Why Do We Cry Over Fake People in Stories?

The Scandal of the Made-Up Boy

In 1980, a young reporter named Janet Cooke wrote a heart-wrenching story for The Washington Post. She described an eight-year-old boy named Jimmy who was addicted to heroin. The article was so powerful it won a Pulitzer Prize. Then the truth came out: Jimmy did not exist. Cooke had made the whole thing up. She had to give the prize back, and her career was ruined. Why did people care so much? After all, we read made-up stories all the time and nobody calls James Patterson a fraud. But that’s the point. If you read a history book, you expect facts. If you open a novel, you accept that the author is inventing characters and events. When someone passes off a made-up story as true, we feel cheated. The fiction/non-fiction distinction—the difference between a story that is pretend and one that reports reality—matters deeply.

But what makes a piece of writing fiction in the first place? A natural guess is that a story is fiction if it is false. Nelson Goodman (1906–1998) thought that “literal falsity” is what separates fiction from true reports. But this won’t work. A physics textbook that accidentally says the earth is flat is false, but it is still non-fiction. And an author could write a novel about real people that accidentally gets every detail right—it would still be fiction. So falsity alone is not the answer.

Most philosophers now think the secret lies not in the words on the page but in what the author is doing. Harry Deutsch (b. 1950s) argues that fiction is making up stories out of whole cloth. The author creatively invents characters and events. John Searle (b. 1932) takes a different angle: the author pretends to assert the sentences. When you write “Once upon a time there was a wizard,” you aren’t really claiming that there was a wizard. You’re going through the motions, like you’d pretend to be a pirate in a game. Readers go along because they spot the pretense.

Kendall Walton (b. 1939) shifts the focus from author to reader. He says a work of fiction is a prop in a game of make-believe. Think of how a tree stump can become a bear when children play. A book works the same way: its job is to prescribe what readers imagine. If the text says a detective solves a crime, you imagine a detective solving a crime. The story doesn’t need to be false, and the author doesn’t need to pretend. The book just has to function as a prompt for a shared imaginative game. That means even a vivid, novelistic history book can count as fiction on Walton’s view because it still gets you to imagine the scenes. That bothers many philosophers—they say a history is still a history, no matter how exciting the style. So the debate rages: is fiction defined by what the author intends, or by how the reader uses the text?

What’s True in a World That Isn’t?

Pick up any Sherlock Holmes story. It is true in the story that Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street. In reality, that address didn’t even exist when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the tales. Yet we all agree that “Holmes was a detective living at 221B Baker Street” is a truth of fiction—something that is the case inside the story, even though it’s false outside. How do we figure out what else is true in a story? We never read that Holmes had a liver, but we assume he did, because all humans have livers. So we bring some real-world knowledge into the story. But we cannot bring all of it. It’s actually true that London didn’t have a famous detective named Holmes, but that isn’t true in the stories. So we need a filter.

David Lewis (1941–2001) offered an elegant way to think about this. He imagined that a story is told as known fact, and then we ask: in the possible worlds where this telling happens, what else is true? We fill in the gaps by staying as close to our actual world as we can, unless the story explicitly says otherwise. But this runs into trouble with beliefs the author and first readers took for granted. In a typical Victorian novel, nobody mentions whether God exists; yet Lewis’s rule might force us to say God does exist in the story because Victorian England was very religious. That feels wrong.

Another headache comes from impossible fictions. Some stories contradict themselves. In one Sherlock Holmes adventure, Watson’s war wound is in his shoulder; in another, it’s in his leg. Does that mean in the stories Watson has a wound in two places at once? Lewis tried to handle this by slicing the story into consistent fragments, but that doesn’t work for tales that are deliberately impossible, like a character proving that 7+5 isn’t 12. Many philosophers think we need a different answer. Walton says truth in fiction is just what the game of make-believe prescribes we imagine. If the story tells us to imagine a talking donkey, we do—and we don’t worry about whether real donkeys can talk. Fictional truth isn’t about matching reality; it’s about following the rules of the game.

