This chapter offers new arguments against existing accounts of the essence of literature and art. Although these approaches have made significant contributions to understanding key aspects of the literary and art phenomenon, none tells the full story about the essence of art. I show how the last 300 years of discussion on the matter have mainly revolved around artefact-oriented and receiver-oriented approaches and reassess the implications of the collapse of the poetics of language programme, which was inspired by structuralist work in linguistics – particularly Jakobson’s structural-linguistic programme for literature. Drawing on Chomsky’s programme of universal grammar, Fodor’s work on mental modularity and the language of thought, and Sperber and Wilson’s relevance-theory, as well as on a wide array of experimental findings, I argue that there is no distinct capacity for literary language and that the essence of literature does not reside in the language of the literary text. I also correct the misconception that follows from the collapse of the poetics of language that there is no distinct essence of literature/art: literature/art does have an essence, but its essence isn’t a matter of structure. Finally, I consider intellectual precursors of the creator-oriented theory to be developed in this book.

This chapter explores the implications of the notions of artistic thought states/processes and aspectual creativity for empirical research in the psychology and neuroscience of creativity. It locates the place of the human ability for creative ideation within the wider framework of the plasticity and productivity of the human mind, which became the focus of theoretical attention thanks to recent work in psycholinguistics, lexical pragmatics and cognitive psychology. Drawing on Chomsky’s view of constraint-governed productivity/ plasticity and recent lexical-pragmatic evidence about the flexible relation between lexically encoded and communicated concepts, my analysis introduces a crucial distinction between various species-specific types of linguistic and cognitive productivity/ plasticity, on the one hand, and full-blown creativity, on the other. The chapter then brings my notions of artistic thought states/processes and aspectual creativity into contact with current research in innateness, giftedness and talent in order to challenge fundamental assumptions in the psychology and neuroscience of creativity, such as the distinction between ‘artistic’ and ‘scientific’ creativity, and the currently dominant ‘domain-specific model’ of creativity (e.g. verbal creativity, musical creativity, kinaesthetic creativity etc). My discussion has fruitful implications for current empirical studies of ‘verbal creativity’ and ‘literary creativity’, sketching new directions for future research.

The poetics of language programme assumed that what makes a literary text distinct from an ordinary linguistic object is some inherent deviation at the formal and structural level. Behind this approach is the idea that there is a distinct language of literature. The fact that pre-existing stretches of ordinary language (‘found text’) may be quoted verbatim as poems presents a challenge to this view. Using a range of similar examples, this chapter invites the reader to step into a ‘gallery’, a space containing some of the philosophical puzzles encountered when trying to decide whether or not a certain object belongs in the category of art. It is the space Danto called the ‘gallery of indiscernibles’. Philosophy of art, literary theory and literary linguistics have treated these puzzles as problematic cases; this book treats them as highly illuminating examples which hold the key to the essence of literature and art. The chapter then challenges a series of assumptions that are implicit in most existing literary-linguistic, literary-theoretical and art-philosophical accounts and treats literature/art as a case of human agency, an action-process that brings literary texts and artworks into being, and has so far been left unlabelled and unaccounted for.

Chapter 4 outlines a novel mentalistic, internalist or cognitivist theory of literature and art made possible by the breakthroughs of Chomsky’s ‘cognitive perspective’. It builds on the idea introduced in Chapter 3, that artworks and literary texts originate from the same minimal cognitive engineering, to support the view that the distinctness of literature and art stems from their cognitive rather than their formal or structural nature. What distinguishes works of literature and art from other entities is their cognitive history: artworks and literary texts are causally related to art-specific activities in the mind of a creator (artistic thought states/processes) and the distinct action-process that these activities bring about. This approach favours a rather strong construal of a poetics of mind to which I refer as a poetics of action. Artworks and literary texts can therefore be said to have a cognitive essence: they are the causal outputs of a distinct type of human action enabled by distinct cognitive engineering. Literature and art may then be seen as an exemplary case study for a cognitive metaphysics, in which cognitive essences may claim their place in a mind-ful world alongside other types of essence, such as structural, biological and chemical ones.

This chapter argues that literature and art is not a body of artefacts, but a unique human action that brings artworks into being. It therefore shifts the theoretical focus from the artwork/ literary text per se to the action-process which produces it, and aims to develop a novel theory of the essence of literature and art which places the mind of the writer/artist at the centre of attention. Focusing on the mind-internal activities that bring about artistic behaviour, it suggests that art involves a distinct type of mental state/ process which I term an artistic thought state/ process (ATSP). ATSPs are psychologically real entities. They are the minimal components of the universal cognitive engineering of literature and art, resulting in one of the most successful and enduring types of human public cultural representations. The claim that ATSPs result from special evolutionary adaptations points to one of the strongest versions of cognitivism available in existing literary and art studies. ATSPs are relevance-yielding, which makes a dialogue with relevance theory integral to comprehending the cognitive engineering of literature and art. The chapter has implications for a range of disciplines, including linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, cognitive cultural studies and philosophy of action.

Humans spend a lot of time in social interaction compared to other animals. The reasons may be various: the need to service social relationships, to detect ‘free riders’, or to handle rapid changes in fluid social arrangements. Actual conversational usage though suggests the prime job is to navigate changing social relationships in a sea of micropolitics. One difficulty is the delicacy of social relationships, and the care that is usually taken to avoid potential loss of ‘face’ or social esteem, as shown by the danger of teases. Social relationships are constructed through three key modes of exchange: reciprocal exchanges of intimacies, reciprocal exchanges of respect, and asymmetrical exchanges of intimacy to juniors and respect to seniors. Even the most complex societies are constructed partly through these three modes, which have some parallels to primate grooming patterns.

The puzzle at the outset of the book is how a fixed biological machinery (like the vocal organs and brain adaptations) could evolve despite the great diversity of languages. The interaction engine bridges the arch from the biological machinery to the cultural diversity of languages, by explaining how the variability is made possible through a uniform set of principles of communicative interaction which makes the learning of diverse languages possible. The book suggests that the enduring mysteries of language evolution are partly unravelled by studies of the interaction system that underlies language.

Compared to the diversity of languages, the ways they are used in informal conversation shows striking uniformity: there is a presumption of cooperation, a principle of taking brief turns at speaking, a recipe for repairing misunderstandings, and a simple but recursive structuring of conversation.