ABSTRACT
Advocates and opponents of the view that art has cognitive value tend to agree on one point. They agree that, if art is a source of knowledge, it is so in the same way as science is. Since science has been the paradigm of inquiry for centuries, this agreement is not surprising. Nevertheless, although both art and science can contribute to our knowledge, they do so in radically different ways. Each of these fundamentally distinct forms of inquiry corresponds to a basic sort of representation. Semantic representations (employed in the sciences) help us understand the world in a way very different from the way illustrations (characteristic of the arts) do. Many of the arguments against the claim that art has cognitive value are directed against the view that art aids understanding in the same way as science does. Once this misconception is rejected, many of the arguments against the view that art has cognitive value are seen to be baseless.
