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This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of how Gottlob Frege's name and work remain unknown to the wider intellectual public. It then describes Frege's contributions to philosophy, including concentration on language in the expression of knowledge and a recognition of the power of logic to illuminate the structure of language and its contribution to the expression of knowledge. It shows how Frege's positivist successors used his innovations against a background of philosophical attitudes that Frege did not share. They differed with him, in absolutely fundamental ways, about both meaning and knowledge. The chapter make some more specific philosophical remarks about Frege's contributions, as discussed in these three parts: truth, structure, and method; sense and cognitive value; and rationalism.

Much of contemporary analytic epistemology has been concerned with the semantics of claims to know. For the most part, feminist epistemology pursues different questions about knowledge. The chapter argues that are there alternative ways of undertaking an analysis of knowledge on which feminist work often deemed irrelevant to the philosophical project is, in fact, highly relevant. Rather than pursuing a strategy of reflective equilibrium, we need to ask: what is our concept of knowledge for? And what conception could best achieve this? The chapter argues that we should consider what cognitive values beings like us ought to have, and to answer this feminist work on the self, the interdependence between selves, agency, and autonomy offer important insights.

In this chapter a provisional definition of literary humanism is given; it is argued that the theses associated with it by that definition are best understood in the context of a special application of Frege’s sense–reference distinction. It is maintained that works of literature often have a paraphrase, which conveys the same referential content via a different sense, and that this referential content may be an object of propositional knowledge. It is further argued that the sense of a work of literature, as well as its reference, may be of cognitive value, and some examples of works (or parts of works) whose cognitive value resides in their reference (respectively, sense) are given. Finally, the chapter examines the respects in which rereading a work can bring cognitive benefit.

In this chapter a distinction is made between propositional and non-propositional knowledge and it is argued, against a number of critics, that works of literature typically convey propositional knowledge. There is a defence of the claim advanced in the previous chapter that the cognitive value of many works of literature is intimately connected with their having reference to the real world and advancing true statements about it. It is maintained that truth and falsity in the paraphrase of a work of literature are pro tanto markers of aesthetic value and disvalue respectively. Finally, consideration is given to the status of contradictions in literature, and it is argued that that status is in all relevant respects comparable to their status in scientific discourse: the existence of a contradiction between two works of literature implies that one of them is false; and falsity in a work is, pro tanto, a blemish.

This chapter presents Aestheticism as a general approach to life. It is argued that a dedicated aestheticist will be inspired to create works of art. In alignment with this view an aesthetic functionalist account of art is defended, incorporating aspects of the expression theory of art and the cognitive theory of art. It is then suggested that the way an artist creatively responds to the value of the world is an ideal of living well. Moreover, although there are other such ideals, the artistic paradigm can apply to a variety of human activities, including the pursuit and expression of one’s understanding (as in philosophy). In the latter part of the chapter it is then argued that, in distilling aesthetic values, the artist has an important social role to play. Artworks help us to discern value ideals, and our capacity to discern values is a vital component of virtue.

This chapter has three main aims. The first is to argue for a modest view of the cognitive value of fiction in the context of the arts. This view asserts that we acquire from such works new conceptions or hypotheses that we then can test in the actual world. The second aim concerns the interaction of values. The claim we will make is that the kind of cognitive value typically possessed by representational art arises through the aesthetic experience of the work. The third aim is to argue against both more ambitious and more skeptical views about the cognitive value of fiction in art.

This chapter argues that artistic value is a distinct kind of value from aesthetic value. Artistic value is a function of, and derived from, a plurality of more basic values, including, but not confined to, aesthetic value. Artworks are also valued as artworks for their cognitive value, ethical value, art-historical value, interpretation-centered value, and in other ways as well. To understand the artistic value of particular works requires understanding what the artist who makes the work is intending to do in it—what functions it is intended to fulfill or what it is intended to achieve. In order to defend this view, the chapter will show that artistic value is not reducible to aesthetic value.

