With a few exceptions, I think of fiction as being meant to entertain, not to educate, so there is no impartial criteria like “accuracy” to apply. How entertaining a class of books is depends heavily on the reader, so I don’t expect my preferences to generalize.
No, that is wrong. E.g. Proust, Flaubert, Balzac, the Mann’s, etc. had a very strong focus on the cognitive content of their writings. Weil, Grothendieck, B. Mazur, Y. Manin and many other science writers (I am pretty sure that it fits to Dirac too, but lack precise infos) spend much thoughts on literature, language and poetics. The idea you express fit only to low level texts of both sorts (lit/sci). But the question was about good texts which help to improve the reader’s mind.
I would suggest that fiction does have some epistemic value too. The best novels/poems/etc. help you understand your own motivation and more easily put you in the shoes of others. Again, I’m only talking about the very best stuff, but for example Austen and especially late Frost have help me become noticeably wiser about interpersonal matters, and I’d estimate that it saved me about 10 years’ worth of lived experience and mistakes. Maybe more, since I’m not an especially sociable person by inclination.
Of course, even if we agreed on this, that wouldn’t establish whether you feel you need more of that sort of wisdom, and whether you have the prereqs to benefit from it,.
“novels/poems/etc. help you understand your own motivation and more easily put you in the shoes of others” That is only a very late and somewhat restricted idea. E.g. ancient greek science of history used novels etc. as epistomological tool, because the core of the things, that what really happened shows not in the surface of the facts, but has to be found and by poetic/artistic work (re)constructed. That was the reason, why their statues were colored like pop art, and why Thukydides’ history book contains poetic inventions as quotes . It is a bit as if in a documentary on e.g. the cold war, suddenly Thatcher, Reagan and Gorbatchev would sing an opera. In contemporary american literature you have this e.g. in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried . Or in Reed’s “Naming of Parts.”. A friend (a great mathematician AND great intellectual ) allowed to illustrate that point by the poem there, scroll down.
With a few exceptions, I think of fiction as being meant to entertain, not to educate, so there is no impartial criteria like “accuracy” to apply. How entertaining a class of books is depends heavily on the reader, so I don’t expect my preferences to generalize.
No, that is wrong. E.g. Proust, Flaubert, Balzac, the Mann’s, etc. had a very strong focus on the cognitive content of their writings. Weil, Grothendieck, B. Mazur, Y. Manin and many other science writers (I am pretty sure that it fits to Dirac too, but lack precise infos) spend much thoughts on literature, language and poetics. The idea you express fit only to low level texts of both sorts (lit/sci). But the question was about good texts which help to improve the reader’s mind.
I would suggest that fiction does have some epistemic value too. The best novels/poems/etc. help you understand your own motivation and more easily put you in the shoes of others. Again, I’m only talking about the very best stuff, but for example Austen and especially late Frost have help me become noticeably wiser about interpersonal matters, and I’d estimate that it saved me about 10 years’ worth of lived experience and mistakes. Maybe more, since I’m not an especially sociable person by inclination.
Of course, even if we agreed on this, that wouldn’t establish whether you feel you need more of that sort of wisdom, and whether you have the prereqs to benefit from it,.
“novels/poems/etc. help you understand your own motivation and more easily put you in the shoes of others” That is only a very late and somewhat restricted idea. E.g. ancient greek science of history used novels etc. as epistomological tool, because the core of the things, that what really happened shows not in the surface of the facts, but has to be found and by poetic/artistic work (re)constructed. That was the reason, why their statues were colored like pop art, and why Thukydides’ history book contains poetic inventions as quotes . It is a bit as if in a documentary on e.g. the cold war, suddenly Thatcher, Reagan and Gorbatchev would sing an opera. In contemporary american literature you have this e.g. in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried . Or in Reed’s “Naming of Parts.”. A friend (a great mathematician AND great intellectual ) allowed to illustrate that point by the poem there, scroll down.