| Summary: | The claim that literary fiction is a valuable source of knowledge can be confronted with the following skeptical objection: on a standard account of the conditions for both the possession and transmission of knowledge, fiction cannot be considered a source of knowledge, for we are not justified in believing any claims from fiction. Our paper argues that the skeptic is wrong. We will start by introducing the notion of <em>self-knowledge</em>, the knowledge a person has of their own conscious attitudes, and distinguish it from <em>knowledge of the self</em>. Both kinds of knowledge concern a person’s beliefs about herself, but they differ in their precise scope and justificatory conditions. We will then argue that the self-knowledge one easily gains by reading fiction is an important route to knowledge of the self, which in turn is hard to obtain, and that a case can be made for literary fiction being an especially valuable source of knowledge of the self.
|
|---|
