Lit Imp

2023

McLuhan, 1967 interview with Gerald Stearn “It’s very difficult to have a structure of any sort without polarities, without tension. (…) Without polarities, without contraries — this is Blake’s whole notion of hateful contraries — without polarities, there is no progression, no structure. (But) for a literary person who likes things to move along in one direction on one plane, polarities are distressing.” (quoted here)

Paul Goodman Growing Up Absurd (1960) [214] "the pathos of literary critics like Lionel Trilling who demand that our novels illuminate the manners and morals of prevailing society. Professor Trilling is right, because otherwise what use are they for us? But he is wrong-headed, because he does not see that the burden of proof is not on the artist but on our society. If such convenient criticism of prevalent life does not get to be written, it is likely that the prevailing society is not inspiring enough; its humanity is not great enough, it does not have enough future, to be worth the novelist's trouble."

Paul Goodman Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals (1962??) "On a writer's block"
(p. 119-129) [126] "it is good advice for poets to write prose stories, to keep their poems from incorporating the stories."

Elizabeth Loftus " Our changeable memories: legal and practical implications " (2003) "Memory is malleable. It is not, as is commonly thought, like a museum piece sitting in a display case.“Memory is,”as the Uruguayan novelist Eduardo Galeano once said,“born every day, springing from the past, and set against it.”" "Witnesses reported seeing a white truck or van fleeing several of the crime scenes. It seems that a white vehicle might have been near one of the first shootings and media repetition of this information contaminated the memories of witnesses to later attacks, making them more likely to remember white trucks. When caught, the sniper suspects were driving a blue car. Were we observing unwitting memory contamination on a nationwide scale?" "One of the cleverest and most powerful techniques for planting highly implausible false memories involves the use of fake photographs." "Although much of the research has focused on wrongful convictions, there is another side to the criminal justice coin. Memory distortions can also contribute to failures to convict a guilty person, not because an innocent person is convicted in their place, but because accurate witness testimony can be undermined. If witnesses misremember some detail, or they are told that their stories conflict with other evidence, they might discount their testimony and be less persuasive than perhaps they should be, or the jury might consider their entire testimony to be unreliable." "Scientific research into memory has the potential to minimize these kinds of problem. Information from psychological scientists (and perhaps neuroscientists) could help to keep the people in power from making decisions on the basis of myths or misconceptions about memory." Don't forget the literary critics (and any others) who say, "everything in my book is true except for the names and dates." Via Toxins of Power , from which also this: "A group of US marketing researchers claim that brand owners can make their customers believe they had a better experience of a product or service than they really did by bombarding them with positive messages after the event. Advocates of the technique, known as "memory morphing", claim it can be used to improve customers' perceptions of products and encourage them to repeat their purchases and recommend brands to friends. ""When asked, many consumers insist that they rely primarily on their own first-hand experience with products – not advertising – in making purchasing decisions. Yet, clearly, advertising can strongly alter what consumers remember about their past, and thus influence their behaviours,"..."

Paul Darvasi "GONE HOME AND THE APOCALYPSE OF HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH" (pp. 120-142) in Caro Williams-Pierce (Ed.) TEACHER PIONEERS: Visions from the Edge of the Map (2016)

[120] "The game [Gone Home] received a perfect score on Polygon and the reviewer could barely contain her excitement, gushing praises such as “spellbound,” “beautifully written,” “universal experience,” and “emotionally honest.” ... The critic at The New York Times went so far as to say that it was the “closest thing to literary realism I’ve encountered in a video game.”"

[121] "The game yielded a rich, layered, and emotional experience not unlike a captivating short story or novella, with the key difference being that I was an agent in the narrative. ... I echo what one of my students would later observe about the game: This type of dynamic would not work as well in a novel or film. This video game had staked out narrative territory where its more traditional literary forerunners could not follow."

[123] "A cultural theorist would tell you that, much like songs, TV shows, and comic books, video games are cultural artifacts and can be considered texts in their own right. Like novels or other literary texts, video games operate on a symbolic level, employ rhetorical strategies, and can be “read” or interpreted for meaning. A consideration of figures of speech and literary devices and the unique properties of a literary text are diluted (but not entirely lost). However, video games furnish opportunities not typically available in a literary text: choice and agency, exploration, a sense of embodiment, and a visual reinforcement of the narrative. ...

"A video game’s unique technical and formal features invite a fittingly unique response mechanism. It would be an easy and valid activity for students to write analytical essays about their experience, but I wanted to take a more creative approach. A film isn’t studied in the same way as a novel and, likewise, a video game should be examined with its own distinct set of considerations."

And yet, p. 124 lands on the subheading

A LITERARY APPROACH TO A VIDEO GAME

as if to suggest that the liter-ary is a far broader construct than liter-ature. And indeed it is, if what follows is any indication. "Literary" denotes a whole way of looking at the world. It transcends medium. It has nothing necessarily to do with books. And it is deeply flawed epistemologically, also totally apart from its relation (or non-relation) to books.

(Darvasi, cont. #1)

[127] "Let’s face it; at worst schools are extremely controlling environments. ... systems of control have the objective of creating uniformity, making sure that all students have the same experience and, ideally, acquire the prescribed knowledge in the same way. This is a carryover from our industrial past. ...

[128]

"Marshall McLuhan, aptly nicknamed the Oracle of the Electronic Age, once wrote that “the notion that free-roving students would loose chaos on a school comes only from thinking of education in the present mode – as teaching rather than learning.” ...

"We [teachers] have to assert control to maintain order, to fulfill our legal obligations, to parcel out specific knowledge at a specific time, and to make sure that our charges are more or less given the same opportunity to learn the same material. It is extremely difficult to resist the machinations of mass-produced education. I openly confess that I can be and have been a controlling teacher, and a video game has caused me to reflect and reconsider this failing.

...

"In the past, I’ve wanted to teach them to see everything I see and to know everything I know about the nuances and rhythms of the language,... I’ve wanted to impress my template of knowledge wholesale on each of their plasticine brains. Fine and dandy, but here’s the rub—their brains aren’t plasticine. They do have a high degree of malleability but,... each brain is different with its unique form and pressure and, for all my efforts, those brains will never receive information uniformly. There is only one play titled Hamlet, but every single mind will seize and imagine it differently,... The prince is tightly bound by the unchanging text, but he will be imagined in an infinite number of ways, my conception being only one."

So, whether the artist has one concept, infinite concepts, or no concepts in mind, concepts "will be imagined in an infinite number of ways" by the audience. Abandoning the conceit to direct communication of ideas helps to rollback the "controlling" streak in education which is "a carryover from our industrial past," whereby the teacher teaches their own "conception" rather than nurturing the students' formation of their own conceptions. The "infinite number of ways" a literary object might be "imagined" bring hope here, not despair. There's nothing gained and much lost by denying it. Why then do so many people deny it? (Including even, at times, old Prof. McLuhan himself?) Google (drawing from here ): Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur. i.e. “Whatever is received is received according to the manner of the receiver.” i.e. We receive things not as they are but as we are.

(Darvasi, cont. #2)

[128] "passion is not taught, passion is learned,... In my case, my passion largely stems from what I have arrived at on my own, not from where I was tenderly led by the nose."

Amen.

[129] "I presented the class a choice of six possible topics to “track” as they played. Students would select a topic that interested them and undertake an exercise in focused evidence gathering. ...

"...the Video Game References option proved enticing to the gamers. Interestingly, one might be tempted to dismiss this final video game topic as the most nonliterary, but I would argue the opposite.

"Most literary works are referential systems, containing allusion to myths, biblical stories, and other works of culture and literature. These references enrich the text and often act as a nod to the sources that inspired the creation of the work. This type of intertextuality is by no means exclusive to literature, as fine art, film, music, and other cultural texts often do the same. Similarly, Gone Home is replete with both subtle and ostensible references to the video games and genres that preceded it and contributed to its creation. Uncovering these secret references adds an extra dimension of depth and

[130]

entertainment to the gameplay experience, especially for the gamers in the class who connect to the works being referenced. The in-game references also open a door to discuss why they are included in the game, which can be extended to a consideration of how intertextuality works in other cultural products and texts. Students may not always be fascinated by why John Milton nods to the book of Job in Paradise Lost, but they may be keen to discover why game developer Ken Levine is referenced on a salad dressing bottle in the Greenbriar pantry."

Well, where does this leave us re: the "infinite number of ways?" All of a sudden, talk of conceptual plurality has given way to "referential systems", "allusion", "both subtle and ostensible references" and the like. Whereas the character of Hamlet is received by students not as he is but as they are, Milton's "intertextual" reference is received as it is or not at all. And like jokes, when "referential systems" have to be explained, they cease to be "fascinat[ing]."

[130] "We hadn’t quite torn down the classroom walls, but I watched each player running around freely in the old mansion, jotting notes, taking screen shots, and exploring closets. They were essentially nomads hunting and gathering in an information environment—activities that fulfill McLuhan’s prediction of retribalization in the digital age."

[SK in football meme voice:] C'MON MAN!

(Darvasi, cont. #3)

[131] "While playing, one student remarked: “I keep expecting Uncle Oscar’s ghost to appear, or some psychopath to jump out at me with a knife,” underscoring how Gone Home leverages a haunted house mood to create tension. I thought this was perfect fodder for a lesson on mood and tone.

In literature, much of the emotional climate is determined by the mood and tone of the narrative, two concepts that are commonly confused. To refresh your memory, “tone” is the narrator or speaker’s attitude toward the subject, while “mood” is the atmosphere of the piece and the emotions it conjures in the reader. Mood and tone can be identified in most narrative forms, including film and video games. The distinction is between the emotional impact of what is being described (mood) versus how it is being described (tone)."

So, there is an argument for "tone" as an artifact of transmission which survives the journey from writer to reader; whereas "mood", insofar as it depends on "the emotions it conjures in the reader," is more an artifact of reception which is received according to the manner of the receiver. That is, perhaps "tone" is received more as it is, "mood" more as we are.

[141]
HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH APOCALYPSE

...

"English class can become a sort of theater where everybody pretends the texts are being read. The sheer abundance of communications alternatives is making it harder and harder to focus on reading as we once did. The quickly changing ecology of modern communication expands the notion of literacy to include nonalphabetical visual elements, interactive texts, and a renewed emphasis on orality... Our duty as educators is to design our courses to prepare students to think critically and succeed in their current communication context, as that is the environment where they must survive and, we hope, prosper.

High school English class should continue to be the temple of the written word, but the goal should expand to effective and meaningful modes of communication. All media have the written word at their foundation and it should be given priority, but a space might be made for other meaningful forms of communication. Video games are a new medium and have a long way to go before they can compete with the depth and nuances of literature. A game such as Gone Home has a foot in both worlds as it reinforces a range of skills traditionally associated with high school English, but it also opens the door to skills that are forward thinking and relevant to our rapidly changing age. Gone Home undoubtedly lacks the richness of a literary text, but it compensates in other areas.

...

I use the term apocalypse not only for dramatic effect but also conscious of its original meaning in Greek as a revelation of something hidden or a disclosure of knowledge, not as an end or cataclysmic finality. By unearthing the hidden possibilities and rending the veil we refresh our teaching to align with the world as it is, not as we want it to be. This allows us to open up the possibility for a meaningful renewal of our practice, which is the greatest way to serve and prepare our students. McLuhan famously quipped that “we look at the present in a rear view mirror”—a good reminder that maybe it’s time to turn our attention to the road ahead."

(Darvasi, cont. #4)

With apologies and due respect to the author, who clearly "gets it" as a teacher, the desire evinced here is actually just the reverse: in "the world as it is", the rule Quidquid recipitur... prevails, as this chapter itself elsewhere claims; yet clearly "we want it to be" otherwise, since "a consideration of how intertextuality works in other cultural products and texts" is among the "range of skills traditionally associated with high school English" which "prepare students to think critically and succeed in their current communication context"

There is something untenable about this current context if literary plurality is not how one is to "succeed" in it. And so it is. Reference is the lingua franca of postmodern cultural production. Unless of course you don't catch the reference; and who can catch all of them these days? It is impossible, even for those who would like to. To study instances of "intertextuality", to study the mechanism generically, this is to get all dressed up with nowhere to go.

There is something (much) untenable about "High School English" if literary plurality is an inconvenient fact rather than generative one. The happy side of reception-according-to-the-manner-of-the-receiver is that some works "work" either (any) way. Even in the belly of the Postmodern beast, this (the "surface" level) undoubtedly has more to do with what succeeds and fails commercially than does the quality, breadth, or clarity of reference. The industry platitudes that exalt this dynamic could fill a coffee table book. It might even be ventured, maybe, that this lack of dependence on reference is the real populism, the maximal inclusiveness, the unity that kills division with its kindness. There are fewer platitudes in circulation with which to support this notion, so now we at least have a few.

The problem is there is not much to be taught or learned about surfaces. There aren't many journal articles or term papers to be written about them. We "like what we like" and "know it when we see it." Surfaces are both elementary (either it works or it doesn't) and intractable (whither psychophysics, phenomenology, ontology, ideology,...). Surfaces are preschool and doctoral level concerns. They are less apt in the teaching of High School English than at any other academic level. Surfaces are a concern of "passive audiences," of aesthetes, of practitioners. High School English students, meanwhile, "must survive and, we hope, prosper" in the uncertain and unknown future. For mature adults, "prosper[ity]" is above all a spiritual problem. For the very young it is an intellectual, emotional, and physiological one. When it becomes a technical problem of the acquisition of "skills", we are playing a different game, different entirely from that of either the creator of the work or the mass audiences who have validated the work with their attention.

("English class can become a sort of theater where everybody pretends the texts are being read." Then it is indeed nothing like the "real world," where no one even pretends anymore. Where I work, it was recently revealed (inadvertently) that no one had read an important part of the AFM contract which, as it turns out, has been violated dozens of times over the last decade or so. I read a lot of stuff, but I certainly had not read this part either. Why would I?)

(Darvasi, cont. #5)

[137] "Those who tracked characters explored relationships, motives, and personality traits to flesh out the individual story arcs. They discussed complex issues such as alcoholism, sexual abuse, infidelity, sexual identify [sic], rejection, and loneliness, to name a few."

[140] "students connected with the topics on a personal level as they demonstrated keen insights into family psychology, adolescent angst, teen-parent power dynamics, and how historical circumstances can shape and affect the stories of our lives."

In other words, the moral and epistemological conceits associated with the novel are carried over intact, even though "Video games are a new medium and have a long way to go before they can compete with the depth and nuances of literature." The only "revelation", if it is even worthy of that moniker, is that liter-ary thought does not attach exclusively to the medium of liter-ature, nor to any other medium. It does not require its object to have "depth" or "nuances". Literary thought is, unto itself, a complete worldview, one wherein Quidquid recipitur... is admitted only where it is too obvious to be denied, and where it is denied the rest of the time.

postscript to B&K above, found languishing in the text file (either forgotten or excised): Characteristically, just as there is not enough said here about what narrative actually is, no effort is made to actually define "worthiness," rather merely to catch someone else in the act of failing to define it. I would venture that social contingencies and exigencies can indeed make certain people's experiences more or less worthy of being shared, quite apart from whether those experiences would be "worthy" (or even "interesting") in any more abstract, ahistorical, aesthetic or human sense. Still, narrativizing has the same effect on everyone. Namely, it makes liars of us all. "People think in stories," but universality (if that's really what we're going with!) does not make it right. That is the point.

Paul Goodman Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals (1962) "Designing pacifist films" (pp. 70-79) [71] "What a theater audience experiences most vividly is how it has, anonymously, shared in breaking a taboo, in witnessing with accomplices the forbidden and shocking. The "message" of the spectacle is then employed as a rationalization." [72] "bad audiences cannot be relied on to respond to a whole work of art; they will select from it what suits their own repressions and interpret according to their own prejudices the very fact that they have been moved despite themselves." [79] "Factual and analytic handling of images of war can neutralize their pornographic effect." (more)

Dave Pollard The Pure Immanence of a Moment "She [Parul Sehgal] summarizes Peter Brooks’ book Seduced By Story, which warns of a “‘narrative takeover of reality’... "Narrative, she says, has wormed its way into business..., into law and medicine, and, of course, into political discourse and journalism... "She cites Jonathan Gottschall’s book The Story Paradox explaining how stories invoke “unconscious obedience to the grammar” of the story: “Details are amplified or muted. Irrelevancies are integrated or pruned. [And] each decision [on what to include, reword or exclude] is an imposition of meaning… an exercise of power.” The rewriting of history, the drafting of obsequiously distorted case studies and biographies, the whitewashing of memoirs are all such exercises of power. Art, music, and much poetry, on the other hand, do not lend themselves to being conscripted to the service of the author,..., these arts provide “no assurance of closure or comfort”."

comment to
"ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving"

From the department of confronting what we value...

"High school English" is somewhere between a euphemism and a misnomer when what is really being taught (and subsequently written/written about) is "English Literature," i.e. narrative fiction.

When I came up through the IB gauntlet in the late 1990s (starting with "pre-IB" all the way back in middle school), I had by far the heaviest workload in "English" class. I had great teachers who "got it" in all the right ways. But it was ALL built around narrative fiction. That's why I absolutly dreaded the "writing" assignments despite being (probably) the most able and willing "writer" in the class. By the time I graduated I had written a hundred short pieces of music on my own time, usually between 10pm and 1am, and I had emptied nearly a whole ream of printer paper writing about narrative fiction. I'll never forget staring at that stack of paper as I began to reorganize my stuff before college. I went numb for a moment. It was actually mildly traumatic. As this comment indicates, I'm still not over it. The day I learned that my stellar IB exam had bailed me out of all college "English" classes was one of the happiest days of my life.

