The empathic skill fiction can't teach us

This paper argues that a crucial skill needed to empathize with others cannot be trained by reading fiction: the skill of reading the evidence for the other person's state of mind and, thus, empathically getting their mental state right. While the evidence for a fictional character's mental state is merely propositional, the evidence for a person's mental state in a typical real-life situation is often experiential. Because the kind of evidence is different, the skill does not carry over. If reading fiction has a positive impact on our empathic skills in real life, as some empirical evidence suggests, it cannot be because we practice the relevant skill in the context of fiction.