Aesthetic Understanding and Epistemic Agency in Art

Recently, cognitivist accounts about art have come under pressure to provide strongerarguments for the view that artworks can yield genuine insight and understanding. InGregory Currie’sImagining and Knowing: Learning from Fiction, for example, a convincingcase is laid out to the effect that any knowledge gained from engaging with art must “bejudged by the very standards that are used in assessing the claim of science to do the same”(Currie 2020: 8) if indeed it is to count as knowledge. Cognitivists must thus rally toprovide sturdier grounds for their view. The revived interest in this philosophical discussiontargets not only the concept of knowledge at the heart of cognitivist and anti-cognitivistdebate, but also highlights a more specific question about how, exactly, some artworks can(arguably) afford cognitive import and change how we think about the world, ourselvesand the many events, persons and situations we encounter. This paper seeks to exploresome of the ways in which art is capable of altering our epistemic perspectives in ways thatmight count as knowledge despite circumventing some standards of evidential requirement.In so doing we will contrast two alternative conceptions of how we stand to learn fromart. Whereas the former is modelled on the idea that knowledge is something that can be“extracted” from our experience of particular works of art, the latter relies on a notion ofsuch understanding as primarily borne out of a different kind of engagement with art. Weshall call this thesubtractive conception and cumulative conceptionrespectively. The cumulativeconception, we shall argue, better explains why at least some insights and instances of knowledge gained from art seem to elude the evidential standards called for by sceptics ofcognitivism