engleski

Literary Fiction as Thought Experiment: The Scope of the Analogy

Some authors defend literary cognitivism – the view that literary fiction is cognitively valuable – by drawing an analogy between cognitive values of thought experiments and literary fiction. In this paper my aim is to analyze the reasons for drawing this analogy and to see how far the analogy can be stretched. In the second part, I turn to the claim put forward by literary anti-cognitivists according to which literature can at best be the source of hypotheses, not of knowledge. I challenge this claim by showing that hypotheses can have valuable cognitive benefits on their own, thus hoping to restore cognitive benefits readers get from literature.

cognitive values; hypotheses; literary cognitivism; realism; science fiction

nije evidentirano