Literature and art as cognitive objects : from a poetics of language to a poetics of action / Patricia Kolaiti.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kolaitē, Patritsia, 1976- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Art and literature.

Literature--Psychology.

Literature.

Literature--Philosophy.

Art--Psychology.

Art.

Art--Philosophy.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xi, 245 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Summary:

What makes literature and art the distinct kinds of entities they are? Previous attempts to prove that artworks and literary texts are formally and structurally distinguishable from other objects have been misinterpreted to mean that any distinction between art and non-art must be largely sociological. This book takes a radically new approach to this long-standing question. Shifting the focus from the artwork itself to art as a case of human agency, it sets out a groundbreaking theory of literature and art as a single cognitive and natural entity. It argues that literature and art is neither sociologically determined nor a body of artefacts, but a unique type of action enabled by art-specific processes in the mind-internal and body-internal reality of human agents. With wide implications for existing debates, this book is essential reading for researchers and students in linguistics, philosophy and the cognitive sciences.

Contents:

Cover

Half-title page

Title page

Imprints page

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Funding

Additional material

Introduction

1 A Theory of blibs

1.1 The 'Gallery of Indiscernibles'

1.2 A Rather Widespread Variety of Conventionalism

1.3 A Theory of blibs vs blobs

1.4 Essentialism and Its Ethics

2 What Sort of Concept Literature and Art Is Not

2.1 Introduction

2.2 Literature and Art as a Conventional (Prototypical) Concept

2.3 Literature and Art as a Structural Concept

2.4 Literature and Art as a Conventional (Institutional) Concept

2.5 Literature and Art as a Causal (Intentional) Concept

3 Literature and Art as an Action

3.1 Three Centuries of Binarism

3.2 Ways of Seeing Objects: The Aspectual Mind

3.3 Aspectual Representations and Naive Agency: The Case of Incidental Creatorship

3.4 Artistic Thought States/Processes: The Artistic or 'Poetic' Mind

3.5 Artistic Thought as a Stylistic Thought State/Process

3.6 Artistic Thought States/Processes vs Artistic Creation Methods

3.7 Local vs Global Facts

4 Literature and Art as a Cognitive and Natural Object

4.1 Literature and Art as a Cognitive Concept

4.2 Cognitive Ontology or Towards a Cognitive Metaphysics

4.3 From a Poetics of Language to a Poetics of Action: Literature and Art as a Natural Object

4.4 Cognitive Objects with an Evaluative Element: Art and Aesthetic Experience

4.5 Why Art Is Not an Unstable Object

5 How to Solve the Ontological Puzzles

5.1 The Concept artwork as a Fuzzy Set

5.2 Solving Some Ontological Puzzles

6 Literature, Art and Relevance

6.1 Art as an Intra-individual and Inter-individual Occurrence: Evolutionary and Cognitive Conundrums Revisited

6.2 Artistic Thought States/Processes as Relevance-Yielding Phenomena.

6.3 Art, Agency and Attention: Relevance beyond Cognitive Effects?

6.4 The Composite Organism: Perceptual and Affective Effects

6.5 Suggestions for Future Research

7 Ιnterdisciplinary Effects on the Psychology and Neuroscience of Creativity

7.1 A Hands-On Example of Two-Way Interdisciplinarity

7.2 Is There Such a Thing as Creativity?

7.3 Mere Creation vs Creative Creation: All the Way from the Nonsensical to the Exceptionally Non-trivial

7.4 Constraint-Governed Productivity/Plasticity

7.5 Context-Sensitive Productivity/Plasticity

7.6 Full-Blown Creativity: Aspectual and Other Forms of Creative Ideation

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 12 Sep 2025).

ISBN:

1-009-03716-1

1-009-03736-6

1-009-03709-9

OCLC:

1460256895