Yuchen Guo

Representationalism claims that pretense is determined in advance by the content-bearing mental representations of individual pretenders. Alternatively, 4E approaches to pretense claim that pretense emerges in agent-environment interactions and is not determined in advance by pretenders’ mental representations. Peter Langland-Hassan has offered an objection to the 4E accounts of pretense: two individuals may have the same or similar bodily movements and environments, but only one engages in pretense. However, recently, Marco Facchin and Zuzanna Rucińska have defended 4E approaches to pretense; they argue that Langland-Hassan’s cases are impossible. Nevertheless, I argue that such cases are possible, and offer some real-life examples in support of Langland-Hassan’s objection. I also argue that in distinguishing pretense from non-pretense representationalism is a more effective strategy.

An adaptation is a special case of intertextuality or intermediality that usually involves the transfer of a work of art from one medium to another. Adaptation has become a dominant cultural phenomenon – for example, many films are based on novels. This paper explores the nature of the appreciation of adaptations. On the one hand, I argue that, when engaging with an adaptation, people take the same approach as when appreciating a work of art not based on any pre-existing work. It follows that the process of appreciating adaptations is not as special and unique as we think. On the other hand, I argue this special way of appreciating adaptations negatively impacts our engagement with adaptations. Therefore, it should not be adopted by appreciators. I conclude that people do not have a special way to appreciate adaptations and may not require one.

What is acting? What type of action does an actor perform when portraying their character? Is it possible to conceptually distinguish acting from other types of activities? This paper aims to answer these types of questions about defining acting. My work involves two aspects. On one hand, I argue that the three current popular theories defining acting (the pretense theory, the display account, and the game model) are implausible; namely, acting cannot be reduced to a simple state or event. On the other hand, I argue that acting should be understood as a process and try to clarify the distinctive characteristics of this process.

This paper aims to investigate cosplay—an activity in which participants wear costumes to portray a fictional character. Firstly, I conceptually distinguish cosplay from onstage acting, child pretend play, and similar cases. I argue that cosplay is based on self-oriented perspective-taking and is more committed to the character than pretend play but less committed than onstage acting. Subsequently, I argue that cosplay is a type of hybrid art or a hybrid of art forms—a combination of photography, dramatic acting, and fashion performance

What is the nature of the kind of behaviour English speakers call “acting”? A popular strategy is to say that acting is a kind of pretence, and onstage actors pretend to do and say what the character does and says. This paper aims to reject this “pretence theory of acting”. To do so, first, I introduce several counterexamples showing that actors do not engage in pretending but still enact their characters; second, I argue that the reasons in favour of the pretence theory of acting are not persuasive; finally, I argue that the pretence theory of acting can lead to a misunderstanding about acting.

Many actors report a form of dual-consciousness when playing roles on stage: they react to the given circumstances as their characters would do, but they do not forget they are on the stage. This paper analyzes the concept of dual-consciousness and argues that actor dual-consciousness results from the actor’s imaginings, which both recreate the experience of the character and inform the actor about the non-reality of the experience. Keywords: Acting, actor, dual-consciousness, recreative imagination, experiential identification.

Abstract:Although many actors report experiencing genuine emotions befitting a specific character’s circumstances, the actors themselves are neither their characters nor in their characters’ circumstances. Moreover, it seems that if our circumstances do not afford certain emotions, we will not experience these emotions. Thus, actors experience “a paradox of onstage emotion.” This article aims to provide a solution to this paradox. I argue that actors’ onstage emotions are repeatable, controllable, scripted, and impersonal; however, everyday genuine emotions are neither repeatable nor controllable nor scripted and are always personal. Therefore, onstage emotions are not genuine emotions. I then argue that imagination is a repeatable and controllable mental state and that it can be scripted and impersonal. Finally, given that imagination is seen as a re-creation of occurrent experiences, I conclude that onstage emotions are not genuine emotions but rather are imaginative emotions—a re-creation of genuine emotions, and the solution of imaginative emotions better accounts for actors’ onstage performance.

We can portray or take on the role of someone whom we are not. For example, a professional actor can play the role of a fictional character who does not exist in the real world, although she believes she is not that person. This behavior is named “acting.” My aim here is to locate the necessary and sufficient conditions of acting. In my view, acting is a process of communication between actors and audiences. One of its necessary components is that actors use their own features to represent those features that their characters have; another is that actors intend to make their audiences imagine that they are themselves identical to their characters. In this article, I specify these two components, critique other views of the definition of acting and distinguish acting from other similar processes.

Gregory Currie has argued for the indispensability of i-desires – a kind of imaginative counterpart of desires – by drawing a distinction between the satisfaction conditions of the desire-like states involved in our emotional responses to tragedies and those of genuine desires. Nevertheless, Fiora Salis has recently shown that the same sort of distinction can also be found in nonfictional cases and has proposed a solution to the issue of satisfaction conditions that dispenses with i-desires. In this paper, I refute Salis’s stance and argue for the indispensability of i-desires. For this aim to be achieved, I first argue that the distinction between the satisfaction conditions of i-desires and those of desires can be given a different explanation, and that in this case, the same sort of distinction cannot arise in nonfictional cases; Secondly, I argue that we cannot make sense of the conflict between our desire-like states triggered by fictions and our background desires, and therefore i-desires should be introduced to avoid this conflict.Keywords: i-desires, desire-like imaginings, tragedy, imaginative desires

There are three competing theories (imagination + i-desire, imagination + desire, and desire + desire) to account for our affective responses to fictional events. The proponents of imagination + i-desire argue that the alternative accounts imply that consumers of fiction are irrational. In Imagination, Desire and Rationality, Spaulding challenges this claim and argues that the imagination + desire and desire + desire accounts do not imply that consumers of fiction are irrational. In this paper, I attempt to rebut Spaulding’s arguments.

People have a capacity to imaginatively recreate mental states that they themselves do not have. These recreative states are referred to as ‘I-states’. Several philosophers, such as Gregory Currie, Tyler Doggett, and Andy Egan, propose that the combination of i-desire and i-belief—two typical I-states—can motivate agents. The goal of this paper is to defend this i-desire + i-belief account. Here I consider a kind of dramatic acting—method acting—in which an actor aspires to sincere performances by experientially inhabiting the role of the character, as involving I-states and that it implies that i-desires and i-beliefs can motivate agents. First, I analyze the features of method acting; second, I argue that those accounts which do not include the concept of i-desire cannot explain these features; third, I argue that the i-desire + i-belief account can do that and it therefore is the best explanation of how a method actor is motivated on stage.