Most of the Mind Can’t Tell Fact from Fiction
tories, fiction included, act as a kind of surrogate life. You can learn from them so seamlessly that you might believe you knew something—about ancient Greece, say—before having it from Mary Renault’s novel . You’ll also to. That seems like a liability: Philosophers have long concerned themselves with what they call “the paradox of fiction”—why would we find imagined stories emotionally arousing at all? The answer is that most of our mind does not even realize that , so we react to it almost as though it were real.
