ABSTRACT
One of the great advantages of a cognitive poetics is that it binds together the philosophical and practical sides of literary investigation. It offers a grounding of critical theory in a philosophical position that is scientific in the modern sense: aiming for an account of natural phenomena (like reading) that represents our current best understanding while always being open to falsifiability and a better explanation. It avoids the trap of circularity by deriving analytical methods not from within literary reading but from the fields of linguistics and psychology. Most engagingly of all, it is concerned not simply with conceptual and abstract structures but with addressing the central issue of how those conceptual structures are manifest and actualised in language.
