Literature and art is not a body of objects out there in the world.Footnote ¹ That is what artworks are. The equation of art with artwork, and of literature with literary text, is an arbitrary and reductionist move that dominated the entire twentieth century, forming the nucleus of the formalist and structuralist venture. Literature and art is an action, a unique and distinct human action that brings artworks into being.

What makes literature and art the distinct and unique kind of action it is? And what makes artworks and literary texts the distinct kind of objectsFootnote ² they are? In linguistics, literary theory and philosophy of art, this question has come to be known as the question of literariness or arthood or essence of art i.e. a question about the property (or properties) that make a certain object an artwork.

For nearly three centuries, linguists, literary theorists and philosophers of art have tried to answer this question by moving back and forth between the two ends of a continuum: from the artwork itself to its reception, then back to the artwork, and back to the receiver. One of the most serious twentieth-century attempts to answer this question arose out of early work in structural linguistics. Inspired by breakthroughs in linguistic science and parallel developments in the fine art world of the time, early twentieth-century theorists defended an influential idea that in Kolaiti (Reference Kolaiti2019) I have referred to as the poetics of language hypothesis or the distinct language of literature hypothesis: they treated the literary text as a deviation from the ‘norms’ and ‘canon’ of ordinary language and assumed that what makes a literary text distinct from an ordinary linguistic object is significant or deviant linguistic form and structure. The poetics of language was an artefact-oriented account in the sense that the property or properties that make a literary text distinct from an ordinary linguistic object were attributed to artefactual aspects of the literary text per se. If the poetics of language hypothesis had been correct, it would have shown that what makes an artwork essentially distinct from a ‘mere thing’ is some deviation at the artefactual and, more specifically, formal and structural level. The most ambitious attempt to defend this programme in structural linguistic terms was Jakobson’s ‘Closing statement in linguistic and poetics’ (Reference Jakobson and Weber1958/1996). However, founded as it was on assumptions which seemed increasingly lacking in psychological plausibility, this programme eventually collapsed under the weight of psycholinguistic, pragmatic and philosophical arguments showing that the formal and structural distinctness of literature (and subsequently, art) cannot be reasonably defended.

The failure of attempts to show that artworks and literary texts are formally and structurally distinguishable from other objects has been taken to show that there is no distinct essence of literature and art. In the second half of the twentieth century, this assumption in turn gave rise to a range of anti-essentialist approaches – for instance, receiver-oriented accounts such as reader-response criticism (e.g. MacCabe et al. 1988; Fabb and Durant Reference Fabb, Durant, Fabb, Attridge, Durant and MacCabe1988; Fish Reference Fish1980; Holland Reference Holland1968), reception theory (e.g. Holub Reference Holub1984) and cognitive poetics (e.g. Gavins and Steen Reference Gavins and Steen2003; Tsur Reference Tsur2008), and institutional approaches that focus exclusively on the historical and cultural aspects of literary and artistic transmission (e.g. Danto Reference Danto1981; Dickie Reference Dickie and Noel2000; Levinson Reference Levinson1979, Reference Levinson2002): these approaches are underpinned by the assumption that any distinction between art and non-art must be largely audience-dependent and sociological.

This book takes a radically new approach to this long-standing issue. It argues against the binary oppositions proposed by existing artefact-oriented and receiver-oriented approaches and sets out a novel theory that shifts attention to the mind-internal reality of human creators. Inspired by the Chomskian cognitive perspective and cognitivist approaches to human natural languages, the book focuses on the mental activities of the writer/artist and the characteristic action-process these activities bring about and goes on to claim that literature/art has distinct cognitive rather than linguistic properties. This line of investigation shifts attention away from the artefactual properties of the artwork/literary text and its structural/linguistic make-up and towards literature and art as a case of human agency: the essential distinctness of literature and art can be fully defended, and it is of a cognitive rather than a linguistic nature. What distinguishes works of literature and art from other objects, I will suggest, is not their internal formal or structural properties or socio-cultural and reception-related aspects but their cognitive history: artworks and literary texts are causally related to an art-specific type of spontaneously caused, complex and relevance-yielding mental state/process involved in their creation, which I have termed an artistic thought state/process. This latter approach puts the artist/creator at the centre of theoretical attention and points in the direction of a novel mentalistic or internalist or cognitivist theory of literature and art as a cognitive object.

