Exploring Transmission: The Epistemic Status Of Narrative-Based Knowledge

I explore the epistemic status of beliefs that we formulate on the basis of a certain narrative, such as a belief, derived from Houellebecq’s Serotonin, that the rejection of a meat-based diet is causing significant existential issues with serious social and political ramifications. This process, referred to as transmission, is important for defending aesthetic cognitivism, the view that narrative art is a source of knowledge, but is vulnerable to numerous challenges, ranging from the fictional basis of narratives and epistemic reliability of narrative art, to questions concerning the kind of beliefs we end up having and their applicability in reality. I address these challenges and I explore how curiosity on the one hand and aesthetic satisfaction derived from a narrative on the other determine and shape this process. One consequence of my account is a diversity of readers’ emotional and intellectual responses to the same work and I end by showing that this is not a reason to give up cognitivism.