This paper critically examines leading feminist philosophical arguments asserting that inegalitarian pornography inherently perpetuates the objectification and silencing of women, thereby warranting moral condemnation or legal restriction. While recognizing the seriousness of these concerns, we argue that neither objection holds, regardless of how objectification or silencing is conceptualized. Central to our position is the distinction between fictional and non-fictional pornography. As fiction, we contend, pornography does not intrinsically validate real-world beliefs or behaviors regarding women’s subordination. Even in non-fictional (“documentary”) contexts, the purported causal link between pornography and harm remains unsubstantiated. The paper deliberately sets aside ethical concerns about coercion in pornography’s production (e.g., exploitation, abuse) to focus on its alleged social effects. By interrogating the assumed mechanisms of influence—whether through fictional representation or documentary realism—we challenge the foundational premises of anti-pornography arguments and advocate for a more nuanced assessment of pornography’s role in shaping social norms.

In this paper, we want to maintain that the puzzle of imaginative resistance is basically a pragmatic issue due to the failure of participative imagination, as involving a pre-semantic level relating to a wide context (the overall situation of discourse). Since the linguistic meanings of the relevant fiction-involving sentences violate some of our basic norms, what such sentences (fictionally) say cannot be participatively imagined. That failure leads one to refrain from ascribing such sentences the fictional truth-conditions they would have in narrow fictional contexts (sets of fixed parameters) as determined by those meanings in those contexts. Yet one could still make that ascription, for one can cognitively imagine what such sentences would say in those contexts. As is proved by the fact that if one either adopts an alternative view on such norms or, for some reason, brackets them, one can again perform that ascription.

In this paper, we present some experimental findings whose best explanation, first of all, provides a positive answer to a philosophical question in ontology as to whether, in the overall domain of beings, there are fictional characters (ficta) over and above concrete individuals. Moreover, since such findings arise out of different comparisons between fictional characters and concrete individuals on the one hand and fictional characters again and non-items that do not belong at all to such an overall domain on the other hand, they also suggest that ficta are allowed as inhabiting a particular subrealm of that domain distinct from the one inhabited by concrete individuals, as previous findings in cognitive psychology had suggested.

According to some, there is a problem concerning the emotions we feel toward fictional entities such as Anna Karenina, Werther and the like. We feel pity, fear, and sadness toward them, but how is that possible? “We are saddened, but how can we be? What are we sad about ? How can we feel genuinely and involuntarily sad, and weep, as we do know that no one has suffered or died?” (Radford, in: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1975). This is the paradox of fiction which is based on the assumption that emotions, to be genuine and rational, should be directed toward existent beings. But if beliefs about existence are necessary for us to be rationally moved by something, and such beliefs are lacking when we are moved by fiction (because we do not believe fictional characters and events to be real), then our capacity for an emotional response to fiction is irrational. Consequently, our emotional attitude toward future generations should be considered as irrational as well. But is this really the case? Are there good arguments to consider future and fictional entities as similar from this point of view? Or would it be better to distinguish the two? Is there such a thing as a paradox of the future? If so, how does it relate to the more famous paradox of fiction?

Reading starts with the act of perception and rapidly moves into an area concerning the recognition of written words. Word recognition consists of two aspects (functioning simultaneously and working in parallel): the phonological—converting groups of letters into sounds—and the lexical— giving access to a mental dictionary of the meaning of words. But what does the act of reading consist of? According to Peter Kivy, there is a parallel between reading texts and reading scores. And what about the reasons for reading? When we read, we are not just interested in understanding what the signs stand for, but we also activate memory, perception, problem-solving, and reasoning, and our attention is also devoted to identifying those characteristics of texts which help categorize them as works of a specific genre. Readers play a central role: without them and their activity, there would be nothing but a page of black spots. As they read and understand, readers propositionally imagine what is written and, at a further level, they may also imagine objectually and simulatively. These objects come into being thanks to the words that we imagine are similar to what Roman Ingarden sees as a skeleton, needing the experience of reading to be appropriately concretized.

What happens when we read a text like The Name of the Rose? How may we understand what is fictional and what is true in it? By working on Eco’s Confessions of a Young Novelist, we will try to investigate the phenomenology of reading together with immersivity and our emotional involvement with fiction.

This volume features an interdisciplinary view of the concept of distance. It brings together different scholars from different research fields in order to deeply understand a crucial concept in our times.