From the time the novel first began to be accepted as a serious art form, Western literary people have refined and collected all manner of lovely rationalizations and platitudes in support of narrative fiction as the ideal lens through which to teach not only "writing" but just about everything else too. Literature is "a lie that tells the truth;" as if the search for documentary evidence is what drives fiction readers. Literature "fires the imagination;" as if musicians, scientists and craftspeople did not have or use their "imaginations." For bookworms literature is a "repository of memory;" whereas for anthropoligists and cognitive scientists memory just keeps becoming less trustworthy the better it is understood.

My high school experience prompted me, as an adult, to start paying closer attention to all of this. I don't understand how or why anyone still takes seriously the old views of narrative fiction's pedagogical role and value. I think we are just beginning to see some real "cultural lag" around this issue, prompted not by the question of "teaching writing" to adolescents but by the rough seas faced by (professional) journalism. The inherent tension between journalism's narrative and documentary capacity is suddenly harder to ignore. But when I talk to novel-readers the old platitudes come fast and loose as ever.

If all of that is too much, there is at least this: some of us are just cognitively, culturally, affinitively incompatible with narrative fiction, but not necessarily with "writing." Some of us are "musical" (others are "theatrical") rather than "literary" not merely in our superficial tastes but in our whole gestalt. And for us, "high school English" was going to suck no matter how "writing" was taught.

Keith Oatley, Raymond A. Mar, and Maja Djikic "The psychology of fiction: Present and future" (2009) "Strictures by post-modernists such as Derrida (1976) who proposed that text cannot represent anything outside itself, and by psychologists who argue that fiction is flawed description, are jejune: both derive from the assumption that art is imitation or copying, the usual translations of mimesis, the central term in Aristotle’s Poetics. This family of meanings is, however, the lesser part of what Aristotle wrote about. As Halliwell (2002) has shown, the Greek word, mimesis had a second family of meanings, which is often ignored. This family has to do with model-building, and with imagination. ... "Literary art is not, therefore, to be judged entirely by criteria of a correspondence theory of truth, but principally by coherence (one of Aristotle’s themes...) "... The modern metaphor is simulation. Pieces of fiction are simulations of selves in the social world. Fiction is the earliest kind of simulation, one that runs not on computers but on minds. One of the virtues of taking up this idea from cognitive science is that we can think that, just as if we were to learn to pilot an airplane we could benefit from spending time in a flight simulator, so if we were to seek to understand better our selves and others in the social world, we could benefit from spending time with the simulations of fiction in which we can enter many kinds of social worlds, and be affected by the characters we meet there." "Coleridge’s (1817/1907) idea that in fiction there is a “willing suspension of disbelief.” The phrase is so resonant that it seems true. Yet, psychologically, Gerrig and his colleagues found it to be misleading. When we read fiction, we don’t have to suspend disbelief. Instead we tend often to accept what is said rather easily, and sometimes it may not be true (see also Green and Brock 2000; Marsh and Fazio 2006; Marsh et al. 2003). "A conspicuous accomplishment of international journalism of the twentieth century on war, health, and other human vicissitudes, has enabled us to empathize with people in societies and predicaments far distant from our own." Hmm. Some would say it has merely objectified and sensationalized this suffering for the idle amusement of the privileged. "we investigated associations between reading fiction and social abilities. Mar et al. (2006) measured the amount of reading of nonfiction and fiction that participants did, and then gave them two tests of social ability. One was a test of theory of mind and empathy, and the other was a test of interpersonal perception... Mar et al. found that fiction reading was associated with better performance on these tasks whereas nonfiction reading was associated with worse performance. The former association was re-tested in a larger sample, with the same result, and with an additional finding that the effect was not due to individual differences..."

Maja Djikic, Keith Oatley, and Jordan B. Peterson "The Bitter-Sweet Labor of Emoting: The Linguistic Comparison of Writers and Physicists" (2006) [195] "One's language expresses much more than one intends, as Freud argues in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1965/1901), and errors in the usage of natural language can reveal unconscious motivations." Well okay, so we're back again to taking Freud (this Freud) seriously? [196] "A precondition for treating word usage as a psychometric predictor is its stability across time and contexts. ... In addition, much research has shown that word usage can indicate natural, social, and personality processes, including motivations..." "...strong arguments countering the more simplistic Romantic idea of art as only expressing emotion... If weeping expresses emotions as well as, or perhaps better than, writing a poem, why write a poem? The answer might lie in the functional nature of emotion and the dynamic nature of art." "Unlike weeping, making art is a dynamic symbolic action that not only expresses, but explores, and sometimes resolves the challenges that present themselves to the artist. According to this view, the emotional challenges that compel some writers to write will become apparent in their language when they are asked about their work." This is pretty funny. Debunking the Expressive Fallacy here leads not to a concurrent debunking of the instrumental aims which motivate this fallacy but rather to the exaltation of those aims under a new epistemological cover story. Similarly, in our ceaseless search for psychological tells we are now reading artists' "language when they are asked about their work" rather than reading their work itself. Perhaps this follows easily from yet another panoply of righteous debunkings, i.e. of psycho-determinism and of critical-interpretive license. Instead, we now seek to reveal (implicit?) attitudes while the artists have their guard down. Might as well! I'm just not sure what this revelation actually accomplishes aside from shining the spotlight more on the person and less on the work. [199] " Discussion What does it mean that writers use more emotion words, particularly more negative emotion words than physicists? It does not mean that writers were more emotional at the time of the interviews than are physicists. Pennebaker and his colleagues (2003) warned rather specifically against this misconstrual. In their words, “it is striking how weakly emotion words pre- [200] dict emotional state” (p. 571). If emotion words do not predict emotional states, what do they predict? Here, psychoanalytic interpretation (Freud, 1901; Jung, 1971; Lacan, 1968) can be employed satisfactorily: Word usage can reveal unconscious preoccupations. It is on this assumption that the hypothesis in this exploratory study hinges. It is our view that writers used more emotion-related words when asked about their work because writers’ work is suffused with these emotions, particularly negative emotions, and that these emotions indicate unresolved issues that writers battle using their preferred weapon—the pen (or more recently, the word processor)—to resolve them." "A tendency has been reported in the literature for a high rate of depression and suicide in female poets, but not for prose writers and not for males (Kaufman & Baer, 2002)." "Sheldon (1994) argued, based on his research results, that some individuals might choose artistic rather than scientific endeavor because artistic vocation provides a culturally sanctioned means of remaining preoccupied with one’s emotional life." Rank couldn't have said it better, I don't think, but he might find this extended self-preoccupation badly overdue for a good ol' fashioned "renunciation."

Keith Oatley "Why Fiction May Be Twice as True as Fact: Fiction as Cognitive and Emotional Stimulation" (1999) [101 (abstract)] "Although fiction treats themes of psychological importance, it has been excluded from psychology because it is seen as involving flawed empirical method. But fiction is not empirical truth. It is simulation that runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers. In any simulation, coherence truths have priority over correspondences. Moreover, in the simulations of fiction, personal truths can be explored that allow readers to experience emotions—their own emotions—and understand aspects of them that are obscure, in relation to contexts in which the emotions arise." The speculative "can be" of the last sentence seems important! To "understand aspects" of one's own "emotions" and "personal truths" when those aspects are otherwise "obscure", this is quite the "empirical" project! ( A project of which certain other lab rats have admonished us to remain skeptical! ) "Fiction has come to mean falsehood." Perhaps it is merely more efficient to say "falsehood", etc. than to say "not empirical truth" ? "In [Aristotle's Poetics] poetry, like fiction, meant something made, covering all literary works including drama. In what follows, I use the term fiction rather than poetry, but with the same inclusive sense." The "inclusive sense" is doubly necessary ever since the advent of The Movies, which descend in equal (perhaps in larger) part from the novel as from theater. "Narrative accounts of human behavior by any single observer, without regard to sampling or the subjective bias of any individual perspective and without methods that allow generalizability, fail to meet even minimal standards for empirical psychology. And if to such defects is added the admission that fiction is a difficult-to-disentangle mixture of what has been observed, remembered, and imagined by an author, then the predicament of fiction in psychology seems hopeless indeed." Yep. But,... [102] "Because of its clear nonveridicality, fiction can help to demonstrate cognitive processes that underlie both fictional and nonfictional understanding." Hopefully this point is developed later on, here or elsewhere. I would like to agree that "In any simulation, coherence truths have priority over correspondences"; also that "clear nonveridicality" is actually a good thing because, if nothing else, it precludes the most vulgar, instrumental misuses of art. The problem yet remains that "clear nonveridicality" is not so clear to everyone. Perhaps also, as seems to be Oatley's broader concern, it is too intensely clear to certain hyper-"empirical" autists.

Maltby (Harmless Entertainment) had a lot to say about the relationship between veridicality, narrative and ideology, and this seems important to account for here. " To describe an aesthetic so committed to illusion, artifice, and idealism as "realist" seems a perversity sanctioned only by tradition. ...the cinema of the consensus was not concerned with the philosophical or perceptual presumptions behind its imitation of life, only with the technical expedients necessary to sustain its illusion. ... However awkward a term it may be, however, realism cannot be altogether discarded. ... If a text and its consumers share the assumption that a fixed and mutually known set of conventions represent external reality, and neither seeks to challenge the efficacy of those conventions of representation, then we may describe the text as "realist," regardless of what perceptual systems it operates. The conventions of representation that Hollywood's consensual cinema employed provided its audiences with the means by which they could treat what they saw as if it were real, and order their emotional responses accordingly. " (192-193) " Despite the opportunism of its techniques, the cinema of the consensus was committed absolutely to the maintenance of continuity as the primary ingredient of its realism. ... [e.g.] The narrative of Casablanca... The audience is attached to the film by the process of the revealing of the story, not by the facts of the story's revelations. " (193)

(re: Maltby) I am unsure of how to balance the sweeping quality of Maltby's insights with his laser focus on specific era of a specific art form. I do suspect that this theory of "shared assumptions" travels well. Disney's success in this same era, e.g., has often been attributed to more or less the same dynamic: the classic Disney aesthetic was anything but "realist" in the "empirical" sense, and even less so in its technical aspects, but it found massive audiences with whose "assumptions" it was consonant. We can play Freud (or Skinner!) endlessly with this issue, but one thing is transparent without any recourse to psychology: many people engage with a narrative precisely because of its non-"correspondence" to "empirical" reality, not in spite of it. And meanwhile, on the other side of the transaction, selection pressure is intense regardless of whether successful creators understand the first thing about why they've succeeded (as they typically do not). Hence it is not quite so easy to brush off the "correspondence" issue as a "jejune" formality "Flawed empirical method" is not just a supply-side problem in fiction but also a demand-side problem. People actively demand it from their "fiction", and they reward creators who supply it. Social alienation cannot simply be reduced to zero, not even in the most well-adjusted among us; and so, in a fully saturated media miasma, every bit of this endemic social alienation is a strictly relative "realist" "assumption" with tremendous selection pressure driving creators to unwittingly stumble upon it. That, at least, is the world that our lab subjects live in outside of the lab. If it is virtually impossible to catch anyone in the "alienated" act so as to prove this point scientifically, it is equally hard to simply ignore the revealed preferences of the so-called Lowest Common Denominator, which seem to have everything to do with "ideology" and little to do with "veridicality." Not that Oatley has claimed veridicality for fiction; actually he claims that it exhibits "clear nonveridicality". He must mean on the macro level, in the sense that audiences are not literally fooled into thinking that events are happening as they read. Otherwise, i.e. technically and aesthetically, the statement is clearly wrong. Following Maltby: within any given tacet pact of shared ideological "assumptions" between audience and creator, any degree of "veridicality" is workable provided it is aesthetically effective in treating the given subject matter. Add to all of this the ever-advancing technologies which are mostly designed around delivering entertainment (and incidentally are very good for creating and distributing it oneself) and we just get more and more and more of it until the formerly quite reasonable assumptions about the audience's ability to ground themselves in "empirical" reality begin to break down under sheer force and saturation. THAT is certainly a contingent issue rather than an essential one. Oatley et al may well be onto a potential of literature which is theoretically the enemy of the "narrative takeover of reality" rather than its ally. But one seeks in vain for a peep of resistance from this cohort as the Takeover proceeds apace.

