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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9019854" data-attributes="member: 8461">So, I thought I'd mentioned before in this thread that I'd been reading Lisa Zunshine's Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (which I came across when reading an essay several years ago as to why so many adult men were ardent fans of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic), but looking over the last several pages of the thread, I apparently neglected to mention it (along with one or two other books that I've been working my way through lately). An oversight on my part, there.That said, I had some free time this morning and finished the last few sections of Zunshine's book. It was, overall, extremely insightful, but very much not what I was expecting.To wit, I had thought this book would focus very much on the emotional aspects and responses that fiction (attempts to) evoke in us, and how works of fiction attempt to do so. Instead, the book was very much focused on the "theory of mind" mentioned in the title, which is an aspect of what the author refers to as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitivism_(aesthetics)#Overview" target="_blank">cognitive literary theory</a>. More specifically, "theory of mind" is our evolved tendency to attribute actions to the emotions (i.e. state of mind) being experienced by someone else (be that person real or fictional). The example the author uses at the beginning of the book is how, at the beginning of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, we automatically assume that Peter Walsh's trembling when he greets Clarissa Dalloway is due to what he's (emotionally) feeling when he sees her, rather than his having some sort of disease, being cold, etc.?This forms the basis for what the book discusses at length, building on it to discuss ideas of "metarepresentational tags" (i.e. that our brains "tag" information with notes about when/how/from whom we learned that information, and in what regard we hold it, i.e. as a belief, a fact, something someone else believes, etc., and that these tags in conjunction with the information in question can inform us about those sources so tagged as much as about the information itself...for instance, we can tag "that coffee shop across the street is a health hazard" with "Jane says that," and that can tell us about Jane more than anything else is we know that she's a hypochondriac who is always wiping down her desk), episodic and semantic memory (the former being memories with strong metarepresentational tags, such as the anecdote about Jane and the coffee shop, while the latter have either weak tags or no tags at all, i.e. "the Earth is round," as we don't usually bother tagging that with when we learned it, who we learned it from, or even a tag about "I believe that"), and several related ideas.Utilizing these, the book's core theory is that one of the reasons we read fiction (and the author goes out of her way to make sure that we understand that she's not saying that this is the only reason) is that doing so exercises our theory of mind (ToM) ability to attribute characters' actions to their personal dispositions. We might be wrong about what a character's disposition is, but even when we are the challenge is entertaining in and of itself (which is why quite a few types of fiction set out to deliberately play with our ToM in this regard: unreliable narrators are discussed at length, as are detective novels).The takeaway here, at least as I understood it, is that reading fiction is itself a creative act on the part of the reader(s), in that we're "filling in the blanks" behind what the characters are doing. It's a fascinating idea, and one that I don't think is without merit. It's certainly something worth considering, and in that regard Zunshine's book is one that I'd recommend to others (though certainly not as light reading!).Having finished that, I'm also preparing to wrap up Benjamin Franklin's The Art of Virtue (which is a book that Franklin titled but never actually wrote; this book's editor, George L. Rogers, has instead taken selected writings of Franklin's – personal correspondence, newspaper articles, speeches, quotes from Poor Richard's Almanac, etc. – and put them together to demonstrate various virtues that Franklin both lived and championed).</blockquote>

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