The idea that fictions may educate us is an old one, as is the view that they distort the truth and mislead us. While there is a long tradition of passionate assertion in this debate, systematic arguments are a recent development, and the idea of empirically testing is particularly novel. Our aim in this chapter is to provide clarity about what is at stake in this debate, what the options are, and how empirical work does or might bear on its (...) resolution. We distinguish between merely influencing people’s opinions and providing genuine learning, where the latter requires that the source of the change in opinion should be reliable. Other important ideas here are the extent to which authors of fiction may be considered to provide testimony, or something like it, and the possibility of recognizing an unstated purpose in the project of the fictional work. We ask whether fictions can furnish us not merely with ideas but with reasons for believing them, perhaps by constituting thought experiments. We consider whether the focus should be on understanding rather than on knowledge, and whether fictions can inform us about the qualities of another’s experiences. We briefly describe some experimental work of recent decades and suggest that the evidence for learning from fiction is currently meagre. (shrink)

A World of Muscle, Bone & Organs: Research and Scholarship in Dance is an e-book exploring contemporary ideas and themes in the research and practice of dance. It contains 23 chapters written by researchers at the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE), Coventry University, and is divided into six sections: Spaces of Practice, Philosophy, Communities, Politics, Data and Thinking, and Epistemology.

Mikkonen’s new book and his emphasis on understanding should be regarded as an important contribution to the contemporary debate on the cognitive value of literary narratives. As I shall argue, his notion of understanding can also help explain how literature is existentially valuable. In so doing, his account can support a radicalized contemporary neo-cognitivism according to which literature can affect us existentially and lead to a personal transformation.

We argue that although art has no systematic conventions for conveying knowledge in the way science does, the arts often play an important epistemic role in the production and understanding of scientific knowledge. We argue for what we call weak scientific cognitivism, the view that the production and distribution of scientific knowledge can benefit from engagement with art. We present a range of cases that illustrate a variety of epistemic functions of art relevant to scientific practice, and respond to influential (...) objections from anti-cognitivists that purport to show that art has no epistemic value. (shrink)

I question whether the case for “literary cognitivism” has generally been successfully made. As it is usually construed, the thesis is easy to satisfy illegitimately because dependence on fictionality is not built in as a requirement. The thesis of literary cognitivism should say: “literary fiction can be a source of knowledge in a way that depends crucially on its being fictional” (Green’s phrasing). After questioning whether nonpropositional cognitivist views (e.g., Nussbaum’s) meet this neglected standard, I argue that if fictional narratives (...) can impart propositional knowledge in virtue of their fictionality, it would be largely via a suppositional framework. Yet in many cases, such as Huxley’s Brave New World, the key literary supposition could simply be an epistemic possibility (‘suppose X, which for all we know, occurs sometime’), not counterfactual supposition, that is, distinctively fictional supposition. The best general case for literary cognitivism may be the limited one that literary fiction can alert us to nonactual metaphysical possibilities that may be important for understanding actuality. Yet even here, seemingly possible fictions are often impossible. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that narrative representations can provide knowledge in virtue of their narrativity, regardless of their truth value. I set out the question in section 1, distinguishing narrative cognitivism from aesthetic cognitivism and narrative representations from non-narrative representations. Sections 2 and 3 argue that exemplary narratives can provide lucid phenomenological knowledge, which appears to meet both the epistemic and narrativity criteria for the narrative cognitivist thesis. In section 4, I turn to non-narrative representation, focusing (...) on lyric poetry as presenting a disjunctive objection: either lucid phenomenological knowledge can be reduced to identification and fails to meet the epistemic criterion, or lucid phenomenological knowledge is provided in virtue of aesthetic properties and fails to meet the narrativity criterion. I address both of these problems in sections 5 and 6, and I close with a tentative suggestion as to how my argument for narrative c.. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that since artworks cannot take moral responsibility, it is impossible to establish any sort of ethical criticism towards them for their own sake. Ethical criticism of art is inevitably directed at the artist(s), who can take moral responsibility for creating or performing the art in certain ways. Therefore, we should distinguish between two types of criticism towards art: (1) the ethical criticism should be contextualized within the author-work framework, meaning that the extent to which the (...) author can take moral responsibility will significantly affect the ethical criticism of art, while artworks can serve as acts or evidence of acts (of the author) in ethical criticism; (2) ‘ethical’ criticism of art for the work’s own sake should be excluded from the ethical issue and instead reconstructed in the causal issue. (shrink)