Oatley (1999) (cont. #1) [102] "...Bartlett (1932)...showed that when people read a story, their comprehension and remembering of it are not faithful renderings. They are based on idiosyncratic and societal schemas available to the reader;... With Bartlett's finding, one can see that it is not just that stories are made up; in people's understanding of them, they suffer uncontrolled changes and a further drift toward the inaccuracy with which fiction is associated." "Although Gerrig was persuasive in demonstrating processes such as schematic construction that are common to both fiction and veridical understanding, the tenor of his argument about the truth value of fiction remains one of suspicion. ... The problem with fiction...is not that of explaining what Coleridge called the "willing suspension of disbelief"... The problem is quite the opposite. It is nonfiction, with its primary representative science, that requires special effort. ... One can imagine that Gerrig would have thought Coleridge more correct to have written that science requires the willing suspension of facile belief." No argument from me on any of this. I wonder if speculative or polemical writing, e.g., is not therefore at root a dressing up of/indulgence in precisely that "facile belief" which is inimical both to "science" and to "fiction"? This certainly seems to be a hazard. But how "special" is this "special effort" really? "...Gerrig suggested that fictions may, nonetheless, be useful in intermediate stages of thought, because they are cancelled when valid results are reached. ... So,...in the end Gerrig too separated fiction—untrue and potentially misleading—from psychology, with its effortful procedures for reaching valid empirical conclusions." Is it the "separat[ion]" that's really at issue here? Or is it that adept "empirical" scientists know that "valid results" also are "reach[ed]" only (ever) provisionally; whereas the adept instrumentalizers of "fiction" are not quite the able "cancell[ors]" that they aspire to be? "Fiction is dismissed in this way only if it is understood as defective empirical description." Of course. But what if it is "understood" to be twice as true as the most "valid" of "empirical" results. Wtf are we supposed to do with that sort of pretense? "Modern psychology as science has allied itself [103] with only one kind of truth: truth as empirical correspondence. This kind of truth is necessary but not sufficient. If psychology is to be fully psychology, there must be consideration of two other kinds of truth as well: truth as coherence within complex structures and truth as personal relevance. "Empirical psychology obeys criteria of the first type of truth. Fiction fails this criteria but can meet the other two. One could say, then, that fiction can be twice as true as fact." Egads. "Bruner (1986) has argued that narrative is that mode of thinking in which human agents with goals conceive plans that meet vicissitudes." Nice. "Not all narrative is fiction." Literally/technically true but pragmatically false, I think. "Aristotle made this distinction: History is about the particular, about what has happened, whereas poetry (fiction) is about the universal, about what can happen. One could add that empirical psychology, with its convention of past-tense description of data that have been gathered, can be grouped with history." Paging Taleb et al re: retrospective and prospective epistemologies. "Vicissitudes tend to elicit emotions. Thus, one could add to Bruner's proposal the following: Fictional narrative is that mode of thought about what is possible for human beings in which protagonists, on meeting vicissitudes, experience emotions." "what is possible for human beings" is an (the!!) empirical project in capsule. It is not just possible but actually customary, I argue, for a "narrative" to be both (1) not "possible for human beings" and (2) not "clear[ly] nonveridical" , this because most of us have no f***ing clue what is and is not "possible" for us nor for anyone else. I think this explains, first of all, the sheer appeal of narrative fiction, but also the tendency for it to be taken for valid empirical description (for precisely what it cannot be) by everyone who is not inclined to think really f***ing hard about stuff in general. That is the whole problem. "The term used by Aristotle to describe the relation of world to text was mimesis. It was the central concept of the Poetics. Over the time during which such matters have been written about in English, the term has almost universally been taken to mean imitation or representation. ... [104] ... With "copying technologies...unintentionally, the idea of art as a faithful representation of nature was finished." Well, yeah. "Technology" is an empirical project too. Not that it promises anything like absolute truth, but it certainly can be the "finish" of existing truth claims which have survived too long simply because they otherwise encountered no "empirical" resistance. This could even be seen as an ethic of technological "disruption" in the techbro mold, but applied to epistemology rather than to markets. Likewise, doing as both the techbros and the techno-dinosaurs do in the heat of battle, we will tend to be favorably or unfavorably disposed towards it more based on vulgar self-interest than on principle. Such is my feeling, at least, in the wake of this passage and what follows below. "Historically, literary criticism did not remain fixated on this problem [of mimesis]. ... About 250 years ago, the era of romanticism in literature began. This involved a further shift of interest to the link...between author and text... In the last 30 years or so...the focus has shifted again, now to the link between reader and text, to the questions of reader response and how readers interpret a text." ... "it seemed...the problem of art as mimesis might have been made to go away. Perhaps the most articulate philosopher of this romantic theory of art was Collingwood (1938). He accepted that mimesis equaled representation and saw this as the mark of the technical." Gee, I couldn't have put it better. Without having yet consulted Collingwood directly, I can only speculate that perhaps "the mark of the technical" indeed comes with some baggage that we would do well to watch out for! "He went on to argue that one needs a representation when one is working to a plan... In fiction, the idea of writing technically is that of formula: to achieve a predetermined end of arousing specific emotions in the reader... When people see deliberate elicitation of specific emotions in other societies, they call it magic, which they tend to regard as pseudoscience. But this is wrong, according to Collingwood. Magic is legitimate social activity;...not pseudoscience but pseudo-art." Rank and Becker have shown this beyond a reasonable doubt, no? "Because emotions are responses to the problematic and to the unanticipated vicissitudes of life, they basically demand creative responses... By definition, being creative cannot be done to formula in relation to any specific representation or to determine any specific effect." Why do I always agree so fully with the part of these papers where the opposing argument is laid out? "It is for this reason that Collingwood, with the typical understanding of mimesis as representation, rejected Aristotle's Poetics as technical hints for hacks and thereby finessed the problem of what relation the work of art might have to the world." Finessed? I think this "relation" is herein made perfectly clear. "With art proper, he argued, there is only the creative expression of emotions, and there is no issue of representation. "Despite this, the question of the relation of words to world did not go away. Also, despite the limitations of science and the naggings of postmodernism, science can bring words and other symbols into correspondence with things in the world, but this needs the complex and effortful procedures discussed earlier." Uh...yep. p. 105—expands on the idea that "A play or novel runs on the minds of the audience or reader as a computer simulation runs on a computer." This metaphor of course "was not available until recently." Much has been made of the metaphor treadmill by those dreaded "postmodern"-ists; also of the speciousness of the computer metaphor specifically by the more techbroey scientists-of-mind. I'm tempted to argue something like: there can be no "simulation", only experience. Maybe that is precisely the author's point here; if so, he'd have done better to eschew the "computer" stuff. In any case, this isn't a corner I want to be working. [106] "Dreaming is familiar to most people, programming computers only to a few; thus, as a metaphor, simulation works well only for a minority." Isn't this perfectly backwards? Doesn't the metaphor "work well" precisely for the great majority who don't actually know anything about either computers or laboratory psychology? Isn't that precisely how this mischief gets started? Hard for me to say, since I count myself among the ignorant here. When I do know something about a subject, though, I do find almost every popular metaphor about it to be totally wrong. Don't you too? "since the Russian formalists, two separable aspects of narrative have been recognized, the fabula (events of the story world) and the suizhet (the aesthetic working of the plot). Following Brewer and Lichtenstein (1981), I label these aspects the event structure and the discourse structure." the first being that "which psychologists can recognize as the material to be constructed into a mental model...or situation model that, of course, does have aspects of representation (semantics)..." the second "includes speech acts (pragmatics)" YIPES!! "and cues to the reader as to how this model is to be constructed and run." This draws us closer yet to Maltby's account, I think. "For a writer of fiction, it would be no good simply offering something like "event + event + event"; he or she must also offer clues and means for running the simulation." e.g. the "suspense story" "(a) get the reader attached to a likable protagonist, (b) create a believable threat to this character, and (c) have the threat originating from some person or agency toward whom the reader will feel antagonistic." Well obvs, But wtf is "likable" or "believable" ? Glossing over "postmodernism" here is a mistake. Of course there can be near-total consensus on a person's "likab"-ility (or in the case of one of my older co-workers, on his being "hard to hate"), and of course there is an element of "human nature" underlying this which cannot be reduced to zero. But the observable variation is wide enough that I'm still not sure that we can build any useful theory on such essentialist assumptions as above. And I'm also not sure we have to go looking for people who loathe pizza or crave lutefisk in order to cinch the argument. There will still be plenty of agreement. Do we see anything like that level of agreement about what is "believable" in a narrative and what is not? That is already quite a complex question. All of this to say: universalism ain't dead, but it has taken a hell of a beating. Also, cultural fragmentation. MacCannell: "The group does not produce the world view, the world view produces the group." Sad to say, but the "view" of any given "protagonist" as "likable" has probably created more cultural affinity groups during my lifetime than has any well-considered political or philosophical ideology. That's one way I rationalize my dogged skepticism of The Literary Imperative. I can only imagine that the view from inside those groups is not quite the same as mine from without. [107] "Writers avoid imitating all aspects of such conversations: "Eh. Yer . . . uhm," ...after the first three utterances, this real conversation is largely incomprehensible from a transcript, although it was not to the participants. ... "...essentials of human action that do not appear in behavioral copies such as tape recordings. These include characters' goals and interpretations." Well, if you want to preserve the comprehensibility of an "Eh...uhm" encounter without rewriting the dialogue, then you could just make a film instead of a novel. But then you would not be making a novel. (And you would not have the "tape recording" as a rhetorical foil.) And of course you may thereby introduce new film-specific distortions. Often enough there is a ready means to do exactly what an artist or critic says must be done, just not in their own medium. The 2006 paper above has a passage that hints at this ("functional nature of emotion"..."dynamic symbolic action"...). This is another corner I don't want to be working. A simpler issue, though, is this blanket assertion (ca. 1999!) that "writers avoid" the tape-recorder mode in favor of the "as it might occur in a novel" mode. Suddenly it seems we are deeply entrenched in "romantic"-ism in spite of prior disavowals. p. 108—an except of dialogue from Tolstoy contrasted with laboratory study of married couples —"transcription" (i.e. of real conversation) must be either "accompanied by interpretive analysis" or "altered (fictionalized)" in order to "then become parts of a simulation in which meanings can become comprehensible." In contrast, "a faithful, empirically unexceptionable copy of real life" runs aground for lack of "context". Unconvincing. More convincing, to me at least, is Lakoff's conclusion that " Words are not just words—they activate a huge range of brain mechanisms. Moreover, words don't just activate neutral meanings; they are often defined relative to conservative framings. " Doesn't that mean that readers will always enter into different "simulations" regardless of how well-wrought the narrative is? The real problem with the "empirically unexceptionable copy" (if there is a problem with it) is that it's not entertaining. The fact that it has not been worked over by a zealous annotator or novelist says nothing about its "comprehensib[ility]"; rather its access-ibility, which is something else entirely. We are here again slaves to the dreaded LCD, even in the controlled "empirical" setting of the lab. [109] "The second [proposal of this article] is that fiction can be involving; it can serve as a personal truth and give rise to insight. Although nonfiction such as science can be interesting, it is generally not part of its function to touch its readers in a personal way." See comments to Lasch above (Revolt, pp. 149-150). Larsen and Seilman (1988) "found that twice as many memories in which the reader was personally involved as an actor (as compared with an observer of reported events) occurred with the fictional text as with the expository one. They argued that this kind of reminding provides the basis of a personal resonance between themes of a story and those of the reader's life." "It seems likely that the provenance of fiction is the ordinary conversation (turning things over together) in which humans have taken part in all known societies. Such conversation is most frequently about what people have done, what they are up to, and what the personal implications of such doings might be." So, gossip? ...gossip that tells the truth? ...gossip may be twice as true as fact? "Such narratives, of both the conversational and fictional kind, are not just common; they are at the center of social life." And what is social life "at the center of" ? Becker's account of "the quest for the ideal heroism" seems apt here. From ch. 13 of The Birth and Death of Meaning: " The religious assessment of madness is remarkably like the psychological one. The universal geniuses [of "Judeo-Christian and Oriental religions"] began a critique of narcissism, of loyalty to the loved ones, the family, the tribe, the nation, to the detriment of the stranger, the fellow-man wherever he came from, the whole of humanity. ... Each individual was a sacred center, they said, a free and pure spirit who cannot be measured by a material yardstick; by saying that each individual had a divine soul they meant that he was not to be reduced to earthly measures, which is what men of power have almost always tried to do to their human chattel. ... "... The great promise of symbolic modes [of behavior] was that they would infinitely extend the range of this [human] animal's action and perception, make him truly a prince of the earth,... But the fact that the symbolic modes were built into an animal with man's peculiar weaknesses gave rise to a paradox: that instead of remaining free and broadly adaptive, the new symbolic animal immediately became "symbolically re-instinctivized" almost as solidly as the other animals were physio-chemically instinctivized. In each human society individuals were solidly programmed into the cultural world view and only rarely did isolated individuals break out of it... The anxiety-prone higher primate overcame animal instincts only to fall slave to the symbol-reflexes of his trainers and his social group. He lives out the answers to the six common human problems as reflexively and uncritically, for the most part, as a cat tenses to pounce on a mouse. "... The challenge of the modern theory of democracy is that more people than just the geniuses or gifted leaders will have to free themselves from cultural constraint in order for sufficient new energies to emerge from nature. And the religious geniuses themselves already knew that their own small numbers were not enough, that large masses of people will have to turn from narrowness and illusion to a more universal development. ... "... A large part of the evil that man unleashes on himself and his world stems not from a wickedness in his heart, but from the way he was conditioned to see the world and to seek satisfaction in it. He blindly follows out his unconscious urges in the frantic activity of daily life, and gets his satisfaction and his self-esteem. ... He is part of an objectified structure, an ant doing his small part reflexively in a huge anthill of delegated power and authority. ... And so the best and most "natural" intentions work the great historical evil that we have seen in our time. " (pp. 182-185) Becker then introduces a quadripartite theory of "Levels of Power and Meaning"... " It seems to me that we have, then, evolutionarily and historically, a common problem for men of good will in all fields to work on: in their own lives if they so choose, and in the social and political sphere. Basically,...it is a problem of the identification of idols. To what powers has a man given himself in order to solve the paradoxes of his life? On what kind of objective structure has he strung out his meanings and fenced off his own free energies?... "We might say that there were roughly four levels of power and meaning that an individual could "choose" to live by: 1. The first, most intimate, basic level, is what we could call the Personal one. It is the level of what one is oneself, his "true" self, his special gift or talent, what he feels himself to be deep down inside, the person he talks to when he is alone, the secret hero of his inner scenario. 2. The second or next highest level we could call the Social. It represents the most immediate extension of oneself to a select few intimate others: one's spouse, his friends, his relatives, perhaps even his pets. 3. The third and next higher level we could call the Secular. It consists of symbols of allegiance at a greater personal distance and often higher in power and compellingness: the corporation, the party, the nation, science, history, humanity. 4. The fourth and highest level of power and meaning we would call the Sacred: it is the invisible and unknown level of power, the insides of nature, the source of creation, God. These levels, of course, are not discrete for most people: most of us live in several of them, and the importance we assign to each level gives the general orientation and dimensions of our self-world. I said that the individual could "choose" the levels he would live by, and it is obvious why I put the word in quotation marks: usually the person doesn't ask himself this basic question: this is decided for him by the accidents of his birth and training and by the energies of his heredity... " (pp. 185-187) And finally, the kicker: " If you extend your allegiance to the power and meaning of the second [social] level you are still very narrowed down to a limited world: ...what the psychoanalysts so aptly call "the incestuous symbiosis"... "The process that we call "secondary socialization" takes people onto level three, and if you extend only that far you live as most people do today: you broaden out your identity to the full scope of the social world, make a solution of the problem of your career and your social self-esteem; if you give your allegiance to large, humanistic abstractions like science, the development of history or humanity, you transcend yourself sufficiently to give a rich meaning and support to your life. " (p. 188) For now I have nothing to say about the "Sacred" Level 4. Also, I certainly am aware that the mere occurrence of the word "social" in two vastly disparate pieces of scholarship hardly permits the facile mapping of one onto the other. I merely want to suggest that when lit and art theorists regale us with tales of the "social," we had better not lose track of the very real differences between "primary" and "secondary" socialization, nor of what this might mean for "The challenge of the modern theory of democracy." e.g. Working through some of Oatley's sources reveals the finding that "empathy" is less acute the weaker the social tie. This implies that literary empathy makes for better people but not necessarily for better citizens. It is also a piece of "empirical" evidence supporting Lasch's (and many others') view that, contra Becker's "universal geniuses," "loyalty" to "the stranger, the fellow-man wherever he came from, the whole of humanity" is impossible. [109] "Dunbar (1996) has argued that conversation about oneself and others has a function of socioemotional bonding." Sure, but that cannot be its sole cause or effect. [110] "Most indigenous forms of narrative therapy and healing...have cultural functions of reintegrating disordered individuals and disturbing experiences with communal beliefs and practices." Yep, when we share the "beliefs and practices" it's "therapy", and when we don't its propaganda, repression, tyranny, etc. See again Becker, Escape From Evil, for an anthropological account of the origins of "social inequality" in elite "priestcraft." Oddly enough, contemporary clinical Therapy in becoming ever more solipsistic thereby begins to break with the (priestly) imperative to "reintegrat[e]" the patient; and to that same extent perhaps it ceases to serve power quite as baldly as its most outspoken critics have feared. "One of the most important suggestions made in this area is that certain rituals, as well as certain kinds of drama and other fictional forms, achieve their principal therapeutic value for emotions that have been too overwhelming for people to assimilate in ordinary life." You mean it's not just the Johnny-come-lately Modernist grotesqueries but also the most ancient, elemental "ritual" and "drama" which can be facilely read for signs that something is wrong? (Perhaps because something is always wrong with human beings?) Becker really is useful here, because he documents the seemy underside of all this seemingly innocuous "ritual." e.g. The word "communal" above could imply a bottom-up process, or at least some sort of tacet consent; but Becker the anthropologist finds this consent to be little more than existential desperation; he finds the "ritual" coextensive with repression and exploitation. To believe, then, in the therapeutic potential of "fictional forms" but not in their "priestly" propagandistic function, this requires demonstrating a whole panoply of additional premises; foremost among these, I think, is an ironclad McLuhanist account of surface content whereby Oatley's "correspondence" (as against "coherence") is well and truly inert. Fond as I am of certain of McLuhan's ideas, I still have trouble believing that repeated exposure to a very distinctive and emotionally penetrating subset of "correspondences" could ever fail to have some effect, though certainly it is very hard to say just what that effect might be. A personal example: it is very, very difficult for me to think of Mozart without conjuring more or less literally his portrayal in the movie Amadeus. Hearing Mozart played and discussed at home by parents and guests over several years made nowhere near the impact that my seventh grade band teacher made in one class period by deciding to show us the movie. "the most momentous literary discovery of Aeschylus and Sophocles in their tragedies was that human action, no longer directed by gods, often produced unforeseen results. ...if now humans live in a world where they choose many of their own actions, then their mental models are usually imperfect and invariably incomplete, whereas their agency is limited by the constraints of embodiment. ...although they start with aspirations (goals) and although they contrive plans, people's actions can have consequences they do not foresee (vicissitudes). As authors of these actions, people experience their consequences and must take responsibility for them, suffering the changed personal circumstances and their accompanying mental states (emotions)." Oatley leans heavily on this terminology of "goals", "vicissitudes", and "emotions". I'm not sure if this passage is to define them retrospectively or merely to give one of several possible examples. There's lots to be said about this passage from a philosophical angle. I find it mildly humorous that this all would come down to guilt over the unintended consequences of intentional actions. "Narrative therapy" cannot possibly be the only (or the best) window in on that question, can it? [114] "There is perhaps no sharp dividing line between fiction and nonfiction. History and biography, for instance, can be profoundly moving,..." Whither "science"? By now the "sharp dividing line" seems to be between "science" and "narrative." Which is both telling and ironic. [115] "Specific emotions are primarily evaluations of events in relation to goals; they are about what is important to one." This would explain why so few are "touch[ed]in a personal way" by "nonfiction such as science". And indeed, this is "generally not part of its function." But this does tell us "what is important to one." Best of luck to you if "science" ain't it. "If, therefore, emotions of reading are ones own, not just pale reflections of the emotions of fictional characters, insight would be more likely when such emotional experience is combined with contexts of fictional simulations that allow it to be [116] understood better than is often possible in ordinary life." Okay, well, looking back this was all there in the Abstract but it didn't grab me the same way at first. After all this, we've finally made good on the loaded title. And what is it that the reader seeks to "underst[and]" here? It is their own emotions. It is themselves. After all this, it is not "fiction" that is "twice as true as fact", but rather something vague called "insight." (backtracking a bit...) "Insights of a personal kind when reading fiction are more likely to occur when the reader is moved emotionally by what he or she is reading and when the accompanying context helps the understanding of the resulting emotions." "clearing away obstacles to understanding" That is, to self-understanding? This is quite the sidestep. We started by accepting tout court the twin premises that (1) fiction is empirically "defective" or "flawed", and (2) "stories are polysemous"; we accepted that literature's "correspondence" to empirical reality is weak; and we accepted that the reader's emotions are their own, not those of the author or the text. And so, it is precisely the fact that the reader is enmeshed in their own response which makes literature a vehicle for gaining self-knowledge. But more (much more) remains to be said, I think, about our ability to parse this experience for these purposes. One of many such aspects: " As a society, we are fixating on our inner lives more than ever, yet we are becoming more, not less, psychologically distressed. We need a different approach, one that encourages more outward-focused action and less inward-focused talk. " (Clay Routledge, Outward Action Is Good for Your Brain) Though I hesitate to endorse this piece's economic Boosterism, the basic point about inward- vs. outward-focus does seem important.

