Learning about attachments through literature

This thesis defends a theory of literary cognitivism: some good literary works, novels in particular, acquaint us with remarkable attachments and put us in a position to evaluate them, and thereby increase our ethical knowledge significantly. Chapter 1 argues that an attachment, such as those involved in love and friendship, is a drive, that is, a standing mental state that manifests itself in emotions and encapsulates what one ultimately cares about. This drive is directed at the person (or entity) one is attached to. Chapter 2 defends a version of the attitudinalist theory of emotions of Deonna and Teroni (2012), that emotions are bodily attitudes directed at a content. It also argues that emotions which are manifestations of attachments do not have fittingness conditions. Chapter 3 provides a theory of imagining emotions, that imagining an emotion is forming a thick meta-representation of that emotion, where a representation is thick if its object can be apprehended in the representation. Chapter 4 argues that literature can provide knowledge what an emotion is like by helping us imagine it. However, this does not amount to understanding the attachment that such an emotion might be a manifestation of. Chapter 5 thus defends the main claim of the thesis, that a work of literature can help us imagine relevant emotions of a character and put them together, in such a way as to acquaint us with an attachment of that character and allow us to judge it ethically. Chapter 6 accounts for why this is an important epistemic gain. The following principle is defended: the value of an individual attachment is revealed in that instance and is only minimally connected to a general description. General judgments of attachments are based on assemblages of individual judgments, so can be changed by an acquaintance with remarkable instances.