The spoilers puzzle

Spoilers provide advance knowledge of crucial facts about how a work of fiction unfolds or ends. This is often the reason given for our dislike of spoilers. I begin by showing that, on generally accepted philosophical accounts of fiction and imagination, the phenomenon of spoilers is puzzling, and the lay explanation of our dislike of spoilers is inadequate. To resolve the puzzle, I first argue that imaginings are inherently constrained or norm-governed. In imagining, we take on a (fictional) doxastic role: our aim is to imagine that which a work of fiction presents as true at each stage of its unfolding. Then, distinguishing between two ways in which we can follow norms or rules, I show that although spoilers do not completely thwart our experience of fiction, they can significantly diminish the degree to which we are engrossed in fiction, hence we dislike them.