Artistic thought states/processes are psychologically and metaphysically real entities. They are the minimal components of the cognitive engineering that enables literature and art as a distinct and unique human action and, therefore, the minimal components of the cognitive infrastructure that made possible one of the most successful and enduring human public cultural representations. Existing cognitively oriented studies assume that there might be a set of cognitive features or processes which are characteristic of literature and art as an output of the human mind without themselves being uniquely artistic or literary (e.g. Cave Reference Cave2016; Currie Reference Currie2004; Gavins and Steen Reference Gavins and Steen2003; Gibbs Reference Gibbs2006; Hogan Reference Hogan2003b; Turner Reference Turner1996, Reference Turner2006). This view is rather uncontroversial and involves a somewhat weak variety of a poetics of mind. The present book champions a more radical version of a poetics of mind: my claim that artistic thought states/processes are art-specific states/processes which render literature and art a distinct type of human action and most probably amount to special evolutionary adaptations or exaptations of a certain kind favours a rather strong construal of what cognitivism amounts to for literature and art, and perhaps the strongest version of cognitivism available in existing cognitively oriented literary and art study. In Chapter 4, I will signify my departure from weaker versions of a poetics of mind by referring to this more radical construal as the poetics of action.

The idea that artworks and literary texts are causally linked to such art-specific mental states/processes can help to eliminate pervasive taxonomic confusions in the philosophy of art, motivate new research initiatives and offer solutions to intriguing ontological puzzles and instances of the problem of indiscernible objects or ‘twin events’:Footnote ³ what is it that distinguishes mere urinals and Duchamp’s Fountain, mere Brillo boxes and Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, a stretch of ordinary discourse and the same stretch of discourse when quoted verbatim in a poetry book as ‘found text’, a genuine artwork and a perceptually indiscernible perfect forgery, an artwork by a neurotypical creator and one by a neurodivergent creator with autism, a contemporary artwork and a prehistoric one? Are the moai artworks?Footnote ⁴ And if a ready-made is accidentally broken, can it just be replaced by another token of the same type, or is the ‘original’ artwork inadvertently lost? In some of these ontological puzzles, the aim is more to enable an entirely new way of breaking free from 300 years of circularity and binarism, and much less to provide a conclusive and definitive answer. But new ways of thinking often give rise to new types of research programmes and initiatives, and this is perhaps one of the key epistemological contributions of this book: it lays the foundations for a new cognitively oriented research venture for literature and art in the twenty-first century, with wide interdisciplinary implications.

A second major epistemological implication of the idea that artworks and literary texts inherit their essence from being the causal outputs or descendants of art-specific mental states/processes is that a long overdue type of ontology is enabled in philosophy and metaphysics: a cognitive ontology, in which cognitive essences may start claiming their place in the natural world alongside structural, chemical or biological ones. My analysis embeds cognitive ontology within the broader epistemic framework of the cognitive revolution and the Chomskian ‘cognitive perspective’ and argues for the theoretical necessity of cognitive essences in a mind-ful world.

One other major epistemological implication of the idea that literature and art is a distinct human action enabled by dedicated cognitive machinery is that literature and art is a natural object. Literature and art as an intra-individual occurrence caused by a particular type of mind-internal efferent activity is a natural object amenable to naturalistic investigation in line with the methods of the natural, cognitive and life sciences. In discussing the naturalistic approach to the domain of linguistics, Chomsky (Reference Chomsky2000: 106) suggests: ‘A naturalistic approach to linguistics and mental aspects of the world seeks to construct intelligible explanatory theories, taking as “real” what we are led to posit in this quest, and hoping for eventual unification, not necessarily reduction, with the “core” natural sciences.’

Broadly speaking, the naturalistic approach is aiming at three key methodological claims:

• Empirical testability, i.e. articulation of testable claims and hypotheses, compatible with the scientific method, amenable to confirmation or disconfirmation and supported by empirical and experimental evidence.

• Explanatory adequacy, i.e. articulation of a systematic body of explanations of how regularities or states of affairs come about, with a focus on causation and generative processes.

• Psychological realism, in the sense that the claims made must correspond to empirical findings about the mechanisms that the human mind/brain actually deploys.

