Art, Representation, and Make-Believe

This is the first collection of essays focused on the many-faceted work of Kendall L. Walton. Walton has shaped debate about the arts for the last 50 years. He provides a comprehensive framework for understanding arts in terms of the human capacity of make-believe that shows how different arts - visual, photographic, musical, literary, or poetic - can be explained in terms of complex structures of pretense, perception, imagining, empathy, and emotion. His groundbreaking work has been taken beyond aesthetics to address foundational issues concerning linguistic and scientific representations - for example, about the nature of scientific modelling or to explain how much of what we say is quite different from the literal meanings of our words. Contributions from a diverse group of philosophers probe Walton's detailed proposals and the themes for research they open. The essays provide an overview of important debates that have Walton's work at their core. This book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working on aesthetics across the humanities, as well as those interested in the topic of representation and its intersection with perception, language, science, and metaphysics.

Sonia Sedivy is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her research focuses on perception, aesthetics, and the later work of Wittgenstein. Beauty and the End of Art: Wittgenstein, Plurality and Perception (2016) offers a new approach to the diversity of art and beauty by bringing aesthetics together with the philosophy of perception and the later work of Wittgenstein. "Aesthetic Properties, History and Perception" shows how philosophy of perception and aesthetics inform one another in Art, History, Perception, a Special Issue of the British Journal of Aesthetics that she guest edited. She is currently writing a book on perception that draws on aesthetics.

1. Introduction: The Reach of Make-Believe Sonia Sedivy Part I: Fiction and the Verbal Arts 2. Fictionality in Imagined Worlds Stacie Friend 3. Walton and Fictional Characters Eileen John 4. Walton on 'the Paradox of Fiction': Confusions and Misunderstandings Derek Matravers 5. Fear and Loathing in Fictional Worlds: Quasi-Emotion, Nonexistence, and the Slime Paradigm Eva Dadlez 6. Lyric Self-Expression John Gibson and Hanna H. Kim 7. Reading (with) Others Wolfgang Huemer 8. The Puzzle of Fictional Morality Stuart Brock Part II: Visual Art, Photography and Music 9. The Puzzle of Make-Believe About Pictures: Can One Imagine a Perception to Be Different? Sonia Sedivy 10. Holey Images and the Roles of Realism John V. Kulvicki 11. Photography as a Category of Art Diarmuid Costello 12. Transparency and Egocentrism Nils-Hennes Stear 13. Photographs and Memories Christopher C. Williams 14. Fiction, Fictionality, and Pictures Paloma Atencia-Linares 15. Understanding Humour, Understanding People, and Understanding Music Julian Dodd Part III: Themes in Aesthetics: Agency, Appearances and Norms 16. Style and the Agency in Art Gregory Currie 17. Veridical Appearances of Production and Marxist Aesthetics Bryan Parkhurst 18. Playing with the Rules of the Game: Imagination, Normativity, and Address in Aesthetics Monique Roelofs Part IV: Beyond Aesthetics: Meaning, Metaphysics and Science 19. 'Existence as Metaphor' Revisited Frederick Kroon 20. Say Holmes Exists; Then What? Stephen Yablo 21. Scientific Modelling and Make-Believe Roman Frigg 22. The Story of the Ghost in the Machine Adam Toon Part V: Walton in Conversation 23. Walton in Conversation Kendall L. Walton