TRUTHS AND TRIVIALITIES OF LITERATURE

Text topic: Literature and Truth

Text author: Iris Vidmar

The central claim in this paper is that literature is cognitively valuable as it offers specific cognitive benefits to the readers. This claim – which I call the intuitive attitude regarding cognitive dimension of literature – is defended against one very specific objection according to which literature offers knowledge already familiar to the reader, which makes it cognitively trivial. This objection – which I call argument from cognitive familiarity – is analyzed from the epistemic point of view, and not, as usually in literary aesthetics, from the aesthetic one. The analysis shows that there are significant cognitive benefits which are available even in those cases where we are already familiar with the knowledge that the work imparts.