Human Emotional Responsiveness to Fiction: a multifaceted enquiry in the light of recent findings

The present work aims to deepen the phenomenon of emotional responsiveness to fiction, an issue particularly dear to the philosophy of literature that has been accompanying the argumentative tradition since the mid-1970s to nowadays. The paradox of fiction concerns subjects' emotional susceptibility towards fictional contents and, in particular, it wonders in which way to qualify the nature and functional role of such affective responses in the wider framework of human rationality. The core of the matter is about the apparent contradiction by which we exhibit emotional involvement toward fictional entities despite rationally knowing that the target of such responses do not exist. We hypothesize that the paradoxical nature of the issue does not lie at the phenomenological level, in the act of being moved, but in the formulation of the matter itself, as a consequence of the adoption of questionable theoretical assumptions and the general resistance to examine through the lens of science one of the most peculiar activities of humankind. The purpose of our work is to show that the paradox can be considered as solved since, by virtue of recent neuroscientific discoveries, one of its fundamental premises known as the Existential Condition has lapsed. Our argumentative strategy concerns demonstrating that the reality/fiction distinction is not a trascendental aspect of fictional experiences in general and that the occurrence of emotional responses is a separate kind of process, independent from any reality checking and assessment procedure. We are going to see that for the brain there is no substantial difference between reality and fiction, at least in the first instance, since are no different and specific pathways or set of nerve fibres reserved to non-actual inputs: both fictional and real information converge in the same neural circuits. Our research fits into the theoretical framework which goes under the name of Thought Theory, position based upon the insight that in order to be emotionally touched, human beings do not necessarily require existential beliefs, but they can be moved by the mental representations they entertain, intended as mental images, imaginings, fantasies, suppositions and so on. In particular, the idea is that the emotional involvement that can accompanies subjects' when reading novels or watching movies is the result of internal representations that people form through their mind's eye while being engaged in such activities and the simple act of internally representing characters, scenarios and events is enough to trigger an emotional response. Fundamental contributes to such position come from Noël Carroll and Peter Lamarque's studies, Tamar Szabó Gendler's interest on the nature of fictional emotions and Damasio's investigations on the role of emotional responses in human rationality. Such contents will be progressively enriched by further contributions, such as Stephen Kosslyn's studies on the nature of mental imagery, Oatley's theory on reading as a form of simulation and Paul Harris' position about imagination and the role of language in respect to imaginative faculties.