Kendall Walton

The genesis of the make-believe theory can be found in Walton's 1978 paper 'Fearing Fictions', which addresses the paradox of fiction i.e. how can we be moved by things that do not exist in the case of fiction? Walton's solution is to accept that our responses to fiction are genuine emotions, but to deny that they correspond to the conventional feelings that we refer to – rather, it is fictional that they are the conventional emotions. So, for instance, when a person who has watched a horror movie declares that they felt afraid, it is true that they were emotionally moved, but fictional that what they were moved to was fear. Walton refers to these fictional emotions as quasi emotions.

Walton's major contribution to philosophy is his theory of representation, known as the make-believe theory. In the context of ontology, the same theory is usually referred to as pretense theory, and in the context of representational arts, prop theory. Walton has been working on this philosophical theory since 1973, and it is expounded in his 1990 magnum opus Mimesis as Make -Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. The theory is a development of Ernst Gombrich's sketched ideas concerning the relationship between toys and art, presented in his famous essay 'Meditations on a Hobby Horse', which Walton has described as having been “largely ignored” by most of philosophy of art.

The make-believe theory has been described by Jerrold Levinson as “the most significant event in Anglo-American aesthetics in many a year”, and compares it to Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art (1968), Richard Wollheim's Art and Its Objects and Arthur Danto's Transfiguration of the Commonplace by suggesting that it “joins a small pantheon of landmark books”.

He joined the University of Michigan faculty in 1965, and became Charles L. Stevenson Collegiate Professor in 1999. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Nottingham in 2005. He was president of the American Society for Aesthetics from 2003 to 2005.

Because of his background in music, Walton expected that he would have an interest in aesthetics and philosophy of art, but was unmoved by his contacts with these fields at Berkeley. After graduating in 1961, he pursued postgraduate studies at Cornell University where he attended a seminar with the British philosopher and aesthetician Frank Sibley that he discovered “how exciting aesthetics can be, how serious, rigorous philosophical thought can connect with real, real-world interests in the arts.” He wrote his dissertation, 'Conceptual Schemes: A Study of Linguistic Relativity and Related Philosophical Problems', with Sydney Shoemaker on philosophy of language, mind and metaphysics, and graduated in 1967 with a Ph.D.

Simo Säätelä compared Walton's approach with the make-believe theory to that of Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind (1949), albeit far wider in scope.

Kendall Lewis Walton (born 1939) is an American philosopher, the Emeritus Charles Stevenson Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. His work mainly deals with theoretical questions about the arts and issues of philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. His book Mimesis as Make Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts develops a theory of make-believe and uses it to understand the nature and varieties of representation in the arts. He has also developed an account of photography as transparent, defending the idea that we see through photographs, much as we see through telescopes or mirrors, and written extensively on pictorial representation, fiction and the emotions, the ontological status of fictional entities, the aesthetics of music, metaphor, and aesthetic value.