This thesis develops and defends a new version of an old view known as literary cognitivism, which holds that the merit of a literary work as such sometimes depends on its cognitive merit. The newness of my view lies in the way it recommends we think about the cognitive merits of a literary work as they relate to its literary merits. Whereas some cognitivists identify the cognitive merit of a literary work with the truth of its themes and others with its capacity to provide certain non-propositional forms of knowledge, I propose that the cognitive dimension most relevant to literary value is the extent to which it provides certain forms of justification for its themes. In particular, I emphasize two ways in which a literary work can justify its themes: one, by providing evidence that its themes are the products of an intellectually virtuous mind and, two, by expressing its themes within a richly coherent framework of beliefs. I argue that the literary-evaluative significance of these two forms of justification is implicit, in the first case, in literary critical judgments that refer to a work’s didacticism, and, in the second case, in judgments that refer to a work’s thematic coherence. Insofar as it bears on these sources of justification, I contend, the truth or falsity of some non-thematic propositions can be relevant to literary value, though truth is generally not relevant at the thematic level.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/35937 |
| Date | 09 August 2013 |
| Creators | Repp, Charles |
| Contributors | Tom Hurka, Amy Mullin |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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