Magic: A New Belief-Based Account

The subject of magic as an art form, and more specifically as a representational art form, has received very little attention by philosophers. By contrast, the subject of magic performance has recently garnered much interest from psychologists seeking to understand the working of the mind with regard to illusion, perception, attention, and inattention. But magic presents a unique challenge to traditional theories of representation in the arts. It seems that magicians depict impossible events, and that these depictions are meant to be experienced as really occurring, here, now in the theatre. This seems to break with the tradition of fictional representation as grounded in some form of make-believe since, if spectators are aware that they are make-believing at all, then they would not respond to the “depiction” in a magic performance in the appropriate way. The challenge seems to be to account for magic in terms of The Paradox of Fiction. What we need to account for in that paradox is the fact that viewers of, e.g., films, plays, novels, respond genuinely to things they know or believe to be fictional in the first place. I will argue, by contrast, that magicians use fictional representations – e.g., the coin teleported, the magician levitated, the object was destroyed and restored – which they do not expect viewers to take seriously in order to frame a set of real actions toward which spectators hold propositional attitudes such as beliefs, and which are constituted in an impossible way. The correct model for an experience of magic is that a viewer believes that their experience must be illusory, but that they also believe that it could not be. This presents a direct contrast to one of the only philosophical accounts of the experience in magic which takes The Paradox of Fiction as, in many ways, central.