Maja Djikic and Keith Oatley The Art in Fiction: From Indirect Communication to Changes of the Self (2014) [498, section heading] "Reading Fiction Improves Empathy and the Ability to Understand Others" (many, many studies cited from the 2000s and 2010s) [499] In one replication, " The effect was not, for instance, explained by preference to read fiction among people who had better empathy and theory-of-mind, or by any other trait of personality." In a study of preschoolers, "By contrast" with being read to, "hours of watching TV did not correlate with any measures of theory-of-mind." "Missing, currently [2014], from studies of this type are experiments on longer term effects. ... Another limitation is that most work of this type has so far focused on fiction as compared with nonfiction." Well, obvs. [500] "reading fiction that is literary made people more empathetic, that is to say better able to experience something of the emotional states of others in an inward way. It is likely that this process diminishes the actor-observer bias (Jones & Nisbett, 1971), in which people tend to see themselves as acting in relation to events while they tend to see others as acting out fixed personality traits." This gets my attention. But I wonder if the ascription of "fixed personality traits" tends to be more reliable epistemologically, at least given a certain degree of familiarity with the person? Whereas "events" outside of your own relationship with someone are a Black Box unless the person proactively reports these events to you? [501] "The main point was that individuals who read Chekhov’s story temporarily changed (fluctuated in their personality) more on average than those who read the less artistic version. Furthermore,...in contrast to effects of persuasion, changes of individuals in their personality were idiosyncratic. Everyone had a different type of change. ... "Popular literature often moves our emotions, but at the end of an emotional roller coaster of the type provided by the typical horror story or thriller, we remain much as we were before we opened the book. Emotion is important to personality change, but not emotion as programmed by writers who have decided in advance that they want their readers to be anxious (in a thriller), or horrified (in a horror story), and suchlike. We think that the intensity of the different emotions people felt as they read Chekhov’s story indicated the strength and importance they attached to the story’s characters and events, that is to say by how touched they were by the story. The readers’ emotions were not prespecified. They were the readers’ own." So, here is a properly Psychological case made for one of the most facile distinctions between art and entertainment: one begets "idiosyncratic" changes, the other leaves us "much as we were before"; to make good on changes "decided in advance", the writer must "program" those "effects" via brute force. But the effects don't last; a reader moved against her will, is of the same disposition still. The problem, if there is one, is that this cohort does seem to have rather specific changes in mind; not specific "emotions", to be sure, but specific abilities, i.e. "improvements in abilities in empathy and theory-of-mind." Re: art and entertainment, see also/again Maltby : " The spectator...merely rents a seat in the cinema for the duration of a performance, a process we might call buying time. The aesthetic experience that has been purchased ends with the expiry of the commercial transaction that has predicated it. ... "This transitoriness is a quality common to aesthetic experiences commonly described as "entertainment";... It is, of course, an inevitable condition of any performing art, since the act of performance itself is impermanent. But it may also be seen as a determining condition of entertainment as a sub-species of leisure. " (pp. 11-12) " ...a broad, commonly assumed distinction between the performances of High Culture, consisting in performances of musical or dramatic texts which exist independently of any production of them, and the performances of entertainment, in which the text does not have the status of a fixed referent but may be infinitely revised with cultural impunity. ...the sacredness of a "text" by Shakespeare or Tchaikovsky bears on any particular production of it in a way quite different from the responsiveness a stand-up comic brings to his performance of routines before any particular audience. " (p. 15) "Fluctuation prompted by literary style is temporary. This means that for many individuals exposed to literature (and other arts), the personality system temporarily may open and then revert to its former configuration. The implication is that an experience of this type can be merely of passing interest. By contrast, those who resonate more strongly with a work of art, as indicated by strong emotions of their own while reading, may be helped by the instability induced in the system to change into a different configuration of personality (see Sabine & Sabine, 1983). Art can therefore be a facilitator, though not a dictator, of self-change." Sure. But to return to the question of "science" and "nonfiction," it seems the same is true of them also; the difference, rather, is that the "fluctuation" is of a kind which this cohort disapproves of, or at least approves of less. (And, per above, they have not studied it half as closely). The difference cannot be that nonfiction readers do not experience "emotion"; and it cannot be that what "emotion" they do experience is not "their own." Perhaps this is precisely the experience and the subsequent conceit of a certain segment of cloistered academic necrophiles, but for the rest of us it is neither necessary nor even helpful. "Emotion" can cause one person to notice details that fall flat on others, and it can motivate the mundane taskwork which is necessary to good scholarship but, yes, not always a whole lot of fun. Rational detachment comes later. Detachment becomes more important the more widely you yourself aspire to publish on the matter at hand; but in the evidence-gathering phase it is not too helpful. "Fluctuations in personality comparable to those that occurred in [502] reading artistic literature have been found when people listened to music (Djikic, 2011) and looked at pieces of visual art (Djikic, Oatley, & Peterson, 2012)." You don't say?! So much of the prattle about "extrinsic benefits" implies an exclusivity which is clearly not justified. Music cannot possibly be the only activity that "makes kids smart," no? "There is a large field of research on persuasion, in which social psychologists have shown how by words and images people can cause others to have beliefs, emotions, and dispositions of particular kinds. Green and Brock (2005) found that narrative can increase persuasiveness of a message. Scientific writing, political communication, advertising, and propaganda, all seek to persuade. But, as we propose here, art does not try to persuade people to believe or act in any particular way. Rather, writers offer cues, and invite readers to draw their own inferences. "Kidd and Castano (2013) argued that literary fiction is more open-ended than popular fiction. People are invited to think more." Great. But watch out for that creeping "narrative takeover of reality," when all things "popular", from sportcasting to barbecuing, become forms of "storytelling." [503] "Chekhov put the issue of the indirectness of his stories like this. In a letter of October 27, 1888 to Suvorin, he wrote that there are two things one must not confuse, “answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author” (as cited in Heim & Karlinsky, 1997, p. 117). A few lines later he suggested that artistic writing compares with presentation in a court of law. “It is the duty of the court to formulate the questions correctly, but it is up to each member of the jury to answer them according to his own preference” (as cited in Heim & Karlinsky, 1997, p. 117). "In his elegy to Yeats, Auden (1977) wrote, “poetry makes nothing happen” (p. 242). He was right; art is not like a toaster that makes bread turn into toast. But recent evidence has shown that artistic literature can allow things to happen in the minds and personalities of readers. Psychologically, this is a nondirective social influence: indirect communication." I guess I don't understand why "indirect communication" is not a contradiction of terms. Similarly, if the author is merely to "formulate" the questions rather than also "answering" them at once (or insert whatever literal or metaphorical version of this from earlier in the paper), this would seem to fall short of an intent to "communicate" in the conventional sense; it seems more like a "signal" than a "message." (And of course the reader who spends both money and time to read the author's work sends back at least one "signal" which has nothing to do with literary "communication," aesthetics, or self-development; and for better or worse that is by far the more precious kind of artist-audience interchange in today's world, unless and until Rank's "renunciation" is meaningfully broached.)

Jessica E. Black, Jennifer L. Barnes, Keith Oatley, Diana I. Tamir, David Dodell-Feder, Tobias Richter, Raymond A. Mar Stories and Their Role in Social Cognition (2021) "Abstract ... A growing body of research suggests that people who listen to, read, or watch fiction may learn social skills from stories through various mechanisms, including identifying with and forming parasocial relationships with characters, and simulating the social experiences depicted in the story." Reclaiming "parasocial relationships" as a way to learn "social skills"? This is off to a great start! "Despite recent efforts..., many aspects of social cognition have yet to be explored, and there is a clear need for longitudinal intervention studies." [230] "people in the United States now spend more than 10 hours every day connected to non-print media (Nielsen Total Audience Report, 2018)" "Although people increasingly engage with audiovisual rather than with textual stories, there is no good evidence that the type of medium — listening, reading, watching — has a substantial effect on how stories affect social cognition." Indeed. "Empathy and Understanding Others Our main focus is on processes known as theory-of-mind (often called “mind-reading”), or the ability to understand the intentions, thoughts, and emotions of other people." Hmm. From the "audiovisual" department, here is a meme which...addresses the "mind-reading" question. Similarly, here is IG user doctor.meme_ arguing (who's to say how seriously) that "Empathy is a liberal myth". [236 (this is one paragraph, broken up for ease of use] "As an important component of social cognition, empathy has also been the subject of various empirical studies on the effects of reading. Most of these have distinguished between cognitive and affective empathy. It should be noted that empathy can be understood as potentially self- and/or other-oriented and is considered a multifaceted domain of related constructs, frequently including sympathy, personal distress, and emotional contagion as well as cognitive and affective empathic responses (e. g., Batson, 2009; Davis, 1980; Eisenberg, 2000) The tendency of fiction researchers to rely on the cognitive vs. affective distinction most likely reflects both measurement and research focus. The most frequently used measure of empathy is a self-report questionnaire, Davis’s (1980) Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI). This widely used and tested measure (see also Eddy, 2019) includes subscales for perspective-taking and empathic concern, usually understood to represent cognitive and affective empathy. Because the IRI is well-established and also includes a fantasy subscale that can be used as a measure of narrative engagement (see Johnson, 2012; Mar et al., 2006), it may be particularly attractive to researchers. In fiction research, the use of the IRI’s Fantasy subscale to operationalize dispositional narrative engagement distinguishes it from other forms of empathy and emphasizes the focus of the investigations. Literature on the effects of fiction has focused on other- rather than self-oriented forms of empathy (see Eisenberg, 2000). Whereas personal distress and emotional contagion are self-oriented, perspective-taking and empathic concern involve perceptions of and interactions with other people. Importantly, there is fMRI evidence from neuroscience that supports the differential functioning of cognitive and affective empathic responding (Healey & Grossman, 2018; Stietz et al., 2019). There is some overlap in neural substrates, and nomenclature varies between research groups (some pit empathy vs. perspective-taking, others affective vs. cognitive), but on the whole neuroscientific studies support the distinction emphasized by researchers investigating fiction." [237] "Developing an understanding that others have mental states, and that these mental states may differ from one’s own, is known as possessing a theory-of-mind (Astington et al., 1988)." Hmm. That falls well short of "mind-reading" in any sense, no? [239] "Special Populations ... With respect to film narratives, for example, individuals with ASD are less likely to visually fixate on the characters, particularly their eyes. They are also more likely to misunderstand characters’ mental states and interactions, and their accounts of complex film narratives contain a smaller bias for mental states over objects. "Evidence also suggests that individuals with ASD may be less drawn to fiction than neurotypical individuals. In a study that offered participants a choice of reading options, individuals with ASD selectively chose the option that was neither fiction nor social in nature. However, research also shows that individuals with ASD sometimes become attached to specific stories. For example, many individuals with ASD have a work of fiction as their “special interest”... Further, Davidson and Weimer (2018) found that parent-reports indicated that children with ASD were just as likely to have a favorite story that was fiction as neurotypical children." I would love to see some research on those "neurotypical[s]" who are "less drawn to fiction". Maybe some phone numbers too. [242] " longitudinal studies would allow researchers to move beyond mechanism and focus on prediction as the ultimate test of proposed explanatory models (see Yarkoni & Westfall, 2017)." Yep. "Saying that “reading fiction is good for you” does not mean that your capacity for an empathic response will increase after reading one short story (that you did not choose). Rather, it does mean that a habit of reading books, reflecting on their meaning, and applying it to yourself and your relationships will enrich your life. This enrichment may come in the form of greater understanding of other people, increased empathy, specific historical knowledge, or better understanding of current social environments. These diverse outcomes cannot be captured by a single measure of how accurately people can correctly identify mental states..." No kidding. So, uh...what are we all doing here?

Keith Oatley, Robin Dunbar and Felix Budelmann "Imagining Possible Worlds" (2018) [121] "Among ongoing research questions are those of how people engage in imagined worlds while keeping in touch with the currently perceived world,..." No shit. I mean,...great. "...as well as how far stories were important in human evolution ..." Cha-ching. "In reading or watching a piece of fiction, we engage ourselves in an imagined world, but without losing all attachment to our real surroundings. How is it that the human mind can manage to live in two worlds simultaneously, without confusing them?" Could it be that we do not "live in" the "imagined world" but merely..."imagine" it? "This is a phenomenon we do not yet fully understand." Obviously. "But we do know that, as members of a species who make plans for the future, we imagine possible versions of the world that are based on mental models (Johnson-Laird, 1983)." i.e. This "imagin-[ing]" is quite useful. We might go so far as to call it "instrumental." "Such models can be about circumstances that are not perceived directly." Well sure. But let's red-flag this already, on the very first page, as a "private" matter that must stay private. The "public" intercourse and discourse in a democracy has terrible trouble accommodating that which is "not perceived directly". "So, while sitting in an armchair alone, a reader of novel may understand a social interaction." Good thing we've primed ourselves with previous papers from this school, because here this line comes out of nowhere. "the effects studied in this issue do not all depend on fictionality. For the most part it is the narrative depiction of people’s intentions, interactions, and lives, which is at the center. So fiction, here, is to be broadly understood, and conceived not an antithesis to fact, but in terms of mode and content: narrative accounts of people and their interactions in the social world." Yup. [122] "It used to be assumed that children cannot tell the difference between the imaginary and the real so that, as we grow up play recedes, and we come to focus on the real. Harris (2000), however, has shown that this idea is misleading. Young children are well able to differentiate between events in an imagined world, such as pouring imaginary tea into toy tea-cups, and the real world in which nothing actually gets wet. But play does not dwindle and die. Like other human functions, it develops: it transforms into adult modes such as games, sports, and indeed fiction. The transformation starts early." Well, again (and again...), if we are "mak[ing] plans for the future" then we are, definitionally, not "play[ing]" . The reverse is more plausible: through play, assuming it is truly "play"-ful i.e. instrumentally open-ended, many things may later emerge. "Carney, Wlodarski, and Dunbar (2014) have shown experimentally that individuals with poorer mentalizing abilities prefer less complex stories. ... An author has to work with a reader or audience-member’s mind, and pushing people beyond what they can process will result in bafflement and failure to engage. Conversely, failing to challenge people may result in a less enthusiastic response. In effect, the author-storyteller has to know people’s competences and be able to work with them." That is, to be able to achieve instrumental aims. "Dunbar (2014) has argued that this ability ["to create stories"] played a central role in allowing ancestral and modern humans to bond large communities, and that this must have involved a long prehistory during which the psychological competences required were built up and scaffolded." I wonder if this storytelling "ability" also underpins the "priestcraft" in which Becker locates the timelessness of "social inequality"? "Tomasello (2014, 2016) has argued that cooperation is fundamental to being human. We arrange and enact joint plans, in which a goal in a possible world, shared with one or a few other people, becomes more important than individual goals. ... Stories told as anecdotes and gossip (Dunbar, 1996), whether orally or in writing, have an effect of enabling human beings to make better mental models of others, both for joint plans and for being members of a cooperating cultural community (Dunbar, 2018)." Ditto above. [123] "There is some evidence that mentalizing is more cognitively demanding than processing factual information. Two studies of 2012...provide evidence for an effect of cognitive load when processing social information. More directly, Lewis, Birch, Hall, and Dunbar (2017) showed that processing propositions about the world of intentions (mentalizing) recruits more brain neurons and is cognitively more demanding (as indexed by reaction time [RT]) than processing factual propositions of similar complexity about the same story."

Keith Oatley and Maja Djikic "Psychology of Narrative Art" (2017) [1] "Narrative is a mode of thinking about people who have intentions that meet vicissitudes. In making this proposal, Bruner (1986) contrasted it with paradigmatic thinking, a mode concerned with explanations of physical processes." "We use simulations to understand complexes in which several factors interact. Widely used are those on which are based weather forecasts. Prediction of the weather can be made from a single variable: “red sky at night, shepherd’s delight.” A far better prediction of the kind one can see on TV,...is based on a simulation. We can be good at understanding processes one at a time, but when several interact, our unaided mind is not so good. ... We need a simulation." Seriously? [2] "When Plato thought of a truth, his example was that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of squares on the other two sides... For Radford the truth was that there is no such person as Mercutio. For Currie a truth was a finding reported in Nature Neuroscience. "We might imagine Radford or Currie advising us not to take an umbrella inside a computer while it is running a simulation to produce a weather forecast." Nope. Rather, we kindly "advis[e]" the bookworms to be good Talebians: take no "forecast" all that seriously; take more seriously the worst case and the gauging of its probability and severity.

