¹ Related questions concern the degree of commonalities in the way beliefs and imaginings are attributed to agents; whether imaginative states bear the same relations (inferential, causal, supervening, etc.) among themselves as belief states do; and what systematic relations exist between imaginative states and belief states. For discussion of these and other comparisons between beliefs and imaginings, see Gendler, Tamar, ‘On the Relation Between Pretense and Belief’ in Kieran, Matthew and Lopes, Dominic McIver, eds. Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts (Routledge, 2003), p.125–141Google Scholar; and Nichols, Shaun, ‘Introduction’ in Shaun Nichols, ed. The Architecture of the Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Whether or not a given theory of fiction-directed imagining commits to or denies invariance tends to be only implicit. Some of the more salient expressions of continuity can be found in: Byrne, Ruth M. J., The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Nichols, Shaun and Stich, Stephen, ‘A Cognitive Theory of Pretense’, Cognition 74 (2000), 115–147CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Currie, Gregory and Ravenscroft, Ian, Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar. Discontinuity is a tenet of Romantic theories of the imagination, as in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (1817), and existentialist and phenomenological treatments of fiction, such as, respectively, Jean-Paul Sartre's What is Literature? and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.’ Among contemporary theorists, Kendall Walton endorses what appears to be a qualified thesis of discontinuity in stressing the absence of any “simple set of principles” governing the generation of fictional truths (Mimesis as Make-believe: on the Foundations of the Representational Arts [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990], 185Google Scholar). My aim in this paper, however, is not to offer critical exegesis of the views of theorists of fictions but to expose a significant conflict between two positions in which they cannot avoid taking a side.

³ Representative studies are: Byrne, The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Harris, Paul L., The Work of the Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000Google Scholar); Nichols, Shaun and Stich, Stephen, ‘A Cognitive Theory of Pretense’, Cognition 74 (2000), 115–147CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Schroeder, Timothy and Matheson, Carl, ‘Imagination and Emotion’ in The Architecture of the Imagination, Nichols, Shaun, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 19–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ For the debate between theories of continuity and discontinuity over the norms governing our emotional responses to fictions and the actual world, see Gilmore, Jonathan, ‘Aptness of Emotions for Fictions and Imaginings’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 92.4 (2011), 468–489CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ In this discussion I treat theoretical and epistemic rationality as largely identical capacities. In other philosophical contexts, however, the two may be distinguished, particularly in how the former but not the latter requires that one be sensitive to certain kinds of instrumental reasons pertaining to the achievement of one's cognitive goals. See Kelly, Thomas, ‘Epistemic Rationality as Instrumental Rationality: a Critique’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66.3 (2003), 612–640CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ There is a narrow sense in which pragmatic factors may plausibly be counted as providing epistemic reasons relevant to acquiring a belief, as when the degree of importance associated with being correct in some claim affects what one counts as a sufficient level of evidence to believe it. Whether or not such pragmatic reasons count in epistemic justification need not be addressed here as my question is only whether the kinds of reasons, whatever they may be, that justify beliefs apply invariantly to the justification of imaginings.

⁷ Defenders of the descriptive continuity of believing and imagining or pretending stress what Nichols calls ‘inferential orderliness’: that individuals working out what is true in a given pretense often make inferences that mirror those that they would employ if the pretense were in fact real. See Nichols, Shaun, ‘Introduction’, in Nichols, Shaun, ed. The Architecture of the Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Currie and Ravenscroft write: ‘It is this capacity of imaginings to mirror the inferential patterns of belief that makes fictional storytelling possible. …If imaginings were not inferentially commensurate with beliefs, we could not draw on our beliefs to fill out what the story tells us.’ Currie, Gregory and Ravenscroft, Ian, Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 13–14Google Scholar. Such preservation of inference in imagining is also demonstrated in studies of child psychology; see, e.g., Leslie, Alan, ‘Pretending and Believing: Issues in the Theory of ToMM’, Cognition 50 (1987), 211–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ As in Jean Rhys' Wild Sargasso Sea (1966), an alternative imagining of the life and mind of the ‘madwoman in the attic’ of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre before her arranged marriage to Rochester and relocation from the Caribbean to England.

¹⁰ That we form intuitions from thought experiments according to the same principles by which we discover truth in fiction is defended in Ichikawa, Jonathan and Jarvis, Benjamin, ‘Thought-Experiment Intuitions and Truth in Fiction’, Philosophical Studies 142 (2009): 221–246CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ For discussions of internal and external stances on a fiction, see Lamarque, Peter, Fictional Points of View (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, chapters 2 and 8; and, Currie, Gregory, ‘Two Ways of Looking at a Narrative.’ In Narratives and Narrators: a Philosophy of Stories (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 49–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An analogous distinction is noted by Walton, Kendall, ‘How Remote are Fictional Worlds from the Real World?’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37 (1978–9), 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² In English Essays: From Sir Philip Sidney to Macaulay. With Introductions and Notes, edited by Eliot, Charles W. (New York: P.F. Collier and Son, 1909)Google Scholar.