Real Tears, Fake People: The Great Paradox

Now we reach the puzzle that any moviegoer knows firsthand. You watch Toy Story 3. As the toys hold hands, facing what looks like their end, your throat tightens. You know they are plastic characters dreamed up in a studio. You know they don’t exist. Yet the sadness feels as real as if a friend were in trouble. This is the paradox of fiction. It starts from three claims that all seem true but can’t all be true at once:

1. People experience emotions for fictional characters and events, knowing they are fictional.
2. People don’t believe those characters and events exist.
3. To have an emotion about something, you must believe it exists.

If (3) is right, then either (1) is wrong—we don’t really have emotions, we just think we do—or (2) is wrong—we secretly believe the story is real, which doesn’t match our experience.

Walton defends a version of rejecting (1). He says we don’t actually feel real pity or fear; we feel quasi-emotions. The pounding heart and the wet eyes are real, but they aren’t full-blown emotions because they don’t come with the belief that anyone is truly suffering. Instead, it is fictional in our game of make-believe that we feel pity. Just as a stump is a bear in a game, our racing heart counts as fear in the game. Many people resist this. When you bawl during a film, telling yourself that the tears are only “quasi” feels like cheating.

A more popular move is to reject (3). We can have real emotions just by entertaining a thought. If you imagine your best friend moving away and you start feeling sad, that sadness is genuine—even though nothing has actually happened. The mere mental image, or the story described in a book, can trigger the emotion. On this view, you don’t need to believe Anna Karenina exists to pity her; you only need to think about her tragic situation. That still leaves a mystery: what exactly is the emotion about if there is no real person? But it at least allows that the tear rolling down your cheek is a real tear.

Does Fiction Teach You Anything (Besides the Ending)?

So fiction can make us feel. Can it also make us think—and help us know something true about the world? Many people believe it can. Reading about a character who struggles with a moral choice might help you understand what courage or honesty looks like in a messy real-life situation. This view is called cognitivism: literary fiction can give readers genuine knowledge, and that adds to the story’s value. Some philosophers argue this knowledge is not just dry facts. A novel might teach you practical knowledge—what it is like to be in someone else’s shoes, or how to pay attention to details you’d otherwise miss. After reading The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, you might grasp the misery of factory workers in a way no textbook can deliver.

Not everyone is convinced. Anti-cognitivists point out that the “truths” we pull from stories are often banal. Pride and Prejudice might only teach you that stubborn pride and prejudice keep attractive people apart—hardly a revelation. Worse, fiction can give us false beliefs. If we learn about the past only from Hollywood movies, we might end up with a pretty distorted picture. More radically, some philosophers say that even if a story does convey truth, that truth doesn’t make the story better as literature. Art’s value is in its themes, its beauty, its power—not in whether it happens to be correct about the world.

A related puzzle is why we enjoy stories that make us sad or scared. The paradox of tragedy asks: why would anyone willingly watch a play where the hero dies? Aristotle thought it was because the drama helps us release pent-up emotions—a kind of cleansing he called catharsis. Today, we might say the artistry of the story transforms painful feelings into something meaningful. All these questions show that fiction isn’t just an escape; it’s a gymnasium for our emotions and our minds.

So Why Does Any of This Matter?

Maybe you will never need to define “fiction” for a test. But every time you open a book or start a movie, you are already doing philosophy. You decide—usually without thinking—that you will go along with a world that isn’t real. You let yourself care about people who don’t exist. You fill in the gaps with your own knowledge, and you complain if the story breaks its own rules. Recognizing these hidden choices can make you a sharper reader. You notice when a “true” story borrows novelistic tricks, or when a fantasy novel smuggles in a real-world truth about friendship. And when a sad scene catches you off guard and you feel foolish for crying, you can remember that even professional philosophers argue about why that tear is perfectly real—or only a kind of game. The mystery is still open. Next time you finish a tear-jerker, you get to decide where you stand.

Think about it

1. If a friend tells you a completely made-up story but says it really happened, and you find out later it was false, should you be angry even if the story was uplifting? Why or why not?
2. Imagine you are reading a book set in the real world, but the main character has a pet dragon. Can you still learn something true about friendship from it, or does the dragon make everything feel fake?
3. Can you enjoy a sad movie if you know it’s going to make you cry? What does that say about how our brains handle make-believe?