: This article seeks to explain how thought experiments work, and also the reasons why they can fail. It is divided into four sections. The first argues that thought experiments in philosophy and science should be treated together. The second examines existing accounts of thought experiments and shows why they are inadequate. The third proposes a better account of thought experiments. According to this account, a thought experimenter manipulates her worldview in accord with the “what if” questions posed by a (...) thought experiment. When all necessary manipulations are carried through, the result is either a consistent model or a contradiction. If a consistent model is achieved, the thought experimenter can conclude that the scenario is possible; if a consistent model cannot be constructed, then the scenario is not possible. The fourth section of the article uses this account to shed light on the circumstances in which thought experiments fail. (shrink)

I argue for the unity of imagination in two prima facie diverse contexts: experiences of beauty and achievements of understanding. I develop my argument in three steps. First, I begin by describing a type of aesthetic experience that is grounded in a set of imaginative activities on the part of the person having the experience. Second, I argue that the same set of imaginative activities that grounds this type of aesthetic experience also contributes to achievements of understanding. Third, I show (...) that my unified account of imagination has important implications: it sheds light on two puzzling phenomena, the aesthetic value of science and the cognitive value of art. (shrink)

i) Íngrid Vendrell Ferran’s defence of the ‘experiential view’ and her related conception of ‘radical neo-cogntivism’, ii) Robert Piercey’s view of the epistemic value of plots and emplotment, iii) Marya Schechtman’s revisionist ideas of self-narration, and, finally, iv) David Collins’s suggestion of the value of an imaginative engagement with the author of an artwork.

This paper argues that certain literary works can only be fully appreciated if the reader is able to experience through empathy the character’s values. I call it "the axiological account" because it makes the grasping of aesthetic values dependent on the experience of other values embodied in the work. I develop my argument in three stages. First, I argue that in empathy we not only apprehend but also experience something similar to what the target is going through. Next, I show (...) how this experience is necessary to extract the aesthetic values of certain works. The final section addresses two challenges to the proposed account. (shrink)

In his monograph Narrative Justice, Rafe McGregor offers an argument for the role narrative can play as part of an aesthetic education of justice—a form of moral development that, he argues, has the potential to reduce criminal inhumanity including terrorism and radical extremism by revealing the problematic master narratives that promote epistemological vices in individuals. Although he makes an important argument about the nature and value of narrative, I argue that a look to poetry will help us see the bigger (...) picture for what engagement with literature can offer in terms of such aesthetic education. I offer a way of developing McGregor's theory to accommodate the role and value of... (shrink)

Much art is committed to political causes. However, does art contribute something unique to political discourse, or does it merely reflect the insights of political science and political philosophy? Here I argue for indispensability of art to political discourse by building on the debate about artistic cognitivism, the view that art is a source of knowledge. Different artforms, I suggest, make available specific epistemic resources, which allow audiences to overcome epistemic obstacles that obtain in a given ideological situation. My goal (...) is to offer a general model for identifying cognitive advantages for artworks belonging to distinct artforms and genres, in a way that can account for each artwork’s historical and cultural specificity. More speculatively, however, my account also comments on the ancient struggle between philosophy and the arts as competing modes of persuasion, and expands our notion of legitimate political discourse to include a greater plurality of discursive genres. (shrink)

What is the value of art? Standard responses draw on the different kinds of value that we tend to ascribe to individual artworks. In that context, none have been more significant than aesthetic value and moral value. To understand what makes an artwork valuable we then need to examine the interaction between these two kinds of value and how this contributes to the artwork's final value. The main aim of this article is to highlight two areas of concern for interaction (...) theories, in order to improve our understanding of the dynamic relations between kinds of value in art. In the first instance, I shall outline the main tenets of the three leading interaction theories. Next, I shall discuss what it might mean to say that an artwork has moral value, in an attempt to establish on what grounds interaction theories base their central claims. Subsequently, I will look at how our conception of art's moral value affects the possibility of a bona fide form of value interaction, or one capable of shaping a work's final value in conjunction with its aesthetic value. Finally, I shall turn to a discussion of the notion of aesthetic value. (shrink)

