Abstract

Many people claim that we can gain knowledge from reading novels and other forms of narrative fiction. In a trivial sense, this claim seems uncontroversial. There is no doubt that reading Pride and Prejudice can teach me, for example, what the novel is about or give me some insight into the character of Regency English. This is because a novel, like any other text, constitutes direct evidence for propositions about its own content and language. But it is widely questioned whether such a work could ever give us knowledge of any of the general propositions it expresses about the world outside the text, for it is commonly held that fictional narratives do not have the resources to justify such propositions, however..