KEITH OATLEY CHAPTER 13 "On Truth and Fiction" (2017) in Cognitive Literary Science: Dialogues between Literature and Cognition ed. Burke and Troscianko [261] "We humans are members of a future-orientated social species, dependent on plans made jointly with others and on understandings of those others (Dunbar, 2004). Fiction is about thinking and feeling beyond the immediate, into worlds of the possible (Bruner, 1986; Gavins, 2007)." Again, this quality of "future-orientated"-ness is itself a problem. There is of course literature which itself speaks to this, e.g., "The best laid plans..." "Fiction is not best characterized as description. It is better thought of as a set of simulations of selves and their interactions in a range of social circumstances (Oatley, 1992, 1999). It is about inward truth, of others and oneself." And again, "inward truth" sounds harmless enough, but it is rarely held in forever; those pesky "plans made jointly" have a way of forcing truth's explicit articulation. The sidestep here seems to be that "simulation" can effect observable behavior without hardening into a "belief" about the world. I suppose we'll just have to await the advent of those "longitudinal studies" to know for sure. [262] "Clearly in any simulation there are descriptive elements, and one wants facts to be right. For instance, in simulations of the weather one needs individual mechanisms to be right,... ...one also needs to know current facts about air temperature, wind force and direction, and so on,... The issues are similar in fiction. When facts or processes are wrong in fiction, the narrative mode can make them too easy to accept (Gerrig, 1993). Thus, Deborah Prentice, Richard Gerrig, and Daniel Bailis (1997) asked students to read narratives that contained weak or unsupported assertions about either their home school or a school they did not know. Readers’ beliefs on unsupported assertions about their home school did not change, [263] but they did change about the away school. Serious writers of fiction usually do a lot of research on their subject matter. If they get things wrong, if they write in a way that is unsupported, or if their work contains untruths or propaganda, it is damaged." Meaning..."it is damaged" only if the reader already possesses reliable information with which to disprove it? And if not, then what? "Principal questions for a simulation-based weather forecast are: Does it clarify outcomes of interactions among its components, and does it produce better predictions than those from single observations... Ok, I missed this the first time. The question is not whether multi-observation models fare better than single-observation models. That question is irrelevant. Rather: Is the "best" model even "good"? Does it ever work? And if it doesn't always work, then where does that leave us? Taleb's basic criticism of forecasting is to observe, in his particular line of work at least, that the answers turn out to be, "No," "We don't know," and "Nowhere." That's what I would say about weather forecasts too, but apparently I'm just a jaded Minnesotan. [264] "Knowing others’ minds is central to human life. But because what goes on in these minds is not immediately visible, we make inferences. We are good at inferring social truths but, because the social world is complex, we are not that good. We can always improve (Nickerson, 1999), and fiction is a means by which we can do so to develop our understanding of others,..." Well okay. Granted that we can "improve", can we ever arrive? If you start out "not that good", you can "improve" quite a lot without becoming actually "good". I think Taleb, Kahneman, et al would have thrown the book out the window by this time. All the danger is in thinking we know when we really don't. [265] "Luria found that people in Uzbekistan who had not attended any of the new reading classes were not able to answer questions based on syllogisms like: ‘In the Far North, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North. What colour are the bears there?’ These respondents were literal-minded. They answered by saying such things as that they did not know what bears were like in Novaya Zemlya because they had never been there." "Literal-minded"? I would call them "hard-headed empirics." Whom I generally find annoying, certainly. At the same time, when it comes to contemporary issues of prejudice and exclusion, the "empiric" refrain would seem to have more going for it: "I don't know how all [identity group]s act because I have only met four of them." Hence it would seem more a question of which epistemologies are appropriate to which contexts. And this points back to yet another of those bookworm evasions, the insistence that "inferences" from literature are of a special, benificent quality as against those made from whatever all the racists, nationalists and homophobes have been reading; add to this here and above Oatley's honing in on one very specific psychological mechanism which can occur in response to this specific body of print media. To put it mildly, this response and those media seem idealized. There's plenty that can go wrong. I was hoping to avoid McLuhanism here since I don't understand all of HMMcL's finer points, but I thought this was among the most readily understandable and widely accepted of his ideas? It seems to have been brushed aside here. And, hate to say it, but the passages which lay bare this brushing-aside are those which betray a clear "progressive" orientation in the author(s). We keep returning to cooperation, empathy, big brains, planning ahead, and general self-improvement. But our big brains are a curse; they also enable us to cooperate in our own mutual mass-killing. And so we force novels down kids' throats in hopes of reaping only the socially constructive big-brain outcomes while suppressing the violent, destructive ones. [268] "Evidence on Understanding Others In The Republic, Plato says that whereas a craftsman has knowledge (episteme) and skill (techne), ‘the artist knows little or nothing about the subjects he represents’ (602b). A Platonic commentary now might be that an actor who plays a doctor in a television series knows nothing about medicine. This may seem compelling until one thinks that medical series on television [269] are usually less about medicine than about characters and their emotions as they enter roles such as doctor, nurse, patient, hospital administrator, and so on. The actors in the series will have thought deeply about emotion and entry into roles in social life. Insofar as such a series is about medicine, one or more doctors will have advised on the episodes, and both actors and viewers can also learn something about medicine." This strikes me as painfully naive. It is out of date in any case. "Narrative" television of course persists, but already in McLuhan we find the following: " Perhaps it is not very contradictory that when a medium becomes a means of depth experience the old categories of "classical" and "popular" or of "highbrow" and "lowbrow" no longer obtain. Watching a blue-baby heart operation on TV is an experience that will fit none of the categories. ... Anything that is approached in depth acquires as much interest as the greatest matters. Because "depth" means "in interrelation," not in isolation. Depth means insight, not point of view; and insight is a kind of mental involvement in process that makes the content of the item seen quite secondary. Consciousness itself is an inclusive process not at all dependent on content. Consciousness does not postulate consciousness of anything in particular. " (Understanding Media, 282-283) This actually sounds a lot like what Oatley et al are trying to establish with the notion of "simulation"...except that McLuhan sees all of this as being quite in opposition to the way "print" works. Also, if "content" is "quite secondary," then presumably the example of the "blue-baby heart operation" (and any other example that might have been proffered here) is arbitrary. But McLuhan in fact chooses an early instance of Reality TV avant la lettre, and I don't think there's anything arbitrary about that. If much reality tv also is "less about medicine [e.g.] than about characters and their emotions as they enter roles", we can still say that it permits technical interest in a way that classic soap operas do not. [270] " (Our original segmentation was between fiction and non-fiction, but of course certain kinds of non-fiction such as biography, some history, and so on, are also narratives about selves in interaction. It might be that ‘narrative’ and ‘expository’ would be better terms for the conditions that led to different effects..." I'll happily adopt the term "expository". An aside: the first version of "lie that tells the truth" that I recall hearing is the one about "history" books: "In history books, only the names and dates are true. In my [narrative fiction] book, everything except the names and dates are true." If this comes from the golden age of "narrative" histories, then it's perfectly fair; yet perhaps it really says nothing at all about "nonfiction" (or "expository") print generally, even though that is typically the adversary at which it takes aim. "In terms of what kinds of fiction are most effective in promoting social understanding, Katrina Fong, Justin Mullin, and Raymond Mar (2013) separated four genres: love stories, thrillers, family stories, and science fiction. Reading of love stories and thrillers was most closely associated with empathy and social understanding (as measured by the Mind in the Eyes test). Reading science fiction showed no such association. One reason is probably that in a love story a protagonist needs to work out whether a certain someone is a suitable person for a long-term commitment, and in a thriller the protagonist has to work out what the antagonist is up to when this character is trying to conceal it. By contrast, the content of science fiction is often focused on technical matters or fantasies that are not primarily interpersonal." [273] "...much fiction derives from personal, social, or political circumstances that have prompted the writer towards an emotionally intense exploration,... It is, however, not the main goal of artistic literature to persuade readers or audiences to some particular point of view, or to feel, think, or dispose themselves in some particular way in relation to such issues." The Intentional Fallacy! It's baaaack!! A conjecture to be investigated: I think that performance on the "Mind in the Eyes test" is not a "point of view" only if it is confined to the laboratory. Outside the lab these two things become harder to disentangle. "Goals of persuasion are common in writing. ...[even] a writer in science wants the reader to agree with particular inferences from the evidence or theory that he or she has presented, as I want you to do now... Such goals also occur in artistic literature;... But in artistic literature, motives of persuasion are outweighed by the writer leaving it open to the reader’s or audience member’s particular imagination of the social world as suggested in what is written." Sure. Whatever you say. [274] "Artistic literature is not primarily about influencing people to feel and behave in some particular way according to the purposes of the influencer. The kind of writing that exerts indirect influence can be non-fiction, but perhaps most often it is artistic fiction in the form of poetry, plays, novels, short stories, films. Works of this kind influence us and enable us to change by inviting us into situations that are often different from those we ordinarily enter, and expressing them in phrases and ideas we would not have thought of ourselves. In fiction we can lead many lives. In relation to the circumstances we enter in a piece of fiction, and only if we want to, we can experience ourselves in new ways, and change, at least temporarily, in ways that are our own."

Gerald C. Cupchik "The Evolution of Psychical Distance as an Aesthetic Concept" (2002) [155] "Mundane perception is action-oriented and involves the identification of useful objects even when they are depicted symbolically in artworks. In aesthetic perception, the sensory qualities of an object are valued in and of themselves, and the two kinds of information, symbolic and sensory, can be viewed relationally, expressively and metaphorically." What else is Reybrouck's whole "ecological" framework, e.g., but the application of this "action-oriented" "mundane perception" in place of "aesthetic perception"? And why tf would anyone want to live that way? [156] "Intimacy and distance, which are important qualities of social relationships, also apply to aesthetic reactions. Personal involvement has traditionally been characterized in terms of psychical distance. Qualitatively, psychical distance reflects the non-utilitarian attitude that a person must adopt as a precondition for an aesthetic episode to occur. Quantitatively, psychical distance reveals the relative closeness that a person feels toward an aesthetic artifact or event as a consequence of interacting with it." "The main goal of this paper is to show that the processes implied by aesthetic distance (a content-oriented concept) and willing suspension of disbelief (an act-oriented concept) are complementary and, when integrated, provide a comprehensive account of aesthetic engagement." [157] "Lord Shaftesbury (1671–1713; actually the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper) introduced the concept of disinterestedness, whereby the aesthetic object is approached in and of itself and without regard for any practical purpose that it might serve." Cool. "The new aesthetics of the Enlightenment stressed manipulating an audience’s imagination and emotions, in contrast with ‘the rhetorical-allegorical style of the humanist and baroque tradition’. This could be accomplished by selecting subject matter that represented universally shared natural and social worlds, and no assumptions were made about the need for recipients to possess specialized knowledge in order to appreciate the work. Images should be guided by strict mimesis, the controlled ‘imitation of nature’. The goal of art was to create an illusionist style of representation in which the natural world, governed by laws of causality, could be faithfully and immediately apprehended by the senses in a single glance. This ‘visualist criterion’ associated an objective representation of the world with sight, so that the aesthetic event, ‘as if it were the thing itself’, would link a person with the familiar world. Addison (1672–1719) stressed the value of the visual sense (and especially landscape painting) as a source of aesthetic pleasure in terms of both direct sense impressions and subsequent recollections. French Neoclassicism emphasized the importance of the ‘three unities’ of time, place and action in determining dramatic illusion and the evocative power of a play." A very astute (including musically) friend once told me that she associates the term "aesthetic" only with the visual. This has always puzzled me. Perhaps this is part of the explanation? [158] "Richard Payne Knight (1786), the late 18th-century scholar, offered an associationist account of illusion in theatre... Knight also analyzed aesthetic reactions in terms of pleasure and pain responses to sensory stimulation. The example given was of a person’s response to the vaulted roof of a Gothic cathedral that is supported by slender columns. If the person ‘suspects’ that the columns are not sufficient, then ideas of ‘weakness and danger’ may be experienced. This is an excellent example of how associations can shape the experience of aesthetic events and is an application of British Empiricist ideas." "He [J.E. Schlegel] believed that the difference between reality and art was not governed by the choice of subject matter, nor was pleasure a function of subject matter, because even ugliness could be a topic for art. The treatment is what determines whether a work is [159] original and gives pleasure, which indeed is the most important function of art. Each art form has a distinctive medium with which the artist works, and one cannot reject a particular medium on the ground that it does not exist in everyday life. Thus, one cannot reject verse as a medium in drama on the premise that people don’t normally speak that way, and similarly one cannot reject sculpture for not being colored. Aesthetic experience is shaped by order and not by the subject matter or the medium as such. If the subject matter evokes excessively strong emotion that seizes the imagination, then the hidden order cannot be discerned. "... Probability must be available within the framework of the drama itself because the unity of action is more important than the unities of time and place. In short, by providing a meaningful context to account for action, the author brings coherence and meaningfulness to the audience’s experience." Or, as for Maltby, "probability" is tacitly negotiated between audiences and artists as is the speed limit by drivers and cops. "Following Kant’s influence, scholars in the Romantic tradition, such as August Wilhelm Schlegel, grounded ‘aesthetic illusion in imagination rather than in emotion’... He countered the Neoclassical principle that powerful dramatic illusion was created by the unity of time, place and action, treating it as a ‘waking dream, to which we voluntarily surrender ourselves’... Schlegel proposed the very modern idea that reality and illusion actually coexist. ... The acceptance of a dramatic work as real is not determined by ‘probability’ but ‘depends on the appearance of truth to the senses’... Even the impossible might be accepted ‘so long as the [160] grounds for impossibility are left out of the circle of our comprehension or are cleverly veiled from our attention’ (p. 210)." This draws us into almost complete alignment with Maltby, though his account also hinges on the "how" and (more tenuously of course) the "why" of this "veil[ing]" of any "grounds of impossibility". "Coleridge objected to mechanistic models proposed by associationists like Knight because they treated the mind as passive. Instead, he emphasized the logic of the imagination rather than the reception of sensation. Imagination provides a basis for the fluid continuity of conscious experience. Henri Bergson (1920) later provided a comparable description of states of ‘pure duration’ in consciousness:... ...Fraisse (1963) infers that, in the experience of internal duration, ‘our thoughts and even more our emotions fuse together in perfect harmony’ (p. 70). This subjective unity detaches experience from ‘the exact stimuli corresponding to it’, and a search for these stimuli would ‘destroy the state of fusion’... [161] "... Haeger (1992) states that Coleridge argued ‘strenuously for a causal relationship between thought and consciousness that derives the former from the latter’ (p. 99). This bottom-up model suggests that unified consciousness and not analytical thought is the ground and source of aesthetic experience. "... [For Coleridge,] Adult audience members experience an antagonism between what they know (rational awareness that a play is a play) and what they feel (a sympathetic emotional response to the dramatic action); the simultaneity of artifice and illusion to which Wilhelm Schlegel alluded. Excessive rational analysis can therefore get in the way of aesthetic absorption. It is for this reason that adults must learn to ‘willingly suspend disbelief’ and set aside comparative judgments..." [162] "According to Burwick (1991), Coleridge’s ‘faith in the logical coherence of illusion’ (p. 224) was a substitution for ‘the classical precepts of representative and probable’ (p. 224) addressed by Horace and Aristotle. The notion of being representative implies some kind of typicality or familiarity of the poetic reference that makes it accessible to the reader. Too strong a departure from the representative into excessive individualization and novelty makes the poetic reference seem alien to the reader. In Coleridge’s analysis of poetic faith and the logic of the imagination, ‘unwanted particularization disrupts the illusion of verisimilitude; . . . the copy intrudes upon the imitation’ (p. 225). The ideal is to achieve a balance between the generic and the individual. The generic ‘makes the character representative and symbolic, therefore instructive’, because it is relevant to all people. The individual, on the other hand, ‘gives it living interest; for nothing lives or is real, but as definite and individual’ (p. 226)." [164] "The modern treatment of aesthetic distance derives from Edward Bullough’s (1912) seminal article titled ‘ “Psychical Distance” ’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle’. His paper offered a psychologically oriented integration of the Empiricist and Romantic intellectual traditions." [165] "Like the Romantic philosophers, he argued that the ‘aesthetic “fact” is a distinctive mode of consciousness’... A more sophisticated model was therefore needed to distinguish between beauty and agreeableness in the study of aesthetic judgment and preference." "The Russian Formalists also argued early in the 20th century that perception in everyday life becomes automatic and habitual, and the goal of aesthetic devices is to defamiliarize perception, to reawaken it through novelty." [166] "...he [Bullough] saw distance as transforming the experience, say, of fog, ‘in the first instance by putting the phenomenon, so to speak, out of gear with our practical, actual self; by allowing it to stand outside the context of our personal needs and ends’ (p. 89); then, ". . . by looking at it ‘objectively’, as it has often been called, by permitting only such reactions on our part as emphasise the ‘objective’ features of the experience, and by interpreting even our ‘subjective’ affections not as modes of our being but rather as characteristics of the phenomenon. (p. 89) "Bullough’s own poetic account offered a phenomenological description of fog as ‘the veil surrounding you with an opaqueness as of transparent milk,... ...the qualities of our experience are projected onto the stimulus; in this instance, the physical phenomenon of fog." "Distance should not be understood to ‘imply an impersonal, purely intellectually interested relation. . . . On the contrary, it describes a personal relation, often highly emotionally coloured, but of a peculiar character’ (p. 91) because the practical side is filtered out. ... [167] ... The central principle is...the same for both viewers and artists: the goal is maximal involvement without excessive self-absorption; ‘utmost decrease of Distance without its disappearance’ (p. 94). This is Bullough’s main theoretical contribution to the study of aesthetic distance. "The next modern innovation of Bullough was to treat distance as a matter of degrees, which is a function of ‘the nature of the object’ but also varies in accordance with ‘the individual’s capacity for maintaining a greater or lesser degree’ (p. 94). ... Two extreme conditions can be observed in relation to Distance:... Underdistancing occurs when the subject matter is ‘crudely naturalistic’, ‘harrowing’, ‘repulsive in its realism’, and over-distancing takes place when the style ‘produces the impression of improbability, artificiality, emptiness or absurdity’ (p. 94)." [168] "The medium can affect psychical distance, sometimes hindering and at other times facilitating it. Thus, the fact that ‘living human beings’ are ‘vehicles of dramatic art’ is a problem faced by theatrical performances that encourage under-distancing." And also a problem faced by, say, a baggage-laden multi-racial society whose "theatrical" industry du jour insists on producing a lot of historical fiction and mildly fictionalized docudrama "based on a true story." "This viewpoint is further revealed in the comment that the ‘whole censorship problem . . . may be said to hinge upon Distance; if every member of the public could be trusted to keep it, there would be no sense whatever in the existence of a censor of plays’ (p. 97)." Paul Goodman said something similar. "With a sense for the immediacy of perceptual experience, Bullough observed: ‘The mere realism of foreshortening and of the boldest vertical perspective may well have made the naive Christian of the 16th century conscious of the Divine Presence—but for us it has become a work of Art’ (p. 103)." Dare I suggest this is an inevitable product of time passing? That we might as well enjoy it as best we can? That, per Becker, we do more damage by fighting against it than by working with it? [169] "In the end, Art serves to balance the interplay of the individual and the typical. While the typical or abstract counteracts under-distancing by limiting concreteness in art and emphasizing the generally social, the individual opposes over-distancing by bridging to the personal." Here in capsule is all the "politics" us artsy-fartsies ought ever to need! "Finally, Bullough argued against the fundamental principle of hedonistic aesthetics that beauty is pleasure. ... [170] ... Bullough argued, instead, that ‘the agreeable is non-distanced pleasure’ (p. 108). While ‘the agreeable is felt as an affection of our concrete, practical self’ (p.108), the aesthetic experience is focused on the object. It is psychical distance that also keeps us from simply responding to the agreeableness of colours as ‘warm or cold, stimulating or soothing, heavy or light’. Instead, colors are seen as ‘a kind of personality; colours are energetic, lively, serious, pensive, melancholic, . . . etc’ (p. 110). Bullough concluded that the aesthetic state has a two-fold character ‘in which we know a thing not to exist, but accept its existence’ (p. 113). Distancing and Empathy Bullough was clearly aware of the similarity between his notion of psychical distance and the concept of Einfühlung as expressed by various writers of that era, Lipps, Witasek and Volkelt, when he said that Distance ‘is essential to the occurrence and working of ‘empathy’ (p. 117)." Hmm. We're getting further stuck in the muck of semantics. Laboratory psychology now finds the strength of "empathy" to vary directly with the strength of social ties; in that respect at least, "Distance" actually mutes empathy rather than making it possible. But the topic under discussion here is not "social" distance but rather "Psychical Distance as an Aesthetic Concept." Oatley's notion of "simulation" certainly connotes "psychical" depth, but of course it ultimately is also materially "distanced." [171] "Philosophical Commentary and Criticisms of Bullough Philosophers who study aesthetic attitude or experience all quote from Bullough’s (1912) seminal work," Whoops, I seem to have missed "all" of that. "but their citations focus on isolated concepts related to aesthetic distance. They fail to grasp the fact that Bullough was offering a distinctively psychological theory of process and not just the isolated concept of ‘psychical distance’." Okay cool. re: George Dickie's critique and his "attempt to demonstrate that there is nothing distinctive about aesthetic attention" More to come on this, I'm sure, as I slowly reckon with the Margolis anthology. For now: we have already found Bullough observing that "‘living human beings’ are ‘vehicles of dramatic art’" and that this can, potentially, be "a problem" of some sort. Presumably he had no idea just what a whopper of a "problem" this would become once Identity Politics entered the fray. It feels unsatisfying to define the "aesthetic point of view" by what it is not. Clearly that is not a winning piece of Philosophy. Yet the fact remains that the very deliberate and conscious efforts to draw attention to the "living human beings" who make art have very deliberately and consciously recapitulated the above "critique" in negative, i.e. precisely in the brute-force imposition of a "distinctive" way of receiving the artwork; a way-of-receiving which by its proponents' own account did not exist before they arrived to articulate it, and which thus requires special effort by any as-yet-unreformed exponents of bygone "aesthetic" ways. [172] Dickie "argued that Bullough and others who adopted the aesthetic attitude viewpoint were overly committed to the belief that people are generally concerned with ‘the reality of things’ (p. 18). Dickie simply does not believe that ‘being distanced’, and therefore insulated from everyday practical concerns, is a necessary condition for aesthetic appreciation. He believes that people don’t have to suspend practical activity, because any ‘person who is in his right mind’ (p. 22) knows that watching a play in a theatre is not a practical activity." I'm favorably disposed towards this view, actually. The whole problem, though, is that so many in the audience for "theatre" and literature do think they are thereby involved in "practical activity". See basically everything posted above. [173] "In short, ‘there is no necessary conflict between aesthetic appreciation and practical concerns’ (p. 26) and ‘no reason to think that a psychological force to restrain either action or thoughts occurs or is required in the ordinary, non-desperate case of aesthetic experience’ (p. 28)." Perhaps I've misunderstood. The phrases "practical concerns" and "the reality of things" seem to be used interchangably here. But I have been reading "practical" as something like "instrumental" and/or "aimful." "This critique is comparable to that offered by behavioral psychologists, such as Duffy (1941), for whom there is no need to posit special states such as emotion; one model of behavior stressing situational or conventional cues is sufficient." Hmm. Admittedly, Behaviorism sort of fascinates me because it seems to have some bonafide predictive power; also because our whole "advanced" (i.e. managerial) society really is built on behavioristic principles masquerading as elemental social structures. Maltby, whose breadth of competence is remarkable, has a nice vignette on this too ("Reasonable Beliefs," pp. 242-245). [174] "The Aesthetic Work as a System The death of the aesthetic ‘object’ as a thing, in the mid-20th century, can be traced in part to information theory, which dealt with the simultaneous presence of symbolic and purely sensory qualities in visual, musical and literary creative works. [e.g.] Moles (1958/1968)...) His focus was on aesthetic messages, be they musical, visual or ‘polydimensional’ (e.g. cinerama), and on the channel, ‘which conveys a message from a transmitter to a receiver’ (p. 7). "My concern here...is to show the value of treating an artwork in an abstract manner as a multilayered event. ... [175] ... "The multilayering concept in visual aesthetics can also be analyzed in terms of figure and ground relations. The figural part of a work, its subject matter, conveys semantic information, while the ground of the work encompasses its style and transmits syntactic information (Berlyne, 1971, 1974). A comparable view of the multileveled nature of the aesthetic work was also expressed at a slightly later time period by Gestalt-oriented theorists... The central point here [Arnheim, "The trouble with wholes and parts"] is that meaning is always dependent on context both within and without the work, and these contexts can be hierarchically structured, thereby setting the stage for depth as a fundamental property of aesthetic meaning and involvement." [176] "The Kreitlers (1972) provided a very interesting account of relations between multileveledness and aesthetic distance looking back over the history of the concept. A ‘disinterested’ attitude, in Bullough’s sense, eliminates practical involvement with a play, for example, and inhibits action that would normally be called for if the events were taking place in real life rather than on the stage. This distancing also enhances attention to the work and intensity of the internal experience elicited by the work. But a second viewpoint suggests that ‘[a]pparent detachment is thus a side effect of an intense, multileveled personal involvement in the work of art’ (p. 282). Thus the complexity of experience evoked by identifying with different characters and their potentially incompatible viewpoints is another inhibitor of action. According to the first viewpoint, ‘distance is a factor external to experiencing and limits its boundaries . . . without reducing its intensity and degree of personal involvement’ (p. 282). The second approach holds that ‘distance is a factor inherent in the very act of experiencing art fully and uninhibitedly’ (p. 282). It is closer to the Gestalt and constructivist emphasis on ‘the structuring of experience, i.e., its chainlike and multileveled nature’ (p. 283). "An important addition of later 20th-century thought has to do with the social role of the recipient or audience member. The Kreitlers argue that in its early stages ‘art seems to have been much more closely bound up with action and participation’ (pp. 283–284), while the emergence of High Art was accompanied by social codes stressing behavioral inhibition. The Kreitlers therefore tie aesthetic distance to inhibition and conclude that ‘the optimal degree of inhibition can hardly be determined in isolation from the accepted social role of the observer’ and ‘the complex system of interactions between observer, object, and situation’ (p. 284). "This more complex appreciation of the structure of aesthetic works and events was also central to an emerging movement in the humanities emphasizing the polyvalent (Schmidt, 1982), indeterminate (Iser, 1971) and open-ended (Eco, 1962/1989) quality of the interpretive process. Reader-response theorists (Fish, 1980; Holland, 1975) and constructivist (Schmidt, 1982) scholars in the latter half of the 20th century stressed the idea that it is impossible to uncover ‘true meaning’ in [177] literary and other aesthetic works. While aesthetic conventions may govern the appreciation of stylistic structures, it is important to appreciate the subjective and interpretive roles of individuals and communities." [178] "Synthesis The two dominant approaches to aesthetic distance describe external and internal models. The Enlightenment and Empiricist traditions emphasized realism and the ways that an artist or playwright’s carefully constructed representations of the world could externally modulate experiences of pleasure and excitement. ... "This concept of a work as an ‘aesthetic object’ applies best when it is approached in the context of action. The context of action is inherently purposive in nature and involves a pragmatic attitude on the part of the person. ... A work can be viewed systemically in the context of action if only some of its qualities are relevant, as in the case of a decorative piece that fits into a particular setting. Aesthetic distance in the context of action [179] would then be based on the approach or avoidance value attached to the object. "Scholars in the Romantic tradition, on the other hand, focused on the role of the recipient in constructing an interpretation of the meaning of a work. Acts of imagination provide an internal way to synthesize sensory and symbolic qualities of the multilayered aesthetic artifact or event into a coherent whole. Treating the aesthetic work as if it were real requires a willing suspension of disbelief (that the work is not absolutely faithful to the literal world) and an effort at finding meaning in the piece. ... Gestalt-like acts of closure also depend on the perspective...that artists/authors and recipients bring to creative works. It is here that context...shapes perspective, which in turn determines what is real for the creative person and the recipient. Thus, the internal experience of the person provides a ground for the aesthetic episode and is the locus of the unfolding meaning and emotion. When the structure of a work is personally, intellectually or emotionally meaningful to the artist/author/recipient, distance is reduced between them and an attachment is formed."

