ABSTRACT
The problem of ‘‘literary cognitivism’’ – as contemporary aesthetics has baptized
it1 – is a technical designation for an ancient issue, one that reaches all the way
back to Plato and Aristotle and hence Western philosophy’s first excursions into
the philosophy of art. In its simplest form, the problem concerns how we might
learn from works of imaginative literature, that is, how literature might function
to convey knowledge of extra-literary reality. That it can do just this is central to
many deep-rooted beliefs we have about the cultural significance of the literary
work of art. But explaining satisfactorily just how literature might be able to do
so has been a perennial source of philosophical frustration.