This volume features an interdisciplinary view of the concept of distance. It brings together different scholars from different research fields in order to deeply understand a crucial concept in our times.

Lexical competence includes both the ability to relate words to the external world as accessed through (mainly) visual perception (referential competence) and the ability to relate words to other words (inferential competence). We investigated the role of visual imagery in lexical inferential competence by using an auditory version of an inferential naming-to-definition task, in which visual imageability of both definitions and target words was manipulated. A visual imageability-related brain activity (bilateral posterior-parietal lobe and ventrotemporal cortex, including fusiform gyrus) was found during a "pure" inferential performance. The definition effect in high vs. low imageability contrast suggests that a visual-imagery strategy is spontaneously activated during the retrieval of a word from a high imageable definition; such an effect appears to be independent of whether the target word is high or low imageable. This contributes to the understanding of the neural correlates of semantic processing and the differential role of spontaneous visual imagery, depending on the semantic properties of the processed stimuli.

ly speaking, counterfactuals, thought experiments, and scientific models seem to be utterly different phenomena. First, counterfactuals are those conditionals whose antecedents are false, for they describe situations that are merely possible, or even impossible. Second, thought experiments are mental experiments performed both in philosophy and in natural sciences that, instead of relying on concrete actual procedures ultimately grounded upon observations, merely rely on hypothetical considerations. And third, scientific models are patterns, sometimes made of actual things—consider Rutherford’s model of the atom, or the three-dimensional eliocentric model of the Solar System that has inspired that model—which, qua props that are proxies of the intended reality to be studied, simulate or idealize the behavior of the concrete items constituting that reality. Following Walton (1990), actual truths about the props can be exploited in order to get truths in the model (for example, actual truths about the spatial distribution of certain balls can be exploited in order to get truths in the eliocentric model about the spatial relations of planets in the Solar System). Note that in accordance with Walton (1993)’s idea of prop-oriented games of make-believe, things can also go in the other direction. That is, truths in the model can be exploited in order to get actual truths about the props themselves. Cf. on this Caldarola and Plebani 2016. Yet appearances notwithstanding, there is a family resemblance among such phenomena. First, as Recanati (2000) remarked by following an original suggestion of Mackie’s (1973), a conditional, hence a counterfactual as well, is the contracted form of a kind of reasoning moving to a conclusion under the scope of a supposition (“Suppose that p. Then q ensues”). Second, that kind of reasoning may also be present in telling a thought experiment, especially a philosophical one yielding an argument in favor of a thesis, yet couched in a narrative form. Third, the sort of tale occurring in that experiment may be similar to the one constituting that kind of scientific model that, instead of using actual props, resorts to descriptions. Perhaps that family resemblance is not just a mere coincidence of overlapping traits, but it has a reason. Indeed, all such phenomena may be seen as forms of imagination, notably the kind of imagination that is exploited when doing fiction: make-believe. The phenomenon of make-believe may be conceived in the normative terms appealed to by Walton (1990), who resorts to games of make-believe based on (prop-exploiting) principles of fiction generation: it is ficCarola Barbero, Matteo Plebani, Alberto Voltolini 10 tional that p iff (in the relevant game using certain props) it is prescribed to imagine that p. But it may also be conceived in cognitive terms, by appealing either to multiple representational models, the reality model and the imaginary model, in order to distinguish the representation of a real situation from the representation of a fictional situation, which is represented in an off-line form detached from behavioral consequences (Perner 1991, Nichols and Stich 2003), or to a metarepresentational structure that involves a metacognitive factor aimed at blocking the confusion between fiction and reality: the situation represented in the imaginary model is fictional precisely because it is so represented (Leslie 1987, Meini and Voltolini 2009, Voltolini 2016). Either way, first, the content of a fiction may be described in counterfactual terms. Indeed, the ability of understanding fiction and the mastery of counterfactuals developmentally go hand in hand (Weisberg and Gopnik 2013). As a matter of fact, a sort of counterfactual knowledge is part of what we learn when we learn something from fiction: a knowledge of possibility, as Putnam (1987) remarked. Actually this is what could be seen as conceptual knowledge, where what “I learn is to see the world as it looks to someone who is sure that hypothesis is correct. I see what plausibility that hypothesis has; what it would be like if it were true; how someone could possibly think that it is true” (Putnam 1976: 488), hence a kind of knowledge not to be seen as the possession of information, but rather as Lewis (1983) underlined, as the ability to imagine, to recognize, to predict one’s behavior by means of imaginative experiments. Indeed, when knowing that in a certain story something is the case, we know how things would unfold if we were in such a situation, the situation affecting the fiction’s protagonists (Currie 1998, Barbero 2017). Second, the telling of a thought experiment is a kind of short fictional tale that has a real import, to be grasped by science: it is fictionally the case that p in order for something to be really the case. As some put it, one may read a thought experiment both as having a fictional content and as having a corresponding real content (Voltolini 2016). Third, scientific models may be compared with games of make-believe, even literary ones, insofar as the latter respectively mobilize physical objects and descriptions as props for imaginary characters, just as scientific models themselves may do in describing an idealized, or even nonexistent, form of reality—frictionless planes, pure distributions of gases, the ether out there (Frigg 2010). And models themselves can be compared to fictional stories, which can further be seen as a sort of abstract objects that amount to cultural artifacts (Thomasson 1999, Salis 2019). In recent times, all such phenomena have individually been the target of several books (to quote just the most important ones, cf. Lewis 1973, Gendler 2000, Suarez 2009). Yet there is a growing interest in also exploring their connections. As a follow-up of the SIFA Midterm Conference / Graduate Conference of the FINO Ph.D. Programme held in Turin on June 17-18 2019, this issue intends to scrutinize such connections more thoroughly and widely. The seven essays collected in this issue address central questions for the contemporary debate on counterfactuals, thought experiments and scientific models from new and thought-provoking perspectives. Conrad Aquilina’s “Simulation Modelling in Fiction” draws a comparison between scientific models, or models more in general, and narrative fictions that can be understood in a similar way. This comparison relies on the idea of simulation. As Frigg himself (2010) originally underlined, scientific models do not work as such unless they are used as models. According to Aquilina, this use in-

