A Particularist Defence of Cognitivism About Literary Value

The aim of this thesis is to describe and defend a tenable version of cognitivism about literary value. According to the view put forward here, for cognitivism about literary value to be tenable, it must be adopted alongside a particularist view of literary value. The particularism argued for here is a particularism of a McDowellian stripe transposed to the context of literary value. According to the cognitivism I propose, cognitive literary value is a truth-related literary value. This characterisation of cognitive literary value is defended first by indicating how works of literature (which are paradigmatically fictional) can express true claims about the actual world. Contra a lot of relatively recent philosophical contributions surrounding cognitive literary value, the view put forward in this thesis proposes that we think of cognitive literary value as the expression of understanding of a given subject-matter which is relevant to the artistic aims of the work in question, as opposed to the claim that works of literature can teach readers how to do things which has been repeatedly defended. There are, I argue, two benefits to thinking of the main epistemic value in literary cognitive value in terms of understanding rather than knowledge�how, or even knowledge-that. The first is that in divorcing literary cognitive value from knowledge, we can more easily side-step Platonic objections (and objections in the spirit of Plato inspired by recent developments in psychology) to learning from literature. The second is that thinking of literary cognitive achievement in terms of understanding helps us better capture the complex relationship between literary value and the way the world really is. I argue for this latter point by way of examining a series of case-studies, whose truth-related literary value is best captured in terms of understanding. I propose that understanding in a work of literature can be expressed through what I call factual story-world building as well as by way of challenging readers’ pre-conceptions.