Neutrality in Fiction

John Gilmore defines the continuity view about expressive emotions, as emotions that are apt if and only if they correctly represent the source of that emotion, if that source has the qualities that are relevant for the expression of that emotion. ( Citation: Gilmore, 2020, p. 95 Gilmore, J. (2020). Apt Imaginings: Feelings for Fictions and Other Creatures of the Mind. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190096342.001.0001 )

The envy I feel in thinking that my colleague cruises around town on a vintage Vespa motorino is inapt if he does no such thing.¹

However, there is reason to think that the criteria which an emotion’s apt expressions are grounded in are dependent on question of whether the source is real of fictional. What grounds the criterial qualities of emotionally apt responses to fiction are the functions that prompt the source.

It is true that works of art standardly evoke a given emotion through supplying reasons that point to its object’s possession of the relevant features. . . . However, we can see how works of art also sometimes represent people, events, states of affairs, and so on in ways designed to elicit certain emotions without supplying what would count as reasons for those emotions if they were felt toward analogous things in real life.²

• Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now where the music “Ride of the Valkyries” is used to elicit first enjoyment, and then shock, horror, and dread.
• Wagner’s Lohengrin is used to distract us from the fact that the The Great Dictator is literally ’toying with the world'

Therefore, an emotion’s criterial qualities can be grounded in entertainment, pleasure, and assorbtion and do not always need to be rationalized by the facts the objects correspond to.

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