The Cognitive Aspect of the Literary Text: Literature as a Source of Knowledge
Literary Cognitivism; Aspect-Seeing; Humanism; Philosophy of Literature; Wittgenstein; John Gibson
The aim of this paper is to investigate, through Wittgenstein's notion of aspect-seeing, what might be the case, from the reader's point of view, for the literary text to be seen as a way of articulating knowledge.
The problem at hand is linked to the debate undertaken by contemporary philosophy of literature about the cognitive value of literary art, mostly centered around the question of whether or not literary discourse is capable of providing relevant orientation in the life-world. John Gibson's literary humanism is taken as a starting point, for theoretical context.