Identifying cognition in general with propositional knowledge exposes the cognitive value of literature to abiding skepticism. This chapter argues that German romanticism has generated two competing views of the relation between literature and the overtly truth-seeking disciplines. One is a legacy of skepticism and antirealism that is powerless to give a positive account of literary value. The other is a complementarist legacy emphasizing literature’s cognitive priority to and its role as the cognitive fulfillment of discursive knowledge. This tradition offers important resources to aesthetic cognitivism for articulating and defending the value of literature and the institutions that support it.

This chapter looks at poststructuralism: this tendency has two distinct strands, a meaning-theoretic one, namely deconstruction, and an ideological one, in the form of political (usually Marxist) criticism. The differences between linguistic idealism and deconstruction are revisited, and the question is addressed whether modern literary theory has lowered intellectual standards. Finally the issue of the politicization of literary criticism is reviewed, and it is argued that this trend wrongly instrumentalizes the study of literature. That study is a cognitively valuable activity which we should pursue in the confidence that all knowledge is grist to our mill; we should not elevate literary understanding above scientific understanding, but nor should we undervalue its benefits.

This chapter uses an exploration of the nature of selfhood in Hamlet to stage a discussion of the concept of literary knowledge. What does it mean to claim for our various practices of literary production that they can yield, collectively if not always individually, a “form of knowing”: that there exist distinctly literary ways of making sense of the world and thus of presenting it as an object of understanding? Making sense of this, this chapter argues, requires an account of the nature of narrative and the manner in which it bestows a distinct form of intelligibility upon the events it relates. Hamlet brings to view a striking feature of the nature of this intelligibility and its role in generating the forms of meaning that make Hamlet, and literary narrative more generally, elusive.

Emma Woodhouse misreads the intentions, and the significance of the actions, of those around her in ways that reflect both her projects and her own acknowledged or unacknowledged desires. Moreover, Emma is innovative in its wide use of “free indirect style”: readers view the fictional events largely through a third-person narrative inflected by Emma’s consciousness of these events. A consequence, for most critics, is that the first-time receiver will have difficulty detecting Emma’s misreadings. Contrary to this view, this chapter argues that, far from deliberately obscuring details of the narrative in this way, Austen’s particular use of the free indirect style allows her to furnish the receiver with the clues necessary to see Emma as the misreader that she is. The first-time receiver is intended to register Emma’s misreadings, and one who fails to do so is themselves misreading Emma. Emma, so understood, bears on debates about the cognitive values of literature.

There is a widespread assumption that we can learn facts from fiction: ordinary empirical facts about history, geography, society, biology, and so on. Although nothing about the nature of fiction precludes the acquisition of empirical knowledge, learning facts from fiction is far from straightforward. Fictional texts usually contain a mix of truths and falsehoods and are rarely vetted for accuracy. Readers should tread carefully in forming beliefs from fiction. Do they? According to various psychological studies, they do not. The evidence indicates that for some information, readers are at least as likely to believe what they read in fiction as in non-fiction. Friend claims that these results cast greater doubt on the possibility of empirical knowledge from fiction than standard objections in the literature. Drawing on work by Williamson and Sosa, she proposes that we meet this challenge by appeal to the competences exercised in reading fiction.

This chapter calls into question the habit of explaining the relationship between philosophy and literature in terms of a ‘compensatory’ thesis according to which literature is able to bring to perfection and so complete the forms of understanding philosophy pursues. The chapter argues that literature is often hostile to the compensatory thesis, and he offers a close reading of Paradise Lost to demonstrate that poetry’s pursuit of insight, even knowledge, often takes a distinctly aesthetic and literary, rather than philosophical, form. It is not a completion of the philosopher’s project but a distinctly poetic manner of pursuing and articulating knowledge. In this respect, there is a unique form of poetic knowledge, and we shouldn’t expect philosophy to take us very far in coming to possess it.