My model of literature and art as a cognitive object represents a cognitivist and naturalistic account that aims to fulfil all three methodological claims. From this perspective, the present book can be seen as an integral part of a new and expanding area of scholarly investigation that is often referred to as the ‘naturalist’ or ‘cognitive’ turn in literary and art study (see Cave Reference Cave2016; Currie et al. Reference Currie, Kieran, Meskin and Robson2014). At least two major interdisciplinary UK research projects related to this turn have received funding from prestigious sources in the last decade: the Balzan project on ‘Literature as an Object of Knowledge’, St John’s College, Oxford funded by the Swiss Balzan Foundation and ‘Philosophical Aesthetics: The Challenge from the Sciences’, University of Nottingham funded by the UK Government’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). In 2012, the AHRC further supported the Cognitive Futures in the Arts and Humanities interdisciplinary conference and international network, bringing together scholars from the arts and humanities whose work interacts with the cognitive, brain and behavioural sciences. The steadily increasing number of literary and art-theoretical publications with an empirical and cognitive orientation (e.g. Anderson Reference Anderson2015; Armstrong Reference Armstrong2014; Austin Reference Austin2011; Blair Reference Blair2007; Bolens Reference Bolens2012; Bortolussi and Dixon Reference Bortolussi and Dixon2003; Bracher Reference Bracher2014; Burke Reference Burke2011; Cave Reference Cave2016; Cave and Wilson Reference Cave and Wilson2018; Cook Reference Cook2010; Crane Reference Crane2001; Currie Reference Currie2004, Reference Currie, Kieran, Meskin and Robson2014; Currie and Ravenscroft Reference Currie and Ravenscroft2003; Hogan Reference Hogan2003a, Reference Hogan2003b, Reference Hogan2011a, Reference Hogan2011b, Reference Hogan2013, Reference Hogan2016; Lyne Reference Lyne2014; McConachie Reference McConachie2011, Reference McConachie2013; McConachie and Hart Reference McConachie and Hart2007; Richardson Reference Richardson2001, Reference Richardson2010; Savarese Reference Savarese and Zunshine2015; Schneider Reference Schneider2013; Spolsky Reference Spolsky1993, Reference Spolsky2007; Turner Reference Turner1996, Reference Turner2006; Young Reference Young2010; Zunshine Reference Zunshine2006, Reference Zunshine2012, Reference Zunshine2015) suggests a more favourable context compared even to the recent past for bringing the universal cognitive aspects of literature and art into focus.

The ‘naturalist’ or ‘cognitive’ turn did not of course emerge out of the blue in the twenty-first century but has a number of intellectual precursors. Since the early 1970s, reader-response criticism, reception theory, cognitive poetics and the psychology of the creative eye have put the mental states and processes of the receivers of artworks on the literary-theoretical and art-philosophical table.Footnote ⁵ By setting out to investigate the receiver’s role in literary and artistic interpretation and the active contribution of the audience in the ‘co-creation’ of works of art, these early endeavours introduced the mental representations and affective attitudes of the receiver into the established conventions of art-theoretical and critical practice and stood in partial opposition to the medium-oriented legacy of twentieth-century formalist and structuralist models. A more decisive and explicit early cognitive endeavour must be credited to the critical school of cognitive poetics and stylistics.Footnote ⁶ From the late 1970s to the present day, and drawing mainly on cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology and neuroscientific research on perception, cognitive poetics and stylistics have formed a well-established domain of literary-critical practice in which close textual analysis is informed by a diverse range of mind-internal events such as schemas, frames, scripts, foregrounding, mental prototypes, embodied cognition and so on, which have been empirically investigated in the cognitive sciences. The common denominator in most of these early cognitive endeavours is that they were focused almost exclusively on critical practice (e.g. close literary text analysis), involved direct application of an existing cognitive model to the analysis of artworks and literary texts and were receiver-oriented.

