We weep for Anna Karenina. She does not exist. We know this. The tears are real.
Play It
Characterization
The Paradox of Fiction, formulated by Colin Radford in his 1975 paper "How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?", arises from three individually plausible but jointly inconsistent claims: (1) we are genuinely moved by fictional characters and events; (2) to be moved, we must believe that the characters and events are real; (3) we do not believe that fictional characters and events are real. Any two of these propositions can be held simultaneously, but not all three. Radford concluded that our emotional responses to fiction are irrational. Kendall Walton, in Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990), proposed that we do not genuinely feel emotions for fictional characters; instead, we experience "quasi-emotions" within a game of make-believe. Tamar Szabó Gendler argued that imaginative engagement can generate genuine emotions without genuine belief — that imagination and belief are distinct cognitive attitudes with partially overlapping emotional consequences. Noël Carroll defended a "thought theory": the mere thought of a scenario, without belief in its reality, suffices for genuine emotional response. No account commands consensus. The paradox endures because the phenomenon is so ordinary and so strange: every reader who has wept over a death in a novel, every player who has grieved a character's loss in a game, has experienced something philosophy cannot yet explain. The Academy hosts the Paradox of Fiction in the Heart School because games — especially narrative games — are engines of precisely this impossible emotion.
Lineage
Colin Radford, "How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 49, 1975. Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Harvard University Press, 1990). Tamar Szabó Gendler, "The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance," Journal of Philosophy 97(2), 2000. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror (Routledge, 1990). Peter Lamarque, "How Can We Fear and Pity Fictions?", British Journal of Aesthetics 21(4), 1981. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, eds., Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Quests
The Magus
Propose a theory of fictional emotions that resolves the paradox without denying any of its three premises (we feel genuine emotions; we know characters are fictional; genuine emotions require existential beliefs). Your theory may draw on cognitive science, philosophy of mind, or aesthetic theory, but it must explain — not explain away — the reality of the tears.
The Adventurer
Choose a work of fiction — novel, film, game, or play — that has moved you to strong emotion. Re-engage with it attentively, noting the precise moments where emotion arises. For each moment, record: What specifically triggered the emotion? Were you aware of the fiction's unreality at that moment? Did the awareness diminish the feeling? Write your observations as a phenomenological report and connect them to Radford's paradox.
The Sage
Explain the Paradox of Fiction for a thoughtful newcomer, tracing its articulation by Colin Radford (1975) through Kendall Walton's make-believe theory (1990), Gendler's imaginative resistance, and recent neuroscientific findings on fictional vs. real emotional processing. Assess which approach comes closest to a resolution and why the paradox persists.