The genesis of the make-believe theory can be found in Walton's 1978 paper 'Fearing Fictions',[22] which addresses the Paradox of fiction i.e. how can we be moved by things that do not exist in the case of fiction?[23] 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.[24]
In later papers, Walton has expanded his theory to recognize a distinction between content oriented make-believe, which describes a participant's relationship to the fictional worlds of novels, films, paintings etc. and prop oriented make-believe, in which the participant's interest is in the nature of the prop itself, not in the fictional world that attaches to it.[25] Metaphors are a classic example of prop oriented make-believe: the phrase “we are in the same boat” is not intended to elicit imaginings about the fictional boat we are in, but to communicate by drawing our attention to a specific prop (the boat).[26] Stephen Yablo has developed Walton's concept of prop oriented make-believe in connection with numbers and concluded that our understanding of cardinality is essentially based upon fiction.