The way cognitivism is pursued in the present book departs from this tradition in a number of theoretically and epistemologically crucial ways. My account of literature and art as a cognitive object is not just another attempt at critical practice but represents what I would describe as robustly theoretical, highly up-to-date, empirically and cognitively aware literary and art-theoretical naturalistic discourse. Second, my account does not involve transfer and application of an existing theoretical model from a linguistic or cognitive domain to the philosophy of literature and art (e.g. application of relevance theory, or application of simulation theory, or application of extended ‘theory of mind’ or something along these lines) but rather fleshes out, develops and articulates a novel theoretical model from scratch. Last but not least, the model I propose puts the creator/artist at the centre of attention and is therefore among the first systematic and empirically testable action-based and creator-oriented models in existing literary-theoretical and art-philosophical discourse.Footnote ⁷

The methodological and epistemic foundations required for the cognitive venture I attempt here are in fact articulated in my first philosophical monograph The Limits of Expression: Language, Literature, Mind (Kolaiti Reference Kolaiti2019), an epistemological book ‘masked’ under the pretext of a theoretical treatise on the so-called prison house of language. There, I explore in detail the possibility of a methodological merger between literary and art study and the empirical, cognitive and life sciences and argue not only in favour of a naturalised literary and art theory but more broadly for a naturalised and genuinely interdisciplinary arts and humanities.

To my mind, a naturalised literary and art study is potentially also a genuinely interdisciplinary literary and art study, which will seek not only to draw on but also to affect hypothesis formation in the empirical and cognitive paradigm. Interdisciplinary practices in recent decades usually treat interdisciplinarity as a unidirectional game without thinking whether literary and art study should or could give something back to empirical domains. Literary and art scholars have been mostly concerned with the question of how theories about mind and language can contribute to our understanding of literature and art but not the other way around, while attempts to reverse this question and explore what humanistic disciplines could offer the sciences have been infrequent and dispersed (e.g. Burke and Troscianko Reference Burke and Troscianko2017; Hogan Reference Hogan2003a; Richardson Reference Richardson2010; Turner Reference Turner2006). Hogan’s work, for instance, is among the first attempts that point tentatively towards a two-way interdisciplinary potential: in What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion (Reference Hogan2003a), Hogan integrates insights from literature with work from empirical domains such as neuroscience and psychology with the two-way aim to contribute to the ongoing interdisciplinary research in emotion; in The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (Reference Hogan2011a), he treats literature as an ignored vast body of data that bears directly on the study of human emotion and its cross-cultural universality. These attempts, however, have not so far steered either a paradigm shift or systematic pursuit of two-way research endeavours. As a result, interdisciplinary research in literary and art study has had little impact on empirical and cognitive enquiry. In Kolaiti (Reference Kolaiti2019), I make a methodological claim for genuine or two-way interdisciplinarity and an epistemologically robust literary and art study that will revise its paradigm-specific investigative practices, so as to make decisive backward contributions to scientific theory formation in the empirical and cognitive sciences.

Literature and art is not an autonomous object, and the same can be said for most if not all investigative objects in the arts and humanities. The non-autonomy of literature and art as an investigative object can be interpreted in two possible ways: first, literature and art cannot be investigated by one discipline alone without being seriously diminished. Second, the investigation of the distinct and at the same time non-autonomous object that literature and art is should help highlight issues and questions in pertinent interdisciplines in a way no other investigative object can. If nothing else, this realisation should be good enough grounds for re-instilling ambition in a naturalised literary and art study to pursue two-way effects on scientific-theory formation through the unique vantage point of its non-autonomous investigative object.

The proposed book aims to build momentum for two-way interdisciplinary practices: it is equally concerned with how our understanding of literature and art can contribute to theories of mind and language and hopes to offer a tangible example of a two-way interdisciplinary relation in which literary and art study can not only draw on but also seek to affect pertinent scientific enquiry. My discussion throughout the book makes incidental contributions to a range of pertinent empirical and cognitive interdisciplines, while Chapters 6 and 7 offer a concrete illustration of two-way interdisciplinarity by yielding backward effects in a targeted way: in Chapter 6, I explore how my suggestions about positive effects of literature and art on the human perceptual system explicitly complement and extend the machinery of cognitive anthropology (Sperber Reference Sperber1996) and pragmatics by adding the term ‘perceptual effects’ to Sperber and Wilson’s (Reference Sperber and Wilson1995) relevance theory, implicitly enrich current debates in philosophy of mind on the ‘thesis of non-conceptualism’ and embodied cognition, provide a new vantage point for cognitive theories of agency, attention and selective directedness and, finally, allow a reinterpretation of various emerging claims in neuroaesthetics and cognitive science as describing different types of positive effects of art on the perceptual system. In Chapter 7, I give a further hands-on illustration of my notion of two-way interdisciplinarity by exploring the extensive and highly revisionary backward interdisciplinary effects of my cognitive model of literature/art for twenty-five years of empirical research in the psychology and neuroscience of creativity.

