ABSTRACT
James Nguyen argues that certain works of literary fiction hold cognitive value about the actual world. This chapter discusses two ways of understanding how we can learn from such works. First, just like experiments (both physical and in thought), works of literary fiction can describe appropriately constrained systems where an explanatory factor can be observed to act in isolation, shielded from extraneous influence. Through this, we can come to better understand the contribution this factor makes in actual systems. Second, through works of literary fiction, we can investigate how explanations that we suspect hold in the actual world fare in novel systems. So when faced with competing hypotheses about what explains some set of observations in the actual world, learning that one of them (and not the others) acts as an explanation in an appropriate world of literary fiction, serves to confirm that hypothesis at the expense of its competitors. These suggestions add (some) detail and precision to the way in which we can learn from literary fiction in a manner that encourages further dialogue between the philosophy of art and the philosophy of science.
