Ohio university puzzle

What are the premises of Walton’s puzzle as listed in the Morreall article? Morreall presents the following: that fear need not have an intentional object and that to fear something, one need not believe that it is dangerous to them. Explain this in your own words, and give two examples. Explain and then discuss how this applies to fear as it involves fear of infectious disease?

Journal of Philosophy, Inc. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2940792 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jphil. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Journal of Philosophy, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Philosophy. http://www.jstor.org COMMENTS AND CRITICISM 359 COMMENTS AND CRITICISM FEAR WITHOUT BELIEF J n his well-knownarticle "Fearing Fictions," Kendall Walton' used a puzzle to launch his theory of fiction as a game of makebelieve. The puzzle goes like this. In describing their experiences of certain movies, people often say that they feel fear. But fear involves the belief that one is in danger, and normal moviegoers do not have this belief. So what they experience cannot really be fear. To solve this puzzle, Walton offered his theory of make-believe: people mistakenly call their reactions to some fictions "fear" because, while watching the movie or reading the book, they are in a game in which it is make-believe that they feel fear. Dozens of commentators have criticized and suggested refinements for Walton's theory, but few have questioned the puzzle that was supposed to motivate it.2 I want to show that with an adequate understanding of fear, Walton's puzzle dissolves. I. THE COGNITIVE THEORY OF FEAR The two premises of Walton's puzzle which led him to conclude that what people describe as fear is not fear, were: (1) Fear involves the belief that one is in danger. (2) Normal moviegoersdo not believe that they are in danger. I accept the second premise but will challenge the first. Walton's account of fear is a standard application of the cognitive theory of emotions, according to which emotions involve or are caused by beliefs. This theory began in Aristotle's Rhetoric, was standard in medieval scholasticism, and has appeared in philosophers as diverse as David Hume, John Dewey, and Jean-Paul Sartre. It was particularly well received in analytic circles, starting about thirty years ago, for at least two reasons. First, its emphasis on beliefs made it compatible with other analytic theory focused on epistemic states and attitudes. And secondly, it seemed explanatorily more satisfactory than both the old James-Lange theory, which identified 1 "Fearing Fictions," this JOURNAL, LXXV, 1 (January 1978): 5-27. See also Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge: Harvard, 1990). 2 For most of the responses to Walton, see the bibliography in Bijoy Boruah, Fiction and Emotion: A Study in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Mind (New York: Oxford, 1989).