Abstract

I argue that the criteria governing the aptness of emotions directed towards fictional entities, such as characters and events in fiction, are structurally identical to the criteria governing the aptness of emotions directed towards real entities in the following sense: in both cases, aptness is characterized in terms of fittingness, justification, and being salience-tracking, and each of these notions is understood in an analogous way across reality- and fiction-directed emotions. The only differences are that, in the case of fiction-directed emotions, fictional truth rather than truth is relevant to fittingness, and salience in the context of engaging with the fiction replaces salience in the real context. Other asymmetries between the aptness criteria of fiction- and reality-directed emotions that seem to conflict with this claim are reducible to these two differences or stem from the failure to distinguish between emotions directed towards the content of a fiction and the fiction itself.