ABSTRACT
The US legal system often requires lawyers and judges to take the intentional stance toward the people and groups on which the system acts. One risk of inattention to the discursive presentation of mental states is the temptation to write "stories" about the experiences of real people as if their traits and thoughts exist only as we describe them, like the attributes and thoughts of fictional characters. The parallels between fictional characters and real people do not make them equivalent. We take many similar attitudes toward fictional characters and real people, but the objects of our attitudes are fundamentally different in each case. Thus, not all readers respond to fictional characters in the same way, nor do they respond to real-life situations involving other people in the same way. Attributing mental states to real people is not like attributing such states to fictional characters, even though the language used in both kinds of attribution can look identical.
