1 2008-0360 Tarbiat Modares University 22968 1 12 2017 10 40 7 39 10 09 2017 12 01 2018
22971 Literary Cognitivism and the Relationship between Cognitive and Literary Value 1 12 2017 10 40 40 66 07 01 2018 12 01 2018 There is a tradition in contemporary literary theory and philosophy of literarture according to which there is a rift between literary/aesthetic value and cognitive value. The anti-cognitivist maintains that even if a literary work has some cognitive value, this has nothing to do with the work’s overall aesthetic value. Furthermore, if a work’s perspective on some issue is seriously flawed, this, by no means contaminates its aesthetic purenss. This paper aims to demonstrate the opposite. It thus makes use of a ceratin thought-experiment and the concept of possible worlds to show that the cognitivist’s position is justified and proceeds to illustrate that even polyphony as an aesthectic value cannot be properly understood without recourse to its cognitive status. It then goes on to meet a serious challenge: the so-called “institutional argument” which is deemed to be among the best arguments in the anti-cognitivist’s dialectical arsenal. The argument is shown to have several defects in the context of the contemporary debates in theory and philosophy of literature. The main conclusion of the paper is thus as follows: The cognitive value of a literary work is part and parcel of its aesthetic value 22973 1 12 2017 10 40 67 91 04 07 2017 12 01 2018 22974 1 12 2017 10 40 93 114 19 10 2017 08 03 2018 22977 1 12 2017 10 40 116 139 16 11 2017 05 03 2018 22978 1 12 2017 10 40 142 166 11 10 2017 12 01 2018 22979 1 12 2017 10 40 167 184 17 08 2017 20 08 2017