Truth and the 'Work' of Literary Fiction

Contemporary discussions over the cognitive value of literature focus on analysing the way in which literature and philosophy come close in addressing a specific class of concerns: those distinctively related to the human position and human experience in the world. In light of some stylistic methodological differences between the two practices – clear and precise language of philosophy and philosophy's focus on abstraction and objectivity vs. semantically dense language of literature accessory to conveying that which is emotional and subjective – it is often argued that the truth pertains to the domain of philosophy and deception to the domain of literature. I take that to be wrong and misrepresentative with respect to two things: philosophy's capacity to foster understanding and literature's overall cognitive value. To support my claim, I first show that philosophy's traditional methods of addressing human concerns are insufficient for the task and I then move on to explaining how literature can be cognitively valuable and better equipped to shed light on some of these concerns. I end by refuting arguments which deny literature's capacity to engage with philosophical problems.

In Noël Carroll and John Gibson (eds.), Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Literature (forthcoming).

In this paper, I shall sketch a preliminary ground for a cognitivist theory of fiction and argue that theories which align fiction-making with (aesthetically valuable) story-telling consider the act of fiction-making too narrowly. As a paradigmatic example of such anti-cognitivist theories, I shall examine Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen’s influential theory of fiction, which suggests that recognizing the author’s fictive and literary intentions manifested in the text would lead to dismissing her aims to make genuine claims and suggestions. I shall illustrate my argument concerning the act of fiction-making by showing that there are sub-genres of fiction, for instance, so-called philosophical fiction, in which the author’s intention to advance genuine points and to invite the reader to entertain the beliefs expressed can reasonably be argued to be as important for understanding the work as is her aim to create an aesthetically valuable and/or entertaining fictional narrative. Leaning on Noël Carroll’s theory of literary thought experiments, I shall suggest that philosophical fictions convey assertions or suggestions in a way similar to philosophers’ fictional thought experiments and are aimed to be understood as such.

Appeals to the actual author's intention in order to legitimate an interpretation of a work of literary narrative fiction have generally been considered extraneous in Anglo-American philosophy of literature since Wimsatt and Beardsley's well-known manifesto from the 1940s. For over sixty years now so-called anti-intentionalists have argued that the author's intentions – plans, aims, and purposes considering her work – are highly irrelevant to interpretation. In this paper, I shall argue that the relevance of the actual author's intentions varies in different approaches to fiction, and suggest that fictions are legitimately interpreted intentionally as conversations in a certain kind of reading. My aim is to show that the so-called conversational approach is valid when emphasizing the cognitive content of a fiction and truths it seem to convey, for example, in a philosophical approach to fictions which contain philosophical purport using Sartre's fictional works as paradigmatic, and that anti-intentionalists' arguments against intentionalism do not threaten such an approach.

2019

In this paper, I develop an alternative account of the novel’s cognitive value, based on the distinction Hannah Arendt made between truth (the result of the ‘need to know’) and meaning (the result of the ‘need to think’), claiming that the latter is better able to explain the novel’s cognitive value. To do this, I focus on a twofold movement I consider central to our experience of literary works, namely the fact that literary works always invite us to come to an interpretation of the work, but at the same time resist interpretation. In her posthumously published work Thinking, Hannah Arendt addresses the fundamental question of what exactly thinking is. One of the most important claims regarding thinking that Arendt makes, is that the activity of thinking is a radically different act from the act of acquiring knowledge. Thinking, Hannah Arendt claims, is the result of the human need to give meaning and the act of thinking must therefore be understood as an ongoing process without es...

This paper is inspired by the manuscript of Philip Kitcher’s forthcoming book Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach, in which he offers a brilliant, philosophically inspired reading of Thomas Mann’s novel, as well as his views on the relationship between literature and philosophy. One of Kitcher’s claims, which is my starting point, is that philosophy can be done not only by philosophers but also within some art forms, such as literature and music. Within the literary text, Kitcher claims, philosophy lies in the showing and the text can influence the way readers think and perceive the world. Due to this claim, I see Kitcher as pertaining to the group of literary cognitivists. He offers some powerful arguments in support of the cognitive value of literature, although his approach is substantially different from the arguments usually put forward in defence of literary cognitivism. In this paper, my aim is twofold: firstly, I want to analyse the relationship between philosophy and literature with the aim of showing that despite some overlap between the two disciplines, we have to keep them separate. Secondly, I want to explore what ramifications this has for literary cognitivism.

Croatian journal of philosophy, 2019

In this paper I address Jerome Stolnitz's famous article "On the cognitive triviality of art," with the aim of defending aesthetic and literary cognitivism against the charges Stolnitz issues at it therein. My defence of literary cognitivism is grounded in contemporary epistemology, which, I argue, is more embracive of cognitive values of literature traditionally invoked by literary cognitivists. My discussion is structured against Stolnitz's individual arguments, dedicated in particular to the problem of literary truth. After exploring what such notion might amount to, I move on to address the problems of applicability and triviality of literary truths, and I end by defending literature as a cognitively valuable social practice.

Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, 2021

Peter Lamarque has suggested that literature could not win the "battle for ideas" without engaging with a (propositional) truth theory of literary value. Thus, denying the theoretical role of truth in the aesthetic appreciation of literary works seems to compel us to leave any disputing arena. In that sense, accepting Peter Lamarque's arguments can be considered a wrong framework for any cognitivist approach to literature since his narrative opacity thesis seems to exclude a cognitivist elucidation. In this article, I briefly discuss that set of inferences. Firstly, I question the Lamarquean approach concerning the battle for ideas concept. Secondly, I propose an elucidation of the narrative opacity, which pretends to be cognitivist and non-truth dependent

Aesthetic Investigation, 2019