Recently, cognitivist accounts about art have come under pressure to provide stronger arguments for the view that artworks can yield genuine insight and understanding. In Gregory Currie’s Imagining and Knowing: Learning from Fiction, for example, a convincing case is laid out to the effect that any knowledge gained from engaging with art must “be judged by the very standards that are used in assessing the claim of science to do the same” (Currie 2020: 8) if indeed it is to count (...) as knowledge. Cognitivists must thus rally to provide sturdier grounds for their view. The revived interest in this philosophical discussion targets not only the concept of knowledge at the heart of cognitivist and anti-cognitivist debate, but also highlights a more specific question about how, exactly, some artworks can (arguably) afford cognitive import and change how we think about the world, ourselves and the many events, persons and situations we encounter. This paper seeks to explore some of the ways in which art is capable of altering our epistemic perspectives in ways that might count as knowledge despite circumventing some standards of evidential requirement. In so doing we will contrast two alternative conceptions of how we stand to learn from art. Whereas the former is modelled on the idea that knowledge is something that can be “extracted” from our experience of particular works of art, the latter relies on a notion of such understanding as primarily borne out of a different kind of engagement with art. We shall call this the subtractive conception and cumulative conception respectively. The cumulative conception, we shall argue, better explains why at least some insights and instances of knowledge gained from art seem to elude the evidential standards called for by sceptics of cognitivism. (shrink)

Many people claim that we can gain knowledge from reading novels and other forms of narrative fiction. In a trivial sense, this claim seems uncontroversial. There is no doubt that reading Pride and Prejudice can teach me, for example, what the novel is about or give me some insight into the character of Regency English. This is because a novel, like any other text, constitutes direct evidence for propositions about its own content and language. But it is widely questioned whether (...) such a work could ever give us knowledge of any of the general propositions it expresses about the world outside the text, for it is commonly held that fictional narratives do not have the resources to justify such propositions, however.. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Prudence or Oneiromancy? A Parody of Didacticism Preaching to the Converted The Asymmetry of “Imaginative Resistance” Virtue Ethics and Gossip Qualifications Positive Views.

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)

Cognitivism in respect to the arts refers to a constellation of positions that share in common the idea that artworks often bear, in addition to aesthetic value, a significant kind of cognitive value. In this paper I concentrate on three things: (i) the challenge of understanding exactly what one must do if one wishes to defend a cognitivist view of the arts; (ii) common anti-cognitivist arguments; and (iii) promising recent attempts to defend cognitivism.

This essay has several related goals. The first is to contribute to the philosophy of education literature on Cora Diamond while introducing the work of her sister, Julie Diamond, to the field. I introduce Julie Diamond’s work by connecting it to the work of John Dewey, and a secondary goal of the paper is to test lines of connection between Dewey and Cora Diamond. Finally, by developing Cora and Julie Diamond’s thinking on teaching and the moral life, I hope to (...) contribute to conversations in teacher education, especially ongoing conversations about the meaning of responsive teaching. The first half of the paper discusses and engages Cora Diamond’s thinking on the moral life drawing on a range of her published work, the middle of the paper builds a bridge from Cora Diamond to Dewey as a way of introducing Julie Diamond, and the final part of the paper offers an engagement with Julie Diamond’s work. I discuss teaching throughout the paper, and my hope is that a vision of responsive teaching, one grounded in the work of Julie and Cora Diamond, emerges that allows teachers to come alive to aspects of their work that can disappear in the rush and whirl of classroom life. The paper begins with a personal story as a way of connecting with the style of Cora and Julie Diamond’s approach to teaching and the moral life. (shrink)

This paper introduces the special section on Cora Diamond’s significance for education and educators. The introduction is meant to be the beginning of a conversation, and—to that end—the special section editors suggest lines of connections that philosophers of education might draw between their work and the work of Cora Diamond. Their list is not meant to be exhaustive, but it is meant to suggest Diamond’s far-reaching significance for education and educators.

Personal narratives can let us in on aspects of reality which we have not experienced for ourselves, and are thus important sources for philosophical reflection. Yet a venerable tradition in mainstream philosophy has little room for arguments which rely on personal narrative, on the grounds that narratives are particular and testimonial, whereas philosophical arguments should be systematic and transparent. I argue that narrative arguments are an important form of philosophical argument. Their testimonial aspects witness to novel facets of reality, but (...) their argumentative aspects help us to understand those facets for ourselves. My argument takes the form of a case study of the exemplary narrative argument penned by Rachel Moran, a former prostitute who uses her experiences to argue that prostitution amounts to sexual abuse. We’ll see that narrative arguments can enjoy expository Advantages over analytic ones. (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)