Dove e quando

The Aesthetics of Artistic Language and its Cognitive Value

talk by Iris Vidmar Jovanović (University of Rijeka)

Abstract:
Philosophical worries about the capacity of language to represent our reality are as old as Plato’s attack on poets. Within analytic philosophy such worries have contributed either to the negative view of art’s (primarily poetry and literary fiction) cognitive value, or to the need to provide a particular account of how artistic employment of language contributes to, rather than deters from, its capacity to describe our world and thus transfer knowledge about it. While some philosophers, most notably Austin and Searle, reject art forms such as poetry as serious, on the account of their employment of language, others, such as Cassirer or Goodman, seek to provide an account of how artistic language can nevertheless be cognitively valuable. My aim here is to build on these views and to explore how linguistic arts provide unique cognitive access into various forms of our experience, primarily but not exclusively emotional, and thus help us grasp certain segments of our reality that may not be expressible in non-artistic formulations.