¹³ On principles of generation, see Walton, Kendall, Mimesis as Make-believe: on the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 138–40Google Scholar.

¹⁴ I appeal here to a “reliabilist” notion of epistemic justification that does not preclude other grounds of justification. For a defense of an epistemic reliabilism as an exclusive account of justification, see Goldman, Alvin, ‘What Is Justified Belief?’ In Goldman, Alvin, Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ See Simone, Schnall, Haidt, Jonathan, Clore, Gerald L., and Jordan, Alexander H., ‘Disgust as Embodied Moral Judgment’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2008), 1096–1109Google Scholar.

¹⁶ One representative study is Dion, Karen, Berscheid, Ellen, and Walster, Elaine, ‘What is Beautiful is Good’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 3 (1972): 285–290CrossRefGoogle Scholar; See also, Nisbett, Richard and Wilson, Timothy D., ‘The halo effect: Evidence for unconscious alteration of judgments’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35 (1987), 250–256CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the idea of ‘beauty of soul’ see Norton, Robert E., The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Compare the metaphorical transfer exhibited in recent experiments that address the processing of tactile information: in one, volunteers asked to assess the quality of candidates for an alleged job tended to rate those applicants whose resumes were attached to heavier clipboards as being, themselves, more serious (i.e., ‘weighty’). Joshua M., Ackerman, Nocera, Christopher C., and Bargh, John A., ‘Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decisions’, Science 328.5986 (2010): 1712–1715Google Scholar.

¹⁸ See the suggestion that mere (arbitrary) categorization of individuals serving as research subjects generated in-group bias in S., Otten, and Moskowitz, G. B., ‘Evidence for Implicit Evaluative In-group Bias: Affect-biased Spontaneous Trait Inference in a Minimal Group Paradigm’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 36 (2000), 77–89Google Scholar.

¹⁹ See Gernsbacher, Morton Ann, et al. , ‘Do readers mentally represent characters' emotional states?’ Cognition & Emotion 6.2, (1992): 89–111CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

²⁰ One of the themes of his ‘On the Genealogy of Morals,’ in ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’ and Other Writings, edited by Ansell-Pearson, Keith, translated by Diethe, Carol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

²¹ On the explanatory limits to relying on a notion of character see Doris, John M., Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wilson, Timothy D., Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

²² Tversky, Amos and Kahneman, Daniel, ‘Belief in the law of small numbers’, Psychological Bulletin 76.2 (1971), 105–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ Compare Nietzsche's remark: ‘[E]ven the wisest of us occasionally becomes a fool for rhythm, if only insofar as he feels a thought to be truer when it has a metric form and presents itself with a divine hop, skip, and jump.’ The Gay Science, edited by Williams, Bernard, translated by Nauckhoff, Josefine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 85–6Google Scholar.

²⁴ See McGlone, Matthew S. and Tofighbakhsh, Jessica, ‘The Keats Heuristic: Rhyme as Reason in Aphorism Interpretation’, Poetics 26.4 (1999), 235–244CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ Nehamas, Alexander, Only a Promise of Happiness: the Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 59Google Scholar.

²⁶ See Bargh, John A. and Chartrand, Tanya L., ‘Studying the mind in the middle: A Practical Guide to Priming and Automaticity Research’ in Reis, Harry T., ed., Handbook of research methods in social and personality psychology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 253–285Google Scholar.

²⁷ Exceptions may be found in the sort of motivated believing and reasoning involved in thinking of oneself as a better athlete than one is in order to perform better than one would in light of a wholly accurate appraisal, or in the various paradoxes of rationality in which one is motivated to adopt an attitude of belief toward what one does not believe. However, it is plausibly a conceptual constraint on the identification of a given attitude toward some content as constituting a belief that it is governed in some sense by a norm of truth. Cf. Shah, Nishi and Velleman, David, ‘Doxastic Deliberation’, Philosophical Review, 114:4, 2005, 497–534CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁸ See, as an example, Gross, James and Levenson, Robert W., ‘Emotion Elicitation Using Films’, Cognition and Emotion 9 (1995), 87–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a favorable discussion of this method see Oatley, Keith, et al. , ‘The Psychology of Fiction: Present and Future,’ in Jaén, I. and Simon, J., eds., Cognitive Literary Studies (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2012), 235–249Google Scholar.

²⁹ Schwarz, Norbert and Clore, Gerald L., ‘Mood, misattribution, and judgments of well-being: Informative and directive functions of affective states’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45.3 (1983), 513CrossRefGoogle Scholar.