Against the Cognitive Triviality of Art

In this paper I try to defend art from those who claim that it is cognitively trivial. I claim that the notion of cognitive value should be expanded so as to include notions that epistemologists and aestheticians alike recognize as cognitively valuable, like understanding and awareness. Next, I claim that art generally, but literature in particular is in its main aspects similar to testimony, which is nowadays recognized as indispensable source of knowledge. Showing in what way literature can be seen as testimony, I claim that the cognitive value of art translates to the cognitive value of testimony.