We can portray or take on the role of someone whom we are not. For example, a professional actor can play the role of a fictional character who does not exist in the real world, although she believes she is not that person. This behavior is named “acting.” My aim here is to locate the necessary and sufficient conditions of acting. In my view, acting is a process of communication between actors and audiences. One of its necessary components is that actors use their own features to represent those features that their characters have; another is that actors intend to make their audiences imagine that they are themselves identical to their characters. In this article, I specify these two components, critique other views of the definition of acting and distinguish acting from other similar processes.
Many actors report a form of dual-consciousness when playing roles on stage: they react to the given circumstances as their characters would do, but they do not forget they are on the stage. This paper analyzes the concept of dual-consciousness and argues that actor dual-consciousness results from the actor’s imaginings, which both recreate the experience of the character and inform the actor about the non-reality of the experience. Keywords: Acting, actor, dual-consciousness, recreative imagination, experiential identification.
In order to account for our engagements with fiction, several philosophers have recently introduced a class of novel mental states which they have designated as 'i-desires' or 'desire-like imaginings'. Others argue against this claim by denying the existence of i-desire. In this article, I argue that genuine desires fail to make sense of our attitudes towards real objects in fictional situations, and that i-desire is psychologically indispensable in explaining our attitudes in such cases.
People have a capacity to imaginatively recreate mental states that they themselves do not have. These recreative states are referred to as 'I-states'. Several philosophers, such as Gregory Currie, Tyler Doggett, and Andy Egan, propose that the combination of i-desire and i-belief-two typical I-states-can motivate agents. The goal of this paper is to defend this i-desire + i-belief account. Here I consider a kind of dramatic acting-method acting-in which an actor aspires to sincere performances by experientially inhabiting the role of the character, as involving I-states and that it implies that i-desires and i-beliefs can motivate agents. First, I analyze the features of method acting; second, I argue that those accounts which do not include the concept of i-desire cannot explain these features; third, I argue that the i-desire + i-belief account can do that and it therefore is the best explanation of how a method actor is motivated on stage.
desire that Romeo not die. The combination of this imagining and this i-desire causes our affective responses.What is an i-desire? Given that our imaginings can mirror the inferential role of beliefs, share mind-to-world direction of fit, and generate emotional states, philosophers agree that imaginings can be seen as a distinctive cognitive attitude and that they can be belief-like (see Currie & Ravenscroft 2002;Nichols 2004a;Walton 1990). If human imagining can take a belief-like form, then there may be an imaginative analogue of desire.Recently, several philosophers have argued that imaginings can also be seen as a distinctive conative attitude. 3 These imaginative analogues of desire are referred to as i-desires.There are two alternative theories: imagination + desire and desire + desire.According to the desire + desire account, we have two conflicting desires concerning the fiction. We desire that the fiction be such that an event occurs, but also desire that the fiction be such that the event not occur. For example, we desire that Othello be such that Desdemona dies, but we also desire that the play be such that Desdemona does not die. The two conflicting desires cause our negative affective responses to the fictional events.According to the imagination + desire account, we imagine that such an event E occurs and also desire that E not occur. It should be noted that the desire being invoked in this account is neither a desire concerning the fiction nor an imaginative desire, but a real desire concerning fictional events or characters. For example, we imagine that Desdemona was killed by Othello and genuinely desire that she not die. The combination of this 3 Unlike belief-like imaginings, there is no agreement about whether i-desire is a key component in mental architecture. For arguments for i-desires,
Gregory Currie has argued for the indispensability of i-desires – a kind of imaginative counterpart of desires – by drawing a distinction between the satisfaction conditions of the desire-like states involved in our emotional responses to tragedies and those of genuine desires. Nevertheless, Fiora Salis has recently shown that the same sort of distinction can also be found in nonfictional cases and has proposed a solution to the issue of satisfaction conditions that dispenses with i-desires. In this paper, I refute Salis’s stance and argue for the indispensability of i-desires. For this aim to be achieved, I first argue that the distinction between the satisfaction conditions of i-desires and those of desires can be given a different explanation, and that in this case, the same sort of distinction cannot arise in nonfictional cases; Secondly, I argue that we cannot make sense of the conflict between our desire-like states triggered by fictions and our background desires, and therefore i-desires should be introduced to avoid this conflict.Keywords: i-desires, desire-like imaginings, tragedy, imaginative desires,
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