There is an interesting podcast in the ‘Philosophy Bites’ series here. Peter Lamarque makes a concise and articulate case that literature does not contain, and is not a source of, knowledge about the world. Whereas scientists and philosophers have theories which they test according to rigorous criteria (a process that leads to knowledge in the sense Lamarque prefers), novelists and poets do not. What they have is something more like a vision, with a claim to verisimilitude in many respects, but not a commitment to truthfulness overall.
      For Lamarque, Plato is still in view, and his concerns are still pertinent: imagination and seductive writing can cause us to believe things that aren’t well-grounded. Literature makes us believe things ‘for the wrong reasons’, swept along by the power and seductiveness of language rather than reason, argument, and analysis. From among Lamarque’s examples… Proust offers an interesting vision of memory but he is not testing a theory about it such that any results can aspire to be true; indeed, it does not fundamentally matter if it’s true or not. Kafka’s vision of human nature is (it could be argued) false, or at least the case for its truth isn’t complete. Nevertheless, it’s a ‘vision of a certain outlook’, valuable as a result.

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Lamarque values literature for the way is helps us in ‘coming to see new possibilities… engagement… pleasures’. And it’s worth noting that not many people who work on literature, or read it, actually base their valuation on the idea that it knows things in the sense that Lamarque prefers. I come closer to it in this blog than I have anywhere else in my writing. Nevertheless, it’s clear that I need to argue for knowledge as something literature might provide. A few germs of a response are in this post, and this one. The former suggests that the definition of knowledge might need to expand to be useful in this context; and that literary knowledge may be a thing that happens in the interaction between readers and works. The latter proposes that the truth of fiction may be less direct and explicit than Lamarque would want, but nevertheless significant. I don’t think either of these ideas would seem persuasive to the philosophical position taken in the podcast, but that may have to be something I live with.
      I realise (with pleasure and alarm) that the blog’s first birthday is approaching. I plan to post on progress so far, and will think further about these key terms there.