However, as I argued in detail in Kolaiti (Reference Kolaiti2019: 95–129) and my talk ‘The Arts and Humanities and Sciences as mutually informing modes of exploration: The need for curricular initiatives in Higher Education settings in the European and Global society’ at the 2019 London International Conference on Education, for the two-way epistemological vision of the present book to be fully fleshed out, parallel curricular reform on both ends of the spectrum is an absolute prerequisite. Theoretical endeavours like the present monograph might inspire young talent, but for inspiration to transform into fruitful interdisciplinary investigative endeavours, young talent needs to be equipped with the appropriate analytical and cognitive skills. It follows that empirical modules in key and highly up-to-date subjects from the cognitive and life sciences should start populating arts and humanities majors, equipping the new generations of arts and humanities scholars with the empirical and cognitive awareness as well the characteristic arguing and questioning mind-style of the naturalistic paradigm that is necessary for two-way interdisciplinarity to take off. At the same time, the ambition of the present book to give a hands-on example of how theory formation in literary and art study can decisively affect theory formation in the empirical and cognitive sciences places this monograph at the heart of discussions on curricular initiatives that seek to integrate arts and humanities subjects in the core curriculum of science and technology majors: in the last six or seven years or so, curriculum reform has been under way in a number of Chinese universities (such as the University of Hong Kong and Peking University) that have begun incorporating arts and humanities subjects in science-focused institutions. Leading US universities such as MIT (see, for instance, the ‘mission statement’ of the MIT Centre for Art, Science and Technology)Footnote ⁸ and HarvardFootnote ⁹ have started looking into the methodological and curricular implications of treating the arts and humanities and sciences as mutually informing modes of exploration.

Through theoretical innovation, commitment to broadening and revising existing interdisciplinary practices and putting the case for an epistemologically robust literary and art study and, more broadly, an epistemologically robust arts and humanities, the present book does not simply sketch a novel, cognitive theory of the essence of literature and art but also contributes to reinstating the arts and humanities as a global actor on the front line of interdisciplinary research and innovation, with a broader impact on both European and global society: humanistic thinking is integral to forming anthropocentric and democratic societies. Scientific thinking is integral to forming inquisitive minds that challenge dogmatic unsubstantiated ‘truths’ and safeguard the secular structure of social functioning. Every endeavour that strengthens the epistemic and curricular profile of the arts and humanities and promotes humanistic and scientific thinking as mutually informing modes of exploration can thus be seen as not merely a theoretical but also, and more importantly perhaps, a political venture that promotes the fundamental European values of anthropocentrism, secularity and democracy.

Yet two-way interdisciplinarity and a methodological merger in the sense of seeking bidirectionality of effects is only one of the at least two prerequisites for interdisciplinary ventures in the twenty-first century to be genuine and full-blown. The other is methodological merger in the sense of methodological and discursive integration, inducing substantial discipline-shaping changes in the paradigms involved and generating new types of interdisciplinary discourses and new types of investigative and discursive practice. Until now, the arts and humanities as much as the empirical, cognitive and life sciences have been describing loosely as ‘interdisciplinary’ intellectual outputs that are better described as multidisciplinary or inter-discursive to use Richardson’s (Reference Richardson2010: x) term: outputs that involve selective reading across disciplinary boundaries and selective adoption of terminological vocabulary from other domains but more often than not do not challenge the established disciplinary practices, boundaries and perspectives of the home discipline through what Richardson (Reference Richardson2010: x) has acutely described as ‘transformative dialogue’. How can there be interdisciplinarity in any epistemologically robust sense of the term without transformative dialogue? How interdisciplinary really is an output that does not reflect any essential and sustained merging between the methods and reasoning styles of the disciplines involved? In the last few decades, interdisciplinarity has come into intellectual fashion more than ever before, but interdisciplinary endeavours across domains of enquiry have nevertheless preserved and nurtured a parallel desire to perpetuate established disciplinary practices, at the moment when interdisciplinarity in a full-blown and epistemologically robust sense should not be anything less than a transformative merging and sustained crossing of discipline-shaping boundaries. To the extent that the resulting inter-discursive outputs can be comfortably accommodated within pre-existing disciplinary ‘boxes’ and easily identified as ‘literary theory’, or ‘cognitive science’ or ‘linguistics’ or ‘aesthetic philosophy’ or ‘psychology’ and so on, interdisciplinarity in a robust sense of the term has not really taken effect: it is just a loose-label term for ramping up the competitiveness of our grant proposals and the appeal of our proposed books.

