Literary Cognitivism and the Relationship between Cognitive and Literary Value

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