Show, Don't Tell: Emotion, Acquaintance and Moral Understanding Through Fiction.

This article develops a Gricean-based distinction between two communicative acts: showing and telling, emphasizing that telling relies on the addressee's trust in the speaker's credibility, whereas showing provides reasons for belief independent of the communicator's trustworthiness. It applies this distinction to literature, arguing that authors can show moral facts within fiction by engaging readers' emotions, thereby enabling them to become acquainted with evaluative properties both inside the fictional world and, through moral counterfactuals, in the actual world. This form of showing differs from moral testimony by fostering not only propositional moral knowledge but also moral understanding—a cognitive skill involving responsiveness to morally relevant features. The article further addresses challenges to the rationality of emotional responses to fiction and contrasts its view with others that downplay the epistemic role of emotion in moral learning through literature.