engleski

Is there really a challenge to the cognitive value of literature?

Many people agree that we can learn from literature, and yet, it is by no means clear how we do that. For a long time it has seemed that arguments against the cognitive value of literature (especially those put forward by J. Stolnitz, S. Olsen and P. Lamarque) were strong and persuasive enough and it wasn’t easy to give an answer to them, without falling back to triviality and philistinism. In this paper I examine the strength and plausibility of these arguments and try to give an answer to them. I believe that recent developments in epistemology, such as the pluralistic picture of cognitive values, enable us to dissect a literary work in a manner that preserves its artistic value, while at the same time to find a mode to accommodate the indispensability of the cognitive dimension.

Literary cognitivism; literary appreciation; slipperiness of cognitivism

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