Abstract
According to a school of thought associated with authors such as Kendall Walton or Gregory Currie, the type of mental state that a fictional text aims to produce is the simulation of the doxastic attitude (belief or judgment) that a non-fictional text aims to produce. The recipient of a fictional text is not supposed to (genuinely) accept what he is told - to hold it as true - but to act as if : he acts as if a trustworthy interlocutor were communicating information to him, and stores this in a separate mental compartment where he builds up a complex representation of the fictional universe he is being depicted. While the perpetually updated representation of the world guides the subject's behavior, the representation of the fictional universe has no impact on behavior: it is disconnected, separate from the representation of the world that the subject uses as a database for acting.
In Fiction and Narrative (2014), Derek Matravers objects to simulationism that the disconnection supposedly severing the links of mental state with perception and behavior does not specifically characterize fiction. Often what we are given is not directly a situation we are confronted with, but the representation of a situation. To understand a representation we need to build a mental model of the situation represented, and we do this whether the representation is fictional or not. If this construction of a mental model is what we call imagination, then imagination is involved in understanding a journalistic text just as much as it is in understanding a fictional one. According to Matravers, every representation is processed in two stages. In the first (common) stage, the recipient imagines the situations he or she is being told about. In the second stage, imagination is transformed into belief (or non-belief, if the recipient is skeptical) in the case of non-fiction, but remains imagination in the case of fiction.
According to simulationists, belief is the conceptually primary notion: imagination results from an operation on belief, namely simulation, which Currie says disconnects the mental state by severing its links with perception and action. According to Matravers, fictional imagination does not result from an operation transforming a state of belief into something else. Fictional imagination is nothing more than the absence of the operation that, in the case of a non-fiction text, transforms imagination into belief. It is belief that, in the case of non-fiction, results from a special operation: the acceptance as real of the situation described and the integration of the information provided by the text into the overall representation of the world.
But a compromise position is possible, more or less germinating in Matravers when he says that what is given in confrontation is imagined or simulated in representation. According to this compromise position, the imagination involved in understanding a representation simulates belief and (in the case of non-fiction) leads to actual belief by accepting the content apprehended in the first stage via imaginative simulation.
