Aprender de la Imaginación

The problem concerning the cognitive value of literary works has mostly received two kind of answers, respectively the cognitivist and anticognitivist one, the first maintaining that literature is the vehicle of universal truths and the second arguing that it transmits nothing but falsities and trivialities. Between these two opposite positions, this paper defends a form of weak cognitivism supporting on the one hand, and together with the cognitivists, the idea that we do learn from literature, and on the other hand, together with the anti-cognitivists, the intuition that literature does not transmit us (as a first step) truths about ourselves or about the world. The idea is that of suggesting a two-level solution according to which what we learn from literature derives from a combination of knowing that and knowing what. As a first step, in order to learn something from literature we need understand and consequently know what do literary texts speak about, i.e. we need be able to grasp the state of affairs described. This is the first level, the one having to do with literary truth and knowing that. At the second level, our learning from literary texts has to do with imagining what it is like to be those characters involved in those events, hence knowing what it is like to live a life different from our own. At this level we learn from literature as we learn form thought experiments, examples or counterexamples. This is what Hilary Putnam has called “conceptual knowledge of possible lives”.