For interdisciplinarity to be genuine and intellectually informed, a condition of discipline-crossing discursive merger must also be fulfilled. Genuine interdisciplinary interaction is not simply a matter of sharing topics, but also, and more crucially, of merging methods, mindsets and discursive conventions into a new methodology proper of paradigm-transforming interdisciplinary discourses. To this end, a head-on revision of established investigative and paradigm-specific practices is necessary, calling for fundamental shifts across and within existing paradigms and disciplines.

The publishing industry can in many ways be thought of as a central actor for full-blown epistemic innovation in interdisciplinary research to actually take off in the twenty-first century. The chief editors and peer reviewers of globally influential publishing houses could play a key role in promoting the epistemic vision of genuine interdisciplinarity, by fostering a new culture across their extant monograph series and peer-reviewed journals, and by pursuing explicit strategies for identifying and promoting new types of paradigm-crossing interdisciplinary outputs. At this moment, the publishing sector has not, as yet and for the main, fostered a positive environment for genuine interdisciplinarity to be able to flourish. Anecdotal but highly illuminating evidence about the unpreparedness of the existing publishing mindset for interdisciplinary outputs that merge, cross and challenge existing disciplinary ‘boxes’ comes from my attempt to publish some of the chapters of this book as papers in peer-reviewed journals. The peer reviewers of cognitive science journals rejected the papers, listing at the top of their negative review comments the argument that ‘this is not cognitive science; it looks more like linguistics or philosophy’. The peer reviewers of linguistics journals rejected the papers suggesting that ‘this is not linguistics; it looks more like literary theory or aesthetic philosophy’. The peer reviewers of philosophy of art journals rejected the papers suggesting that ‘this is not aesthetic philosophy; it looks more like linguistics or cognitive science’. And the peer reviewers of literary journals rejected the papers suggesting that ‘this is not literary theory; it looks more like aesthetic philosophy or cognitive science’. This ripple effect is a telltale sign of the absence at this moment in epistemological and publishing history of explicit strategies that will enable and encourage genuine interdisciplinary ventures and the parallel articulation of paradigm-transforming discourses. The fear that full-blown interdisciplinary outputs might not be able to target an existing readership is unreasonable: any kind of innovative and groundbreaking theoretical or epistemological endeavour does not assume an existing readership at the time of its emergence. Instead, such endeavours seek to cultivate and create a new readership. When the first cognitive research outputs started being published in the early 1970s, they could not possibly target an existing readership since cognitive studies at the time were only a newly emerging domain enquiry. Publishers and scientific journals on the front line of research innovation at the time pioneered the way towards generating a new target readership for the newly emerging domains. But with epistemological innovation, things are by definition significantly trickier, because epistemic innovation does not involve the emergence of a new disciplinary and paradigm-specific ‘box’ – which, roughly speaking, is something more usual in the long course of human scientific history and, therefore, more easily digestible – but messes with the familiar and comforting boundaries of existing disciplinary and paradigm-specific ‘boxes’.

In the twenty-first century, we need to rise to a quadruple challenge: a theoretical challenge to generate two-way interdisciplinary theoretical outputs. An epistemological challenge to generate paradigm-transformative interdisciplinary discursive practices. A curricular challenge to nurture a new generation of arts and humanities graduates who will be able to materialise such a two-way interdisciplinary programme. And a publishing and dissemination challenge to cultivate through explicit strategy development a positive publishing environment so that genuine interdisciplinary ventures can gain public access and impact upon both international scholarship and the wider community. This last challenge depends crucially on generating new pools of target readership and cultivating new reader mindsets. Genuine, full-fledged interdisciplinarity will have taken off at that moment in epistemological and reading history when, say, linguists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, psychologists, literary scholars, anthropologists and aestheticians will be open to treating a book on the nature of literature and art as equally relevant to their domain of enquiry and reading agenda. Full-fledged interdisciplinarity should render any attempt to characterise an output as ‘linguistics’ or ‘literary theory’ or ‘cognitive science’ or such like as a matter of mere labelling and epistemologically irrelevant labour distribution.