Analisarei o romance Um Diário do Ano da Peste de Daniel Defoe como sendo um experimento mental que nos fornece prescrições consistentes sobre como agir em tempos de pandemia. Para mostrar que obras de ficção não possuem apenas valor estético, mas também um caráter cognitivo, defenderei o cognitivismo crítico e sustentarei desse modo que os ganhos cognitivos que temos a partir de uma obra de ficção acontecem em uma reflexão posterior à experiência imediata com a obra. Em seguida, argumentarei que (...) a ficção possui uma vantagem heurística frente à filosofia e às ciências, pois uma narrativa ficcional fornece ao espectador uma perspectiva privilegiada dos fatos ou dos pensamentos de uma personagem. Essa perspectiva pode sensibilizar o espectador e fazê-lo ter empatia pela personagem que sofre; e isso pode funcionar, em tempos de pandemia, como uma defesa das medidas de prevenção, a exemplo do isolamento social. (shrink)

In recent years, there have been debates in aesthetics and philosophy of art on the question of whether we can acquire knowledge about the world from works of art. However, little has been written on the effects that art has on cultivating self-knowledge and self-development. While, for most of us, it seems obvious that art has these effects, little is known about how and why these effects occur. Addressing this issue is the main aim of this paper. The gist of (...) the argument is that narrative art provides a unique opportunity to adopt a dual (first- and third-personal) perspective on the self, which is argued recently by psychologists and philosophers of mind to be necessary for obtaining the kind of self-knowledge that leads to self-development and self-change, that is, therapeutic self-knowledge. (shrink)

Anti-cognitivism is best understood as a challenge to explain how works of fictional narrative can add to our worldly knowledge. One way to respond to this challenge is to argue that works of fictional narrative add to our knowledge by inviting us to explore, in the imagination, the perspectives or points of view of others. In the present paper, I distinguish two readings of this thesis that reflect two very different conceptions of “perspective”: a first understanding focuses on what the (...) world looks like from a subjective point of view. Within this framework, we can distinguish approaches that focus on the subjective character of experience from others that explore the nature of subjectivity. I will argue that both strands can be successful only if they acknowledge the de se character of imagining. The second conception understands perspective as a method of representing. To illustrate it, I will look back to the invention of linear perspective in Renaissance painting. I will argue that the definition of perspective as a rule-guided method or technique can shed new light on the thesis that works of narrative fiction are particularly suited to display other perspectives. (shrink)

We critically survey prominent recent scholarship on the question of whether fiction can be a source of epistemic value for those who engage with it fully and appropriately. Such epistemic value might take the form of knowledge (for ‘cognitivists’) or understanding (for ‘neo-cognitivists’). Both camps may be sorted according to a further distinction between views explaining fiction’s epistemic value either in terms of the author’s engaging in a form of telling, or instead via their showing some state of affairs to (...) obtain, a special case of which is the provision of self-knowledge. Fictional works that show rather than tell often employ thought experiments. The epistemic value of some fictional works is indicated by their enabling of empathy, itself illuminated via the psychological process of experience-taking. Whether a fictional work offers epistemic value by telling or showing, there is, in principle, no bar to its being able to deliver on what it offers, and consumers of fiction who exercise epistemic vigilance may gain either knowledge or some degree of understanding from their engagement with it. (shrink)

Like works of literature, thought experiments present fictional narratives that prompt reflection in their readers. Because of these and other similarities, a number of philosophers have argued for a strong analogy between works of literary fiction and thought experiments, some going so far as to say that works of literary fiction are a species of thought experiment. These arguments are often used in defending a cognitivist position with regard to literature: thought experiments produce knowledge, so works of literary fiction can (...) too. This article concedes that works of literary fiction can be put to use in thought experiments, but not in a way that is helpful to the cognitivist. In particular, it draws three disanalogies in the ways we engage critically with thought experiments and with literary fictions. First, we use thought experiments to make arguments; second, we read thought experiments in strongly allegorical terms; and third, the terms of criticism we apply to thought experiments and to works of literature differ. Although these disanalogies present problems for the cognitivist position, they also give us a sharper picture of the distinctive educative potential of works of literary fiction. (shrink)