Raymond A. Mar "Evaluating whether stories can promote social cognition: Introducing the Social Processes and Content Entrained by Narrative (SPaCEN) framework" (2018) [454] "...a research framework for evaluating the empirical evidence that stories might aid social cognition,... This framework is based on two possible accounts of how such facilitation might occur: (1) stories may evoke social processes that are then improved through practice or (2) stories may present social content that is then learned and applied. ... The Social Process account is based on three central tenets. If social processes are improved via narrative engagement, then the following must be true: (1) stories must represent the social world, (2) social processes must be engaged by stories, and (3) these social processes must be improved by frequent engagement. Similarly, if social content is learned from narratives, then (1) stories must contain accurate social content, (2) this content must be learned during story comprehension, and (3) this content must be applied in the real-world..." Hmm. Oatley above disclaims any necessity for or conceit to "accurate social content". His "research framework" has no "social content" rubric. His answer to (1) is: It doesn't matter; and this precludes asking (2) and (3). [455] "Although narrative fiction is often contrasted with expository nonfiction, for the purposes here it is the narrative aspect that is thought to be key,... It is the narrative aspect of stories—the use of language to both represent and evoke experiences akin to the real-world—that is essential; any connection to actual past events is immaterial." Yep. "Within the psychology of discourse, stories have traditionally been defined by their structure...as a series of goal-centered events arranged in a coherent temporal order, according to a set grammar or schema... These story schemas typically include a context or setting, an inciting incident or conflict that initiates action, followed by several causally-linked goal-based events that embody either progress or setbacks, producing an increase in tension or stakes, culminating in a resolution of the central conflict followed by a brief denouement." Awesome. Can you tell we're dealing with an academic? "However, when examining the broader influence of stories...it may be helpful to go beyond the structure of these representations and also consider their content." Gee, ya think? "Any impact of stories is likely to be determined as much, or more, by what is actually presented in addition to how that content is presented." Yep, this does seem very "likely" to me too. But now we have zoomed right past ol' Prof. McLuhan; it remains to be seen in which direction. "Examining the common content of most stories, their essentially social nature becomes obvious as stories typically involve social agents and social interactions... And so our working definition of a story is as follows: agent-centered accounts of goal-motivated causally-linked events that represent and evoke experiences akin to those found in the real world." Sweet. That's at least more concise. "Our definition...simply highlights an existing aspect of past definitions. However, by shifting the focus from these events to the agents and their interactions, it becomes intuitive to look for a potential social impact of stories." Whatever you say. "...we use the term narrative consumers for those engaging with narrative media, in lieu of modality-specific terms like reader, viewer, or player." "... The distinction between process and content is subtle but important, as Funder (1990) has observed: “Cognitive mechanisms serve to process information, but they are not the information itself.” In the SPaCEN framework, the Processes and Content accounts are not mutually exclusive: both might be true, both might occur simultaneously, and evidence for one does not constitute evidence against the other." [457] "The Social Process account: Honing social processes through practice The Social Process account makes the claim that stories frequently engage social cognitive processes, with these processes being improved through this frequent engagement." "What social processes might be affected? ...if stories constitute a social stimulus then any social process that we might employ in the real-world could also be engaged by stories and improved through practice." "The term empathy originates in the German word einfühlung, which can be translated into English as “feeling into” (Preston & de Waal, 2002). This describes how empathizing with another involves feeling the same emotions as they are currently feeling. ... In addition, some researchers have drawn a distinction between cognitive empathy and emotional empathy. Cognitive empathy could be interpreted as thinking what other people are thinking, whereas emotional empathy is feeling what other people are feeling. ... "Sympathy is a social process closely related to empathy that refers to a “feeling for” another person, rather than “feeling into” that person... [458] ...if we were to feel sympathy for a nervous speaker, we would feel sorry for that person rather than feel nervous ourselves..." [459] "Although exceptions certainly exist, the majority of narratives would seem to center around human psychology, human relationships and interactions, and human society (Mar & Oatley, 2008)." Recall B&K above: " We played Pong, assuming a wider world of players on a court or at a table, rather than just playing Move Ball With Physics (and even that can be argued as a narrative structure, i.e. the ball begins here and then goes there. Also, it was never literally a ball at all;...). " They call this account "admittedly reductive" but this is backwards: actually it is expansive; also (perhaps paradoxically) solipsistic. It probably also is anthropomorphizing, which is an issue that this Laboratory cohort has in fact considered in some depth in relation to narrative (more to come on this below). Granted that these accounts construct the anthropomorphizing tendency as relative rather than absolute, Pong would figure to be of very low susceptibility to it. "Because we depend so heavily on one another to survive..., understanding others and how to relate to them has enormous value. It should come as no surprise then that narratives, which allow us to mentally simulate interactions between people, are of immense interest. We created stories, and their enduring appeal reflects the fact that they are a direct manifestation of our interest in others. It stands to reason, therefore, that more realistic representations of human psychology and human relationships are likely to be of greater interest than less realistic representations. Because our interest in stories likely stems from our motivation to understand those around us and our own lives, stories that depart drastically from reality are unlikely to satisfy this need. In fact, stories that lack correspondence to the real-world are readily criticized, with stories that lack realistic representations of human psychology and behavior often derided for being “cheesy” or “corny.”" Well, this assumes far too much. I don't know how you can count on audiences to self-police on a utilitarian basis which is (at best) subliminal. Certainly "cheesy" entertainment is "often derided", but sometimes it is a hit, other times it is polarizing. (Of course this is not the only direction of non-"correspondence": there is also the "dark," "cynical" story which violates the "realistic" expectations of optimists and extroverts. The "enduring appeal" and "ready criticism" awaiting this kind of entertainment is different still, dare I say, in both quantity and quality.) Here's the thing: we already think we "understand those around us" before the "narrative" has even started. We do not all live in quite the same "reality," but we do very much enjoy seeing our existing version of reality validated. If a narrative doesn't validate us and ours, we will not be able to use it for the above-named purposes. Those purposes actually require special effort to make good on the utilitarian mandate above: they require us not to avoid but to willingly seek out "stories that lack correspondence" to the world we already know. Anyone who complains that this conclusion itself is overly "cynical" is telling on themselves. The takeaways are not exclusively cynical ones, but there are a few which do "depart drastically" from the progressive lit-critter's "reality." "The above notwithstanding, humans also have a powerful ability to treat a wide variety of objects as social targets, in the form of anthropomorphization (Epley, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2007). Human [sic] readily ascribe mental-states and other human qualities to a broad swath of targets that lack mentality, including plants and even simple geometric shapes (Heider & Simmel, 1944). This likely stems from a motivation similar to what explains our attraction to stories. It is so important for us to understand those around us, whose mental states are not directly observable, that this tendency to infer and ascribe mentality is a bit overactive." Gee, ya think? "As a result, it may well be that although stories quite obviously center around human psychology and human relationships, there is considerable latitude when it comes to stories providing adequate targets for social cognitive processes." Sure, go ahead and have it both ways. Again, other (more recent) literature on anthropomorphization suggests that, generally, we do not "ascribe" equally "readily" in all cases and situations. A stone-ager presented with Pong would be very likely and a contemporary teen-ager very unlikely to do so. [461] "Several theorists and researchers have investigated whether stories might make people more moral...altruistic...or more tolerant of differences..., perhaps resulting in a reduction of intergroup prejudice... These are possible downstream consequences of any improvements in social processes and, as such, effects of this kind are expected to be smaller in magnitude than that observed for improvements in social processing." [462] "Carefully crafted public narratives like novels and films are often created by people who are intensely interested in human psychology and the human experience..." Heeeeere's Susan: " Most American novelists and playwrights are really either journalists or gentlemen sociologists and psychologists. They are writing the literary equivalent of program music. And so rudimentary, uninspired, and stagnant has been the sense of what might be done with form in fiction and drama that even when the content isn't simply information, news, it is still peculiarly visible, handier, more exposed. To the extent that novels and plays (in America), unlike poetry and painting and music, don't reflect any interesting concern with changes in their form, these arts remain prone to assault by interpretation. " ("Against Interpretation" 7) [464] " Demonstrations that false information can be learned from fictional narratives, along with parallel work on the learning of questionable beliefs..., highlight the fact that narratives can have positive and negative influences. We should not misinterpret research on narratives and social cognition as evidence that the effects of narratives are solely salutary. However, if people can readily learn falsehoods placed within stories for experiments, it seems very likely that people could also learn truths about the social world from fiction as well. It is an open question as to whether stories contain social truths or more truths than falsehoods. That said, writers appear to make great efforts to pursue truth in their writing (Doyle, 1998) and consumers of fiction typically react poorly to depictions that ring untrue (Richter et al., 2009)." Richter et al downloaded and queued. If they manage to de-relativize "truth" in 2009, I will be really impresssed. [465] "Boundaries and limitations First, it must be emphasized that any putative outcome associated with story engagement will not occur for all people, all of the time. Stories are not a magical panacea that can force the acquisition of social knowledge or guarantee the improvement of a cognitive process. ..." Yup. Can we say more/anything about where and why this could happen but doesn't ? "Second, even if we learn from stories, it is important to recognize that stories are not an ideal platform for learning. Learning occurs most rapidly in contexts when accurate feedback is immediate, when corrections follow errors, and when rewards follow successes. With stories, however, we might not immediately know if we made an incorrect inference" Break inserted for emphasis. "regarding a character’s mental state or if some putative piece of social knowledge is actually incorrect. Moreover, there would seem to be few consequences for errors. ... Because narratives appear to be a weak training context, any influence of stories on social cognitive processes and social knowledge seem likely to emerge only after prolonged, repeated, and frequent exposure." I just think the "exposure" also has to be heterodox, per #2 above. I don't see how that part can be left out. Otherwise it seems we will merely consolodate our existing biases. [468] "Exposure to nonfiction texts was also found to predict mentalizing accuracy in this meta-analysis, albeit at half the magnitude... However, many of these studies do not control for the variance shared between fiction and nonfiction exposure... In studies that have controlled for this shared variance, fiction exposure remains a predictor of mentalizing accuracy, whereas nonfiction does not..." "All of these studies are correlational, however, which means that causal direction cannot be inferred. ... In order to attempt to rule out third-variable explanations, past studies of this type have controlled for other factors statistically,... That said, it is very difficult to appropriately rule out the influence of third-variables statistically..." [469] "One limitation of these experimental investigations is that they do not appear to map well onto the theoretical account advanced thus far. If improvements in mentalizing accuracy result from frequent and prolonged practice effects based on repeated exposure, then one would not expect to see such improvements following a single brief exposure. To draw a parallel, this would be akin to studying whether cigarettes cause cancer by randomly assigning participants to smoke a single cigarette or not, then looking for evidence of cancer. ... It may be that the experimental method...could be a poor fit for this topic. Because exposure to narratives is typically a very personal, self-selected leisure activity" Gee, ya think? "and its influence is likely to be cumulative, occurring over long spans of time, randomly assigning people to briefly read or watch something they normally would not seems unlikely to produce behaviors akin to the real-world phenomena under question." Hopefully someone is studying "self-selected" as against other-selected "leisure activit[ies]". Seems to me that "self-selection" per se is essentially the uber-medium which contains the macro-mediums of literature, music, gaming, etc., as in McLuhan's quip that the content of any medium is another medium. "Most notably, studies of this type have relied heavily on a single measure of mentalizing accuracy, the Reading-the-Mind-in-theEyes-Test—Revised... Validity evidence for the RMET has accrued in various forms. It is sensitive to the mentalizing deficit found in ASD, replicates the mentalizing advantage held by women, is influenced by oxytocin, engages brain regions typically associated with mentalizing, has acceptable test–retest reliability, and possesses clear advantages over self-report. "This measure, however, has not escaped criticism. It may be multidimensional in nature...and might better reflect the recognition of facial emotions rather than the inference of mental states. ...this would be problematic in terms of conceptual clarity, but in the current context it is no less interesting that narratives correlate with emotion recognition rather than mentalizing. A more damning criticism is that RMET scores also reflect verbal intelligence,... This means that the association between narrative and mentalizing accuracy could partly reflect the link between reading and verbal ability. This possibility is even more unsettling because narrative fiction has stronger associations with verbal ability than expository nonfiction. However, some studies have controlled for verbal intelligence and observed robust associations between narrative texts and RMET scores. ... [many citations omitted]"

