounter them in real-life. In this paper, I explore the implications of the sympathy for the devil phenomenon. I begin by considering several popular explanations, including simulation, aesthetic distancing, pre-focusing, and the ‘best of all characters’. I conclude that each one is …Read more
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14Open Casket and the Art World: A Cautionary TaleHypatia 37 (1): 27-42. 2022.In 2017, the artist Dana Schutz presented her painting, Open Casket, at the Whitney Biennial. Both the painting and the painter were subsequently subjected to criticism from the art world. A central critique was that Schutz usurped the story of Emmett Till and that, as a white woman, she had no right to do so. Much can—and has—been said on the appropriateness of Schutz's painting. In this article, I argue that Open Casket is a site of oppression, an object that both reflects and reinforces domin…Read more
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308Does the Paradox of Fiction Exist?Erkenntnis 79 (4): 779-796. 2014.Many philosophers have attempted to provide a solution to the paradox of fiction, a triad of sentences that lead to the conclusion that genuine emotional responses to fiction are irrational. We suggest that disagreement over the best response to this paradox stems directly from the formulation of the paradox itself. Our main goal is to show that there is an ambiguity regarding the word ‘exist’ throughout the premises of the paradox. To reveal this ambiguity, we display the diverse existential co…Read more
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15Aesthetic Courage and PhronesisWashington University Review of Philosophy 1 1-18. 2021.This paper analyzes aesthetic courage, a virtue directed towards aesthetic objects when subjects are asked to confront content that is psychologically or socially risky. I examine aesthetic courage to explore how it plays a role in a virtue theoretic account of the good life. I contend that the virtue theoretic concept of phronesis, or practical wisdom, plays a strong role in guiding the virtuous agent to make decisions about the course of action that promotes her good life. The concept of phron…Read more
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35The contents of racialized seeingPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 20 (4): 723-741. 2020.This paper explores the conscious visual experience of seeing race. In everyday occurrences, racialized seeing involves the capacity for a subject to simply “see” that someone she encounters belongs to a racial category. I bridge research in analytic philosophy of perception and accounts from phenomenologists and critical race theorists on the lived experience of racialized seeing. I contend that we should not trust our visual experiences of racialized seeing because they provide, at best, incom…Read more
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44The Problem of Other MindsMetaphilosophy 50 (5): 708-728. 2019.This paper reimagines the traditional problem of other minds. On a Cartesian view, the problem involves humans’ inability to perceive other persons’ minds. Similarly, Gilbert Ryle claims that we cannot directly access another’s mind. The paper’s rethinking of the problem of other minds moves beyond these questions of perceptibility and accessibility. It asks whether there are certain groups of people whose minds are systematically misinterpreted, or even denied mentality. It argues that there ar…Read more
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33Experiencing Gendered SeeingSouthern Journal of Philosophy 55 (4): 475-499. 2017.This paper explores the concept of “gendered seeing”: the capacity to visually perceive another person's gender and the role that one's own gender plays in that perception. Assuming that gendered properties are actually perceptible, my goal is to provide some support from the philosophy of perception on how gendered visual experiences are possible. I begin by exploring the ways in which sociologists and psychologists study how we perceive one's sex and the implications of these studies for the s…Read more
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35Taking the fictional stanceInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (6): 766-792. 2016.In this paper, I set out to answer two foundational questions concerning our psychological engagements with fictions. The first is the question of fictional transformation: How we can see fictional media while also ‘seeing’ those objects as fictional ones? The second is the question of fictional response: How and why we take the objects of fiction to be the types of things that we can respond to and judge? Standard responses to these questions rely on distinct cognitive attitudes like pretense, …Read more
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22Questioning the necessity of the aesthetic modesBehavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (2). 2013.I question both the necessity and the sufficiency of Bullot & Reber's (B&R's) aesthetic modes. I argue that they have not shown how the aesthetic modes are truly – how they concern our experience of artworks as opposed to other kinds of experiences or why the modes are individually necessary for one. I suggest the causal dependence of the modes should be modified