One challenge involved in integrating so-called ‘non-Western’ philosophies into ‘Western’ philosophical discourse concerns the fact that non-Western philosophical texts frequently differ significantly in style and approach from Western ones, especially those in contemporary analytic philosophy. But how might one bring texts that are written, for example, in a literary, non-expository style, and which do not clearly advance philosophical positions or arguments, into constructive dialogue with those that do? Also, why might one seek to do this in the first place? This (...) paper addresses these questions by means of a case study involving the Daoist classic, theZhuangzi.L’un des défis posés par l’inclusion des soi-disant philosophies «non-occidentales» dans le discours de la philosophie «occidentale» a trait au fait que plusieurs textes philosophiques non-occidentaux diffèrent de façon significative, en termes de style et d’approche, des textes occidentaux, principalement ceux issus de la philosophie analytique contemporaine. Comment établir un dialogue constructif entre des textes écrits de façon littéraire, qui n’ont pas l’allure d’un exposé et qui n’avancent pas clairement des positions ou des arguments philosophiques et des textes qui, au contraire, prennent la forme d’un exposé avançant des positions ou des arguments? Pourquoi, de prime abord, voudrait-on ouvrir un tel dialogue? Cet article pose ces questions par le biais de l’étude du cas du classique taoïste, leZhuāngzǐ. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: In this article, we intend to address the role of memory and narrative in the constitution of personal identity, based on Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” and the theoretical concepts of Paul Ricoeur (especially in Oneself as Another). This movement will allow us to underscore the idea that, contrary to what part of the analytical literature on identity and narrative has held, it is not just what we might call self-narrative that plays a role (...) in maintaining personal identity. Instead, we recover the Ricoeurian idea of a network of narratives or tangled of stories, in which self- and hetero-narratives are entangled, thus providing support to the identities it captures. (shrink)

How to account for the power that art holds over us? Why do artworks touch us deeply, consoling, transforming or invigorating us in the process? In this paper, we argue that an answer to this question might emerge from a fecund framework in cognitive science known as predictive processing (a.k.a. active inference). We unpack how this approach connects sense-making and aesthetic experiences through the idea of an ‘epistemic arc’, consisting of three parts (curiosity, epistemic action and aha experiences), which we (...) cast as aspects of active inference. We then show how epistemic arcs are built and sustained by artworks to provide us with those satisfying experiences that we tend to call ‘aesthetic’. Next, we defuse two key objections to this approach; namely, that it places undue emphasis on the cognitive component of our aesthetic encounters—at the expense of affective aspects—and on closure and uncertainty minimization (order)—at the expense of openness and lingering uncertainty (change). We show that the approach offers crucial resources to account for the open-ended, free and playful behaviour inherent in aesthetic experiences. The upshot is a promising but deflationary approach, both philosophically informed and psychologically sound, that opens new empirical avenues for understanding our aesthetic encounters. -/- This article is part of the theme issue ‘Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives’. (shrink)

In this article I aim to shed light on the question of whether aesthetic experience can constitute practical knowledge and, if so, how it achieves this. I will compare the approaches of Nelson Goodman and Edmund Husserl. Both authors treat the question of which benefits aesthetic experience can bring to certain basic skills. Though one could argue together with Goodman that repeated aesthetic experience allows for a trained and discriminating approach to artworks, Husserl argues that by viewing aesthetic objects we (...) can learn to perceive in a more undiluted fashion and to qualify our own perceptions against the backdrop of the conceptual framework that shapes our everyday experience. As a consequence, aesthetic experience is not to be regarded as something that only contributes to a normatively loaded involvement in the distinct field of the ‘aesthetic’. Reading Goodman with Husserl and vice versa, I will argue in support of a practical aesthetic knowledge account that mediates cognitivist-constructivist and phenomenological concerns and can thus overcome some of their respective shortcomings. The account I present is useful for understanding the practical value of aesthetic experience in and beyond the confined field of the arts. (shrink)

