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How fiction works

Moving from the production to the consumption side of fiction, I argue against a proposal of Derek Matravers, who claims that appeals to the imagination won’t help us distinguish between the responses of an audience to fiction and to non-fiction. I reject Matravers’ proposal, along with his claim that representations do not motivate action in egocentric space. I also reject the idea that much of the work we have supposed to be done by imagination is actually done by a state recently called ‘alief’ (Gendler). I defend the idea that imagination plays an important role in our interpretation of other people—real as well as fictional. I defend the irreducibility of the imagination to other states.