Mimesis as Make-Believe by Kendall Walton Review: A Landmark Work in Analytic Aesthetics

Walton's central project, as the Harvard University Press description states, is to "explore and explain the foundations of the representational arts." His theory holds that representations — in fiction, painting, sculpture, theater, and film — find their origin not in everyday documentary life but in make-believe, and that they function "first and foremost as props in games of make-believe," as David Novitz summarized the argument in Philosophy and Literature. From this single anchoring claim, Walton builds outward to address a remarkably broad set of questions: what distinguishes fiction from nonfiction, how depiction differs from description, what "point of view" means in the arts, and what it means for one work to be more "realistic" than another. The theory also extends to tackle the long-contested philosophical problem of the ontological standing of fictitious beings — what it means, philosophically, for Sherlock Holmes or Anna Karenina to "exist" — and what statements referring to such entities actually mean.

One of the book's most distinctive features is the range of art forms it draws into a single theoretical orbit. Rather than treating literature, visual art, and performance as separate domains requiring separate accounts, Walton deploys his make-believe framework across all of them, illustrating his theoretical positions with examples drawn from literature, painting, sculpture, theater, and film. This cross-media scope is integral to the book's argument: the claim is that the make-believe model illuminates representation as such, not merely one corner of it. The publisher's description positions the book as essential reading for "everyone interested in the workings of representational art," a framing that reflects just how broadly Walton casts the net.

Walton is notably precise about his own terminology — a precision that both strengthens and, for some readers, complicates the work. As Novitz's review in Philosophy and Literature records, Walton explicitly signals at the outset that he uses the term "representation" both more broadly and more narrowly than is ordinarily done, and that only fiction will qualify as "representational" in his particular technical sense. This careful boundary-setting is characteristic of the book's approach: rather than borrowing ordinary language and hoping for the best, Walton builds a technical apparatus from the ground up. Readers coming from philosophy will find this rigor familiar and valuable; readers from art history, film studies, or literary theory who are less accustomed to analytic methodology may need to invest time in mastering Walton's framework before the payoffs become visible.

First published in 1990 and reissued in paperback by Harvard University Press, the book has held a sustained presence in philosophical aesthetics for more than three decades. The fact that Harvard University Press has kept it in print in a reprint edition attests to its continued assignment in graduate philosophy courses and its status as a reference point in ongoing debates about fiction, depiction, and emotional response to art. The make-believe theory Walton develops here has become one of the most discussed proposals in analytic philosophy of art, influencing debates about what it means to have genuine emotional responses to characters one knows to be fictional — a problem sometimes called the "paradox of fiction."

Mimesis as Make-Believe is scholarly philosophy — dense, systematically argued, and written for readers prepared to engage with extended analytical argument. Philosophers working in aesthetics, philosophy of mind, or philosophy of language will find it indispensable. Theorists in adjacent fields — film studies, literary theory, art history — who want a rigorous analytic account of representation will find it rewarding but demanding. The book is not designed as an introduction to aesthetics for a general audience; it presupposes comfort with philosophical argumentation and rewards careful, patient reading. For the audience it addresses, however, Walton's construction of a unified theory of the representational arts from a single, elegantly simple premise represents the kind of philosophical achievement that defines a field.