Might fiction films have cognitive value, and if so, how might such value interact with films’ artistic and aesthetic values? Philosophical consideration of this question tends to consist in either ceteris paribus extensions of claims relating to prose fiction and literature; meta-philosophical inquiries into the capacity of films to be or do philosophy; or generalised investigations into the cognitive value of any, and thereby all, artworks. I first establish that fiction films can be works of art, then address this lacuna (...) and identify three hitherto unrecognised values relevant to the issue of learning from fiction films. These values are (i) a film’s stance-based cinematic value, which is neither an artistic nor an aesthetic value, but which pertains to the integration of a film’s content, its form, and its themes and/or theses; (ii) a film’s dramatic value, which recognises the use of dramatic argumentation to enable us to make sense of agents’ intentional actions; and (iii) a film’s humanistic value which acknowledges a film’s power to provide illuminating insights into the human condition. In tandem with a series of sceptical arguments that question the very notion of cognitive value, I demonstrate how stance-based cinematic value, dramatic value, and humanistic value can provide fresh ways with which to understand and appreciate that we learn from films, what we learn from films, and how we learn from films. Grouping these values together under the rubric of cinematic humanism offers new resources for a paradigm shift capable of staying true to the spirit that informs both sides of the cognitivist/non-cognitivist debate whilst cutting through the Gordian knot it has become. (shrink)

Thought experiments (TEs) are important tools in science, used to both undermine and support theories, and communicate and explain complex phenomena. Their interest within philosophy of science has been dominated by a narrow question: How do TEs increase knowledge? My aim is to push beyond this to consider their broader value in scientific practice. I do this through an investigation into the scientific imagination. Part one explores questions regarding TEs as “experiments in the imagination” via a debate concerning the epistemic (...) status of computer simulations in science. I outline how, against Hacking, TEs also have “a life of their own” and I argue against accounts that privilege experiments over simulations (and by extension TEs) in light of their capacity to surprise in a productive way. Part two develops a pluralist account of the nature of the imagination in science. At its core, my view is that when we attend to a number of examples of TEs and consider the context in which they are used, we see that TEs engage a variety of our imaginative capacities. Existing monistic views fail to recognise the richness of the imagination and its potential in science. Part three looks to the “beauty” of TEs which is currently overlooked in the aesthetics of science literature. I put forward a new account that demonstrates the epistemic value of aesthetic features in science by showing how an appropriate fit between form and content enhances the usability of a TE, and its effectiveness as a prompt for our imagination. This also enables a more nuanced take on the proposed similarities between TEs and literary fictions. In the concluding chapter, I outline ways in which the core features of my account can be extended beyond TEs to illuminate the significance of the imagination and aesthetic values in other areas of science. (shrink)

This paper explores a few of the ways that the Zhuang-Zi can inform contemporary analytic epistemology. I begin, in section 1, by briefly outlining and summarizing the case for my fictionalist interpretation of the text. In section 2, I discuss how the Zhuang-Zi can be brought into productive dialogue with the question of how we should respond to skeptical arguments. Specifically, I argue that the Zhuang-Zi can be reasonably interpreted as exemplifying an approach that is different from dominant contemporary responses (...) to skeptical arguments in three ways: it is fictionalist; it motivates a skeptical perspective rather than a claim; and it accomplishes its aims in an atypical, but nonetheless contextually appropriate, way. However, the Zhuang-Zi is relevant to contemporary debates about skeptical arguments because it can be used: to respond to the same sorts of skeptical arguments that occupy contemporary commentators; to address a number of questions that arise in connection with such arguments; and to suggest important new questions for epistemologists to pursue. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine and defend videogame cognitivism (VC). According to VC, videogames can be a source of cognitive successes (such as true beliefs, knowledge or understanding) for their players. While the possibility of videogame-based learning has been an extensive topic of discussion in the last decades, the epistemological underpinnings of these debates often remain unclear. I propose that VC is a domain- specific brand of aesthetic cognitivism, which should be carefully distinguished from other views that (...) also insist on the cognitive or educational potential of videogames. After these clarifications, I discuss and assess different broad strategies to motivate VC: propositionalism, experientialism, and neocognitivism. These map the different ways in which videogames can prove epistemically valuable, showing them to be, respectively, sources of propositional knowledge, experiential knowledge, and understanding. I eventually argue that neocognitivism is a particularly promising and yet underexplored way to defend VC. (shrink)

This thesis comprises a study of the ethical thought of Iris Murdoch with special emphasis, as evidenced by the title, on how morality is intimately connected to self-improvement aiming at perfection and how the study of fiction has an important role to play in our strive towards bettering ourselves within the framework set by Murdoch’s moral philosophy.