Alex Mesoudi, Andrew Whiten and Robin Dunbar "A bias for social information in human cultural transmission" (2006) [406] "The Machiavellian intelligence or social brain hypothesis asserts that primate intelligence evolved primarily to deal with complex social problems, rather than nonsocial ecological or technological problems..." [407] "...holds that it is not merely being ‘social’ in the sense of ‘living in groups’ that has been a key factor in the evolution of primate intelligence, but rather the degree of social complexity, characterized by frequently changing coalitions and alliances. Hence, we define social information as information concerning interactions and relationships between a number of third parties. ...gossip involves particularly intense and salient social interactions and relationships,...while social nongossip involves more everyday interactions and relationships. This social category is contrasted with non-social information, which we divide into information concerning a single individual’s interactions with the physical environment (individual) and information solely concerning that physical environment (physical)." [409] "Enquist and Leimar (1993) argued that gossiping is a behavioural adaptation to protect against potential free-riders by spreading information about their past behaviour, preventing the free-riders from moving from population to population in order to find and exploit naïve individuals. Meanwhile, Wilson, Wilczynski, Wells, and Weiser (2000) argued that gossiping acts as a means of preventing behaviour that acts to promote individual gain at the expense of the group. This argument was backed up by a series of experiments in which participants rated speakers of self-serving gossip more negatively than speakers of group-serving gossip." [417] "Conclusions ... Experiment 1 found evidence that gossiplike social information is transmitted with significantly greater accuracy and in greater quantity than non-social information. Experiment 2 replicated this finding using material equivalent in narrative coherence, demonstrating that coherence was not responsible for the superior recall of the gossip. Experiment 2 also found that information concerning social interactions that would not be described as gossip was transmitted with an accuracy and in a quantity not significantly different from the gossip itself. That is, the gossip-like content of infidelity, deception and pregnancy was relatively unimportant; what mattered for superior transmission was that there were a number of third party social agents interacting with one another. "These results are therefore consistent with the Machiavellian intelligence or the social brain hypothesis that primate intelligence evolved primarily to deal with social, rather than ecological, information. ... A stronger form of the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis, and theories that argue for a more negative, exploitative function of language...were not supported,... Theories that argue that primate intelligence is the result of ecological selection pressures were also not supported,..." [418] "It might be argued that rather than being the result of a biologically evolved predisposition, the social bias seen here is the result of some related property of the material,... Various findings from the social psychological literature concerning memory might be used to account for some of our findings, such as that people have better recall for descriptions of behaviour that violates social norms...for information that is incongruent with social expectations...and for negative self-discrepant in-group behaviour... We do not, however, see these two types of explanation as in opposition. Properties such as arousing, salient or memorable represent the proximate mechanisms by which an evolved bias may operate. The two levels of explanation, ultimate and proximate, should be seen as separate and complementary. ... "...a bias in memory or recall and a bias in transmission are not alternative or opposing phenomena. The long-term transmission bias does of course reflect a memory bias, but its significance is that it uniquely documents the cumulative operation of that memory bias in successive participants, providing an experimental microcosm for the study of cultural, as opposed to merely cognitive (memory) processes. Furthermore, the assumption that a consistent effect will be observed along an extended chain is just that — an assumption — which should be empirically tested. Indeed, previous transmission chain studies...have demonstrated crossover effects in which later generations reverse a trend exhibited by earlier generations."

Shahid Siddiqui Richard F. West Keith E. Stanovich "The Influence of Print Exposure on Syllogistic Reasoning and Knowledge of Mental-State Verbs" (1998) [84] "...Olson and Astington (1990), who argued that the acquisition of certain metalinguistic and metacognitive terms is uniquely tied to literacy and experience [85] with print. A simple set of verbs (e.g., say, tell) is used for talking about what a person says and what he or she means by it. A more elaborated set is used for talking not only about what a speaker says but also about texts and their interpretations..." "Olson and Astington (1990) pointed out that the massive borrowing of vocabulary from Latin into English in the 16th and 17th centuries contained as a conspicuous part "the speech act and mental state verbs that have come to play such a large part in psychology and philosophy of mind"."

Julia Stietz, Emanuel Jauk, Sören Krach, and Philipp Kanske "Dissociating Empathy From Perspective-Taking: Evidence From Intra- and Inter-Individual Differences Research" [1] " Empathy needs to be dissociated from other social emotions and, crucially, also from cognitive mechanisms of understanding others, the ability to take others’ perspective. ... The data show that empathy and perspective-taking recruit distinct neural circuits and can be discerned already during early and throughout adult development. Both capacities also vary substantially between situations and people. Differences can be systematically related to situational characteristics as well as personality traits and mental disorders. The clear distinction of affect sharing from other social emotions like compassion and from cognitive perspective-taking, argues for a clear-cut terminology to describe these constructs. In our view, this speaks against using empathy as an umbrella term encompassing all affective and cognitive routes to understanding others." " In humans, empathy may even arise, when the other is not present, but thought of or imagined. Critically, however, it has been proposed to involve self-other distinction, that is, the awareness that another is the source of one’s emotions, differentiating it from emotional contagion, where such an awareness is not present." [2] "Of course, empathic affect sharing is only one possible response to another person’s emotion. Complementary affective states such as schadenfreude, envy or compassion occur as well, but the peculiarity of empathy is that it enables access to another’s internal state by re-creating a representation of that state in the observer. Correspondingly, neuroscience research on empathy has not identified one single neural network associated with empathy, but rather the brain regions found to be active depend on what affective state is shared. ... The observation of such “shared neural networks” has been interpreted as agreeing with simulation theory’s account of how we understand others—we impersonate them and imitate their mental states. "Empathy, then, needs to be differentiated from an alternative route to understanding others. Theory theory, assumes abstract, propositional knowledge about others’ behavior to underlie the understanding of the motives that drive others’ behavior. This conceptualization corresponds to psychological and neuroscience research on perspective-taking or Theory of Mind (ToM), the capacity to make inferences about and represent others’ intentions, goals and motives (other terms include mentalizing and cognitive empathy)." "Theory theory" is not a typo; apparently that's what it's called. [3] " TABLE 1 | Summary of the conceptual and empirical dissociation of empathy and perspective-taking. [adapted for lack of formatting options here] Empathy • Affective process • Sharing another’s emotional state • Awareness that other is source of emotion • Involved brain regions depend on emotional valence, largely overlaps with salience network • Develops ontogenetically early, does not decline in old age • State/trait reductions mainly for motivational/habitual reasons Perspective-taking • Cognitive process • Taking another’s perspective • Abstract representation of others’ mental state • Widespread network for information processing, core nodes overlap with default mode network • Later ontogenetic development, declines in old age • State/trait reductions for motivational/habitual and cognitive reasons " "The decline of ToM in older adults is a consistent finding across various ToM tasks regardless of stimulus modality or the specific form of ToM that is measured. For empathy, in contrast, no age-related changes or even increases with age have been reported." Lol. [4] "Empathic processes are generally more salient in situations in which we are confronted with negative rather than positive emotions. We display stronger empathic reactions when interacting with those we are closely affiliated with, which points to a central role of empathy in human and non-human evolution. ...we tend to experience higher empathy toward ingroup others, and lower empathy toward outgroup others, even when group membership is experimentally varied. We typically experience low empathy in states of personal distress or depression, particularly due to an incapacity to inhibit own emotional states. "ToM is high in states in which we are motivated to understand others’ mental states and intentions, which allows making predictions about their actions, and also to influence these actions. This can happen for altruistic or also egoistic motives. ... ToM can be low in states which may block the cognitive route to understanding others, such as alcohol intoxication, or also depression." [SK's spatial emphasis added] "INTERINDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES ... At a most basic level, women score higher on selfreport measures of empathy than men, which may be due to gender-role stereotypes as gender differences are not clearly present in neural empathy responses [but seem to depend largely on context effects]. Among the Big Five personality traits, agreeableness is most consistently and strongly linked to variation in empathy,... Agreeable individuals have a higher propensity to display empathic reactions, or conversely, empathy can be thought of as a low-level function that serves higher-order facets of agreeableness,... ...the “dark” personality traits...are commonly associated with reduced empathy. These are tied together by interpersonal antagonism—the opposite of agreeableness—in terms of a self-focused and callous interpersonal style. ... Interestingly, empathic alterations in narcissism and psychopathy are not due to an incapacity to empathize, but rather due to motivational factors. ..." DON' WANNA... "Psychopathic individuals show similar brain activation as controls in the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex, but only deliberately, not spontaneously. This confirms the notion of reduced propensity for empathic reactions, not reduced capacity in terms of general inability to share others’ affect, in psychopathic individuals. ... "Unlike empathy, variation in ToM is less clearly associated with sex, but similarly associated with the Big Five dimension of agreeableness;... ToM is also not uniformly lowered in the Dark Triad traits. .... This points to a diminished propensity rather than capacity to take others’ perspective, which highlights the motivational role of personality characteristics in ToM. ...there is even evidence for increased social cognition in individuals high on “dark” personality traits, which could enable antagonistic individuals to effectively deceive and manipulate others." WAAH HAA HAA HAA!

Edward A. Vessel, G. Gabrielle Starr and Nava Rubin "Art reaches within: aesthetic experience, the self and the default mode network" (2013) [2] "One aspect that has so far received little investigation is that of individual differences: although it is widely recognized that individuals can differ markedly in their aesthetic response, previous research in neuroaesthetics tended to utilize art pieces that were manipulated in a manner intended to have a consistent effect on observers’ preferences or that were generally highly regarded and often, widely known... It seems reasonable to expect that studying widely admired artwork can help uncover the universal aspects of aesthetic experience. But studying artworks that generate a diversity of responses can also be valuable." One can only hope. Perhaps it depends on whether you think uniformity or diversity of "response" is more "valuable". For all the talk of evolution, it seems to me that psychological "diversity" must have some adaptive/evolutionary value for a group-living species, but there's been not a peep on that front as of yet. "Brain imaging can, in principle, be used to probe the neural correlates of an experience in a manner dissociable from the external stimuli that gave rise to this experience. In particular, it is possible to capitalize on the differences in individual’s responses to artworks to search for commonalities in brain activity associated with the aesthetic experience itself, irrespective of the stimulus properties of specific works of art that gave rise to it." [boxed] "KEY CONCEPT 2 | Aesthetic experience Aesthetics is a discipline concerned with the perception, appreciation, and production of art. Aesthetic experiences, such as looking at paintings, listening to music or reading poems, are linked to the perception of external objects, but not to any apparent functional use the objects might have. Aesthetic experience involves more than preference, encompassing a variety of emotional responses ranging from beauty to awe, sublimity, and a variety of other (often knowledge-based) emotions." Not bad! Actually waaay better than most "knowledge-based" artsy-fartsies! "Analysis of the behavioral responses revealed that responses were indeed highly individual: there was little agreement between observers regarding how moving each painting was... ...on average, each image was rated as highly moving by one subset of observers and rated poorly by another subset of observers... These results stand in contrast with the rather high agreement obtained when observers make preference judgments for real-world scenes...or attractiveness judgments for faces... As we shall see below, the low agreement between individuals in terms of their aesthetic response is what allowed us to disentangle the external attributes of specific stimuli from the internal (neural) states to which they gave rise. "...on average, observers used the highest (“4”) rating significantly less than 25% of the time... This is interesting given that...in rating sensory/perceptual attributes (e.g., perceived brightness) observers tend to distribute their responses across all available options. That the observers in our experiments behaved differently, and did not calibrate their responses so as to give a rating of “4” to roughly a quarter of the stimuli, suggests that they reserved this response for images which met a certain internal (and generally high) criterion." [6] "THE DEFAULT MODE NETWORK AND SELF-REFERENTIAL MENTAL PROCESSING A defining characteristic of the DMN—indeed, how it was discovered—is that it is suppressed when observers are engaged in demanding tasks that require them to focus on external stimuli, compared with its level of activity during passive viewing or periods of rest between the tasks. ...a “task-negative” network of brain regions that normally functions in an anticorrelated manner from “task-positive” networks... The finding that, in our own task, the cortical regions that overlap with previously identified components of the DMN...showed significant deactivation below their baseline (rest) level during a majority of the trials, those rated 1–3...is therefore consistent with what is known about the DMN. From this same perspective, the dramatic reduction of deactivation in the trials rated “4”...therefore seems puzzling. ... "Following its initial identification, further research showed that the DMN regions can maintain their baseline activity not only during periods of (waking) rest, but that they can escape deactivation, or even become activated above baseline, also during the performance of structured tasks. Ventral portions of the MPFC are involved in affective decision making processes, including (but not restricted to) encoding the subjective value of future rewards and assessing the emotional salience of stimuli... The anterior and dorsal portions of MPFC are active in tasks involving self-knowledge such as making judgments about oneself as well as about close others..., self-relevant moral decision-making and in “theory of mind” tasks that require gauging others’ perspectives. The PCC and medial temporal lobe regions are active during tasks that involve retrieving autobiographical memories as well as planning or simulating the future. "The DMN is thus emerging as a highly interconnected network of brain regions that support self-referential mental processing. Such processing is, of course, ubiquitous in everyday life and is undoubtedly important for normal functioning. In experimental settings it can occur spontaneously (e.g., as “mind wandering” during periods of rest) but it can also be triggered in structured tasks, by external stimuli that cause observers to draw on self-referential information (intentionally or automatically), or to engage in inwardly focused attention. ... "INTENSE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE: A (NON-PERSONAL) EXTERNAL STIMULUS REACHES THE SELF ... "We propose that certain artworks can “resonate” with an individual’s sense of self in a manner that has well-defined physiological correlates and consequences: the neural representations of those external stimuli obtain access to the neural substrates and processes concerned with the self—namely to regions of the DMN. This access, which other external stimuli normally do not obtain, allows the representation of the artwork to interact with the neural processes related to the self, affect them, and possibly even be incorporated into them (i.e., into the future, evolving representation of self). This hypothesis gains considerable support from the way that the fMRI responses evolved over time in the MPFC,... ...the initial predisposition of this DMN region was, for all external stimuli, to deactivate. But in contrast with the MPFC response to the artworks rated 1, 2, or 3, which was suppressed during image presentation and remained below baseline throughout the subsequent recovery..., in [7] the 4-rated trials activity started recovering soon after stimulus presentation and then continued to rise above baseline... This is reminiscent of the MPFC recovery from deactivation observed when a highly self-relevant stimulus such as one’s own name is presented in a stream of self-irrelevant stimulation, as in the “cocktail party effect”... ...we cannot say what attributes make specific artworks so exquisitely attuned to an individual’s unique makeup. And yet this hypothesis provides a coherent explanation of our data in that it is consistent not only with what we know about the DMN, but also with what we know about art." "Note that the “resonance” between certain artworks and observers’ sense of self that, we propose, occurs during intense aesthetic experience, is different from explicitly self-referential emotions such as pride, shame, guilt and embarrassment, as these involve an appraisal of self-responsibility for an event." Seems important! "It is also interesting to note in this context that intense aesthetic experience can sometimes be thrillingly bidirectional: not only does the perceiver feel as if they understand the artwork, but there is a sense that the artwork “understands” the perceiver, expressing one’s own innermost thoughts, feelings, or values. The latter sense points to the possibility that it is the artist, not the artwork, who has understood something deep about the perceiver’s experience; hence the intensely personal connection felt by many people toward favorite artists who are, after all, strangers to them." This should not be too hard to test! Why are we still merely speculating about it? (Is it because we want so dearly for it to be true? Then maybe it's not going to be so easy to test...) Note that this study itself involved (seemingly quite intentionally) no "personal connection" of audience with artist! "In some cases, this bidirectionality is accompanied by a perceived or real congruence with the intentions of the artist. Thus, unlike in self-referential emotions, in aesthetic experience the relation to others is not focused on appraisal but on a sense of understanding, gained insight and meaning. The extraction of meaning has been suggested previously as a primary factor of aesthetic experience. But, while those authors suggest that an appeal to self-related information is but one way in which viewers extract meaning from artwork, the release of the DMN from suppression on only the trials rated “4” suggests that, in fact, self-relevance is an integral aspect of intensely moving aesthetic experience."

