ABSTRACT
We often emerge from an encounter with a work of fiction claiming to have
learned something. We take ourselves to have come to see things in a new and
better light, to have gained insight, or increased our understanding. To say this is
to say more than that Middlemarch or Paradise Lost led us to revise our opinions.1
We are not reporting a mere change of mind. Our remarks indicate that we take
ourselves to have made some sort of cognitive progress. We are, we maintain,
cognitively better off for having read the work. I think we are right to say such
things. But this is epistemologically problematic. For works of fiction neither are
nor purport to be literally true. If cognitive advancement consists wholly in the
acquisition of new literally true beliefs, fiction seems a poor vehicle.
