ABSTRACT
The main claim of literary cognitivism is both simple and appealing: the idea is that people can acquire knowledge from reading literature. One might say that a humanistic liberal education is founded on this idea. Thinking about moral knowledge also suggests the problem of moral ignorance and other epistemic vices. Literary cognitivism is often cast in a positive light, as adding to people's base of knowledge and contributing to their moral understanding. The most straightforward way to imagine learning something from a work of literature is to imagine that one acquires propositional knowledge from literature. Such knowledge would need to be capable of being stated in the form of a true proposition for which the literary work itself provides warrant. Meta-ethical cognitivists, not to be confused with literary cognitivists, think that ethical claims express beliefs about the world, and that these beliefs are either true or false.