To rephrase what I have claimed in the last few paragraphs, interdisciplinarity as we have known it so far is not interdisciplinary enough so as not to easily fit existing disciplinary boxes. This book hopes to flesh out a new type of discursive practice and a new variety of two-way research initiative in literary and art study that decisively crosses disciplinary boundaries across the arts and humanities, linguistics and the cognitive sciences.

Now, among all candidate disciplinary domains merging in the present book, if one was to merit the credentials of the enabling force behind its epistemological and theoretical innovation, that would certainly be linguistics. Back in 1958, Jakobson described his ‘Closing statement in linguistics and poetics’ as an ‘attempt to vindicate the right and duty of linguistics to direct the investigation of verbal art in all its compass and extent’ (Jakobson Reference Jakobson and Weber1958/1996: 377). Interestingly, as I will show in detail in Chapter 2 of this analysis, Jakobson’s ‘Closing statement’ envisaged sketching an answer to the exact same persistent ontological question that forms the nucleus of the present book: what makes a certain entity a work of art. Operating within a formalist and structuralist linguistic model, Jakobson’s ambitious programme for poetics envisioned the field of poetics as one of the earliest interdisciplinary ventures for linguistic enquiry, where the systematic and analytical apparatus of the newly emerging science of linguistics could help unearth some essential morphostructural distinctness of literary and poetic as opposed to ordinary language. As I will argue in Chapter 2, the early twentieth-century assumption about an essential linguistic distinctness of literature (the poetics of language) is not correct, but this has little to no effect on the calibre and ambition of the programme it inspired and the numerous rewards literary and linguistic study are still reaping from it by means of its extension in current studies in text linguistics, literary linguistics, poetics and close text analysis. Jakobson’s interdisciplinary venture is perhaps one of the most noteworthy and ambitious programmes in literary, linguistic and art-theoretical thinking in the twentieth century, and, I dare say, it is not contingent that this programme was motivated by linguistic enquiry.

In the seventy years or so since Jakobson’s statement, linguistics has evolved into a massively influential empirical or quasi-empirical domain, particularly through the theoretical and epistemological implications – both within and beyond the realm of linguistic enquiry itself – of the Chomskian cognitive revolution. No other discipline has had the breadth or depth of transformative implications linguistics has had over the last six decades in coining new disciplinary domains and enabling new ways of thinking. And this owes heavily to Chomsky’s groundbreaking epistemological edifice, his cognitive perspective and generative programme in Universal Grammar, innateness and cognition. Thanks to Chomskian linguistics, it is not just the face of linguistics per se that has radically transformed but the face of twentieth-century scientific and theoretical enquiry across a massive range of empirical and life-scientific domains. The impressive strides witnessed in cognitive research over the last thirty years from cognitive science to neuroscience to robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the more recent ‘cognitive turn’ in the arts and humanities may well be seen as a direct epistemological implication of the types of research initiative enabled by Chomsky’s cognitive revolution. Paradigm-transforming research endeavours such as Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory (Reference Sperber and Wilson1995; Wilson and Sperber Reference Wilson and Sperber2012) serve as further illuminating examples of the epistemological impact of linguistics in enabling new modalities of research enquiry. Embedded within the broader edifice of the cognitive revolution and framed as a theory of pragmatics, communication and cognition, relevance theory was a groundbreaking epistemic stride that radically extended and renovated the analytical and discursive tools available thus far to the humanities and life sciences. Relevance theory launched a new discursive variety that fleshed out what I described earlier as the Chomskian ‘naturalistic approach’ and presented an innovative exemplar of research output that weaves together linguistics, philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology by embedding its view of human ostensive inferential communication upon a structured view of human cognition: relevance theory is a theory of human communication as much as a theory of human cognition, attention and agency with very wide multidisciplinary implications across the arts and humanities and life and cognitive sciences.

The new type of research endeavour this book represents would have been impossible without these two epistemological precedents, both of which owe to advancements in the field of linguistics. Although the theoretical focus of this analysis is a question that has traditionally been central to literary theory and the philosophy of art, and although the range of interdisciplines merged in the novel discursive practice by means of which I attempt to tackle this question is particularly wide, still it should be stressed that the rationale, outlook and theoretical and epistemic foundations of the present book draw decisively