Viktor Shklovsky "Art as Technique" (orig. 1917) "If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. ... "This characteristic of thought not only suggests the method of algebra, but even prompts the choice of symbols... The process of "algebrization," the over-automatization of an object, permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort. Either objects are assigned only one proper feature - a number, for example - or else they function as though by formula and do not even appear in cognition:... ""If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been." And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important... "Tolstoy makes the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object. He describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening for the first time. In describing something he avoids the accepted names of its parts and instead names corresponding parts of other objects. ... "... The familiar act of flogging is made unfamiliar both by the description and by the proposal to change its form without changing its nature. Tolstoy uses this technique of "defamiliarization", constantly. ... "... I personally feel that defamiliarization is found almost everywhere form is found… An image is not a permanent referent for those mutable complexities of life which are revealed through it, its purpose is not to make us perceive meaning, but to create a special perception of the object - it creates a vision of the object instead of serving as a means for knowing it… ... "Just now a still more characteristic phenomenon is under way. Russian literary language, which was originally foreign to Russia, has so permeated the language of the people that it has blended with their conversation. On the other hand, literature has now begun to show a tendency towards the use of dialects...and or barbarisms.... And currently Maxim Gorky is changing his diction from the old literary language to the new literary colloquialism of Leskov.[8] Ordinary speech and literary language have thereby changed places... "

Jan Mukařovský "Standard language and poetic language" (orig. 1932) [43] "...for poetry, the standard language is the background against which is reflected the esthetically intentional distortion of the linguistic components of the work, in other words, the intentional violation of the norm of the standard. Let us, for instance, visualize a work in which this distortion is carried out by the interpenetration of dialect speech with the standard; it is clear, then, that it is not the standard which is perceived as a distortion of the dialect, but the dialect as a distortion of the standard, even when the dialect is quantitatively preponderant. The violation of the norm of the standard, its systematic violation, is what makes possible the poetic utilization of language; without this possibility there would be no poetry. The more the norm of the standard is stabilized in a given language, the more varied can be its violation, and therefore the more possibilities for poetry in that language. And on the other hand, the weaker the awareness of this norm, the fewer possibilities of violation, and hence the fewer possibilities for poetry. ... "This relationship between poetic language and the standard, one which we could call negative, also has its positive side which is, however, more important for the theory of the standard language than for poetic language and its theory. Many of the linguistic components of a work of poetry do not deviate from the norm of the standard because they constitute the background against which the distortion of the other components is reflected." [44] "...the different function of the two forms of language. This is the core of the foregrounding of the utterance. Foregrounding is the opposite of automatization, that is, the deautomatization of an act;... ...automatization schematizes an event; foregrounding means the violation of the scheme. The standard language in its purest form, as the language of science with formulation as its objective, avoids foregrounding [aktualisace]: thus, a new expression, foregrounded because of its newness, is immediately automatized in a scientific treatise by an exact definition of its meaning. Foregrounding is, of course, common in the standard language,.... But here it is always subordinate to communication:... In poetic language foregrounding achieves maximum intensity to the extent of pushing communication into the background as the objective of expression and of being used for its own sake;... The idea might arise that this is a quantitative effect, a matter of the foregrounding of the largest number of components, perhaps of all of them together. This would be a mistake,... The foregrounding of any one of the components is necessarily accompanied by the automatization of one or more of the other components;... The foregrounding of intonation as an uninterrupted melodic line is thus linked to the semantic “emptiness” for which the Lumír Group has been criticized by the younger generation as being “verbalistic”. ... A simultaneous general foregrounding would thus bring all the components into the same plane and so become a new automatization. [45] "The devices by which poetic language achieves its maximum of foregrounding must therefore be sought elsewhere than in the quantity of foregrounded components. They consist in the consistency and systematic character of foregrounding. The consistency manifests itself in the fact that the reshaping of the foregrounded component within a given work occurs in a stable direction;... The dominant is that component of the work which sets in motion, and gives direction to, the relationships of all other components. The material of a work of poetry is intertwined with the interrelationships of the components even if it is in a completely unforegrounded state. Thus, there is always present, in communicative speech as well, the potential relationship between intonation and meaning, syntax, word order,... ...each linguistic component is linked directly or indirectly, by means of these multiple interrelationships, in some way to every other component. In communicative speech these relationships are for the most part merely potential,... "The dominant thus creates the unity of the work of poetry. It is, of course, a unity of its own kind, the nature of which in esthetics is usually designated as “unity in variety”,..." [46] "It is thus obvious that the possibility of distorting the norm of the standard, if we henceforth limit ourselves to this particular background of foregrounding, is indispensable to poetry. Without it, there would be no poetry. To criticize the deviations from the norm of the standard as faults, especially in a period which, like the present, tends towards a powerful foregrounding of linguistic components, means to reject poetry." [47] "A recent Czech opinion has it that “esthetic evaluation must be excluded from language, since there is no place where it can be applied. It is useful and necessary for judging style, but not language”... ...I do want to point out, in opposition..., that [48] esthetic valuation is a very important factor in the formation of the norm of the standard; on the one hand because the conscious refinement of the language cannot do without it, on the other hand because it sometimes, in part, determines the development of the norm of the standard. "... Dessoir says about it ["esthetic phenomena"]: “The striving for beauty need not be limited in its manifestation to the specific forms of the arts. The esthetic needs are, on the contrary, so potent that they affect almost all the acts of man”. ... . If [so],...it is indeed not very probable that language would be exempt from esthetic valuation; in other words, that its use would not be subject to the laws of taste. "... Without an esthetic point of view, no other form of the cultivation of good language is possible, even one much more efficient than purism. ... he who is active in the cultivation of good language must take care not to force upon the standard language, in the name of correct language, modes of expression that violate the esthetic canon (set of norms) given in the language implicitly, but objectively; intervention without heed to the esthetic norms hampers, rather than advances, the development of the language." Isn't it funny how those writers later labeled "formalist" can be found among the few to have understood the full scale and scope of "esthetic needs", whereas the self-styled radicals are far more likely to tie themselves in knots of Puritan self-denial? [51] "The very existence of poetry in a certain language has fundamental importance for this language. [52] By the very fact of foregrounding, poetry increases and refines the ability to handle language in general; it gives the language the ability to adjust more flexibly to new requirements and it gives it a richer differentiation of its means of expression." Hmm. Even the "formalist" aesthetes can instrumentalize.

Steven Schneider (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) "The Paradox of Fiction" "The so-called “paradox of emotional response to fiction” is an argument for the conclusion that our emotional response to fiction is irrational. The argument contains an inconsistent triad of premises, all of which seem initially plausible. These premises are (1) that in order for us to be moved (to tears, to anger, to horror) by what we come to learn about various people and situations, we must believe that the people and situations in question really exist or existed; (2) that such “existence beliefs” are lacking when we knowingly engage with fictional texts; and (3) that fictional characters and situations do in fact seem capable of moving us at times." ... "The need for existence beliefs is supposedly revealed by the following sort of case. If what we at first believed was a true account of something heart-wrenching turned out to be false, a lie, a fiction, etc., and we are later made aware of this fact, then we would no longer feel the way we once did—though we might well feel something else, such as embarrassment for having been taken in to begin with." Alternatively, we might feel the opposite of "embarrassment" and double down instead, insisting that "coherence truths have priority over correspondences." Music of course also has the "basset hound" analogy as outlined, I believe, by Stephen Davies: the dog looks sad to us even when it doesn't feel sad itself. To a musician this is familiar territory. To us premise (1) above has all the hallmarks of a strawman. Forget "believ[ing] that" this or that "really existed." "It is interesting to note that while virtually all of those writing on this subject credit [Colin]Radford with initiating the current debate, none of them have adopted his view as their own. At least in part, this must be because what Radford offers is less the solution to a mystery (how is it that we can be moved by what we know does not exist?) than a straightforward acceptance of something mysterious about human nature (our ability to be moved by what we know does not exist is illogical, irrational, even incoherent)." Works for me! I'm a musician! So how do we handle other "illogical, irrational, even incoherent" behavior in all the other "human" social arenas? Perhaps by tolerating it to the extent possible. Probably not by rationalizing it. "...Glenn Hartz...argues not that our responses to fiction are independent of belief, to be understood on the model of the startle effect, but that they are pre-conscious: that real (as opposed to pretend) beliefs which are not consciously entertained are automatically generated by certain visual stimuli. These beliefs are inconsistent with what the spectator—fully aware of where he is and what he is doing—explicitly avows. As Hartz puts it, “how could anything as cerebral and out-of-the-loop as ‘make believe’ make adrenaline and cortisol flow?” (1999, p. 563)." Sounds about right! i.e. It needn't be so hard to accept that our emotional responses to art are "irrational"; what is hard to explain, rather, is why we ought to consider any "emotional" responses to be "rational," no matter the "real" or "fictional" nature of the stimulus. "R.T. Allen argues that, “A novel is not a presentation of facts. But true statements can be made about what happens in it and beliefs directed towards those events can be true or false. Once we realize that truth is not confined to the factual, the problem disappears”..." Works for me! So, by mere naive coincidence I gather it has become conventional in much academic writing to interleave "statements" about the given topic with "statements...about what happens" in this or that novel? And it's up to the reader rather than the writer to keep track of what is a "true statement" merely about the novel and what is a "true statement" about the topic they are trying to learn about?

Maria Dias, Antonio Roazzi, and Paul L. Harris "Reasoning From Unfamiliar Premises: A Study With Unschooled Adults" (2005) [550] "Scribner (1977)...argued that participants adopt one of two distinct orientations toward the reasoning task. Unschooled participants often adopt an empirical orientation. When presented with premises that fit their own past experience, they can reason accurately from them. However, when presented with unfamiliar premises, they use their own experience to supplement, distort, or even reject the premises. Given 2 or 3 years of schooling, however, participants are more likely to adopt an analytic orientation. They accurately encode the claims made in the premises, independently of their familiarity, and reason consequentially from them. ... Those adopting an empirical orientation are prone to refer to some factual generalization or personal observation that warrants their conclusion. Alternatively, they insist that they lack the relevant knowledge to reach any conclusion. By contrast, those adopting an analytic orientation often refer back to what the interviewer has said, using phrases such as ‘‘If you say that. . .’’ or ‘‘To go by your words. . . .’’" Well...you can do a lot worse than to insist (more like admit) that you "lack the relevant knowledge to reach any conclusion". Otherwise its "If you say that. . . ." or "if I say that . . .; Really, these latter Ifs are two versions of the same problem. They are not different types of problems. Both will fail catastrophically given enough chances to do so. But the real problem is that global interconnectedness is a truly wicked environment for the "analytic orientation" to wrestle with. It does not furnish us with the basis for analytic insight. Rather, it tricks us into thinking that it has. The possibility of this kind of skepticism is hinted at on the next page: [551] "Braine (1990) reached a similar conclusion regarding the unnaturalness of this analytic stance: ‘‘Artificially setting aside part of what you know is an academic game, and there is no reason to assume that our ancestors’ life conditions would lead them to acquire much skill at that game.’’" And yet, more recently, "findings cast doubt on the conclusions reached by Luria, Cole, Scribner, and Braine regarding the critical role of schooling. By implication, the ability to reason from unfamiliar premises is something that comes easily to unschooled children with explicit prompting." Well, all "schooling" is "explicit prompting" even if all "explicit prompting" is not "schooling." "Yet these developmental findings need to be reconciled with the consistent findings obtained with adults. Why do unschooled adults in Uzbekistan, Liberia, and Mexico fail to reason accurately from unfamiliar premises when unschooled children are able to do so? ...three possible explanations for the discrepant findings... "First, recent developmental research has been based on children growing up in Western, industrialized communities where traditions of schooling and literacy conveyed via adult dialogue or storybook reading may affect children even before they go to school. ... Second, young children often participate in fantasy play in which unfamiliar propositions are treated as true in a pretend fashion. ... By contrast, unschooled adults, especially those engaged in traditional manual occupations, might reject such an imaginative stance. ... A third possibility is that reasoning from unfamiliar premises is a natural ability—one displayed by children and adults alike when appropriately prompted." [554] "The present study provides strong support for this last alternative. ... "... the current findings show that reasoning from unfamiliar premises, including premises that contradict everyday empirical knowledge, is not an ability that is engendered by schooling. Rather, it is an early competence that is preserved into adulthood, even in the absence of schooling."

David C. Funder "Process Versus Content in the Study of Judgmental Accuracy" (1990) [207] "The distinction between process and content is both fundamental and subtle. ...if you want to understand completely how a chess player thinks, and in particular if you want to be able to predict his or her next move, it will not suffice to garner knowledge, no matter how extensive, about the chess player's cognitive processes...or brain functioning... You will also have to acquire an understanding of chess. ... "This analogy comes close to explaining why studies of judgmental process...will never get us far toward understanding accuracy. ... "...Studies of error tell us about the process of judgment rather than about its content. In particular, I argued, the existence of errors, demonstrated in laboratory settings, cannot be taken as evidence that judgment in real life is generally inaccurate. I also argued...that when subjects make judgments correctly in the lab, this cannot constitute evidence that they are generally accurate in real life. ... "...at the risk of reinstating the misunderstanding I have just tried to eliminate, let me add that the laboratory situations in which judgmental errors are demonstrated are not merely artificial in some neutral way. Rather, they are specifically designed to fool subjects. ...it would be trivially easy to design a study that would lead subjects to make correct judgments of experimental stimuli. Unfortunately, such a study would not prove that people reason will in real life, for exactly the same reason that studies of error do not show that people reason poorly." [footnote 2] "One of the errors most commonly demonstrated in these experiments is the "fundamental attribution error," the putative tendency to overestimate the importance of persons relative to situations in the determination of behavior. Ironically, it could be argued that by attributing errors to shortcomings of subjects...instead of to the deliberate rigging of experimental situations, researchers are themselves committing a particularly grievous instance of the fundamental attribution error." BRAVO!!

Francesca Happé, Jennifer Cook & Geoffrey Bird "Exploring the Structure of Social Cognition" " 1. Why is establishing the in/dependence of sociocognitive processes important? ... The term ‘cognition’ is used in the same way as Morton and Frith (1995), to refer to the level of explanation lying between neural processes and behavior, and includes emotion, and we define social cognition as the processing of socially-relevant stimuli." "4.4 Dual-process Theories and Social Cognition ... Many instantiations of dual process theory suggest that the fast automatic System 1 is domain-specific, whereas the slow controlled System 2 is domain-general. ... "While the debate surrounding the existence of implicit mentalizing continues, the general principle of separating sociocognitive processes into System 1 and System 2 promises to bear fruit. Perhaps all core social abilities could be accomplished via two routes, one being an automatic, cognitively efficient process that relies in part on heuristics/learned associations, and the other a deliberative reasoning process. If it is the case that each aspect of social processing can be accomplished via either route then the relationship between different social abilities may depend on whether the automatic or deliberative route is used to accomplish a particular social goal... Presumably, any time the rational, deliberative System 2 route is used then performance will, in part, be affected by individual differences in general processes such as working memory, executive function and intelligence, and correlations will be observed between different social abilities. " "5.2 Recommendations for Further Progress ... "A...distinction to be made when determining the structure of social cognition is between the ability to carry-out a social computation and the propensity to do so. The paradigmatic case for this distinction is ToM in ASD. When tested on explicit ToM tasks in a laboratory setting, intellectually-able adults with ASD can often perform at the same level as typical adults. In everyday life, however, ASD individuals typically exhibit problems interacting with others, difficulties with pragmatic language understanding, and other impairments thought to result from impaired ToM. Assuming laboratory-based tests are sensitive enough to detect a ToM impairment should it exist, then a potential explanation for this discrepancy is that these adults with ASD are able to use ToM, but have a reduced propensity to do so (see also Cage et al. 2013)." DON' WANNA...

Philipp Kanske, Anne Böckler, Fynn-Mathis Trautwein, Franca H. Parianen Lesemann, Tania Singer "Are strong empathizers better mentalizers? Evidence for independence and interaction between the routes of social cognition" (2016) "Abstract ... Assessing both functions simultaneously in a large sample (N=178), we show that people’s capacities to empathize and mentalize are independent, both on a behavioral and neural level. Thus, strong empathizers are not necessarily proficient mentalizers, arguing against a general capacity of social understanding. Secondly, we applied dynamic causal modeling to investigate how the neural networks underlying empathy and mentalizing are orchestrated in naturalistic social settings. Results reveal that in highly emotional situations, empathic sharing can inhibit mentalizing related activity and thereby harm mentalizing performance. Taken together, our findings speak against a unitary construct of social understanding and suggest flexible interplay of distinct social functions." "Introduction ... As the literature varies in the definition of the concepts empathy and ToM, we want to clarify that we define empathy as an emotional state that is isomorphic to and elicited by observing or imagining another’s affective state. Hence, empathy can be described as “feeling with” rather than “feeling for” another, the latter referring to empathic concern and compassion. ... The key difference between empathy and ToM is that the former entails embodied sharing of a sensory, affective or bodily state while the latter yields propositional knowledge of another’s state."