Abstract

That we can learn something from literature, as cognitivists claim, seems to be a commonplace. However, when one considers matters more deeply, it turns out to be a problematic claim. In this paper, by focusing on general revelatory facts about the world and the human spirit, I hold that the cognitivist claim can be vindicated if one takes it as follows. We do not learn such facts from literature, if by “literature” one means the truth-conditional contents that one may ascribe to textual sentences in their fictional use, i.e., in the use in which one makes believe that things unfold in a certain way. What we improperly call learning from literature amounts to knowing actually true conversational implicatures concerning the above facts as meant by literary authors. So, in one and the same shot, we learn both a general revelatory fact and the fact that such a fact is meant via a true conversational implicature by an author. The author draws that implicature from the different truth-conditional content a sentence possesses when the sentence is interpreted in a fictional context, meant as Kaplan’s (1989) narrow context, i.e., a set of circumstantial parameters (agent, space, time, and world).

Highlights

  • That we can learn something from literature, as cognitivists claim, seems to be a commonplace

  • What we improperly call learning from literature amounts to knowing the above general revelatory facts matching true conversational implicatures as meant by literary authors

  • The author draws that implicature from the different truthconditional content a sentence possesses in its fictional use, when the sentence is interpreted in a fictional context, meant as a narrow context (Kaplan, 1989), i.e., the set constituted by four circumstantial parameters

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Summary

Introduction

That we can learn something from literature, as cognitivists claim, seems to be a commonplace. By focusing on general revelatory facts about the world (broadly meant, in order to include even facts about its significance) and the human spirit, I hold that the cognitivist claim can be vindicated if one takes it as follows. What we improperly call learning from literature amounts to knowing the above general revelatory facts matching true conversational implicatures as meant by literary authors. In one and the same shot, we learn both a general revelatory fact and the fact that such a fact is meant via a true conversational implicature by an author.

The Problem
An Interesting Way Out
A New Solution
Objections and Answers
Conclusion
Full Text
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