Original scientific paper
Thought Experiments, Hypotheses, and Cognitive Dimension of Literary Fiction
Iris Vidmar
orcid.org/0000-0003-3780-6457
; University of Rijeka, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Rijeka, Croatia
Abstract
Some authors defend literary cognitivism – the view that literary fiction is cognitively valuable – by drawing an analogy between cognitive values of thought experiments and literary fiction. In this paper my aim is to analyse the reasons for drawing this analogy and to see how far the analogy can be stretched. In the second part, I turn to the claim put forward by literary anti-cognitivists according to which literature can at best be the source of hypotheses, not of knowledge. I challenge this claim by showing that hypotheses can have valuable cognitive benefits on their own, thus hoping to restore cognitive benefits readers get from literature.
Keywords
cognitive values; hypotheses; literary cognitivism; realism; science fiction
Hrčak ID:
120141
URI
Publication date:
17.2.2014.
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