According to the 'Consumption Exclusion Thesis' defended by Hegel, the fact that food is consumed means that it cannot be considered a proper art object: art is supposed to be timeless and lasting, two characteristics that food lacks by definition. According to the 'Interest Exclusion Thesis' defended by Kant, when judging a work of art we should not have any kind of interest towards it, because aesthetic appreciation is characterized by disinterested pleasure. In order to defend the idea that culinary objects can be art objects we will challenge both theses by proposing a definition of art able to explain how culinary objects do last in time even after their consumption, and how our approach to them can be disinterested even if we are physiologically attracted by the food.

Nonostante Don Chisciotte e Madame Bovary si siano rovinati (letteralmente) la vita a forza di leggere romanzi, e opinione condivisa che le opere letterarie possano essere molto importanti, se non addirittura fondamentali, quale fonte di conoscenza. Non e quindi per caso che si comincino a leggere le storie ai bambini piccoli, che se ne richieda la lettura ai ragazzi a scuola e si cerchi di sensibilizzare il piu possibile al mondo dei libri, perche, come diceva Umberto Eco, «[…] la nostra ric...

What happens us emotionally when we read a work of fiction? According to some philosophers our emotional engagement with fiction gives rise to a paradox and involves either irrationality or participation in a game of make believe. I argue that an Object Theory in a meinongian style, by supporting a realistic perspective on fictional emotions, is able to dissolve the paradox of fiction by providing a positive ontological account of fictional entities (and the properties characterizing them).

The problem concerning the cognitive value of literary works has mostly received two kind of answers, respectively the cognitivist and anti-cognitivist one, the first maintaining that literature is the vehicle of universal truths and the second arguing that it transmits nothing but falsities and trivialities. Between these two opposite positions, this paper defends a form of weak cognitivism supporting on the one hand, and together with the cognitivists, the idea that we do learn from literature, and on the other hand, together with the anti-cognitivists, the intuition that literature does not transmit us (as a first step) truths about ourselves or about the world. The idea is that of suggesting a two-level solution according to which what we learn from literature derives from a combination of knowing that and knowing what . As a first step, in order to learn something from literature we need understand and consequently know what do literary texts speak about, i.e. we need be able to grasp the state of affairs described. This is the first level, the one having to do with literary truth and knowing that . At the second level, our learning from literary texts has to do with imagining what it is like to be those characters involved in those events, hence knowing what it is like to live a life different from our own. At this level we learn from literature as we learn form thought experiments, examples or counterexamples. This is what Hilary Putnam has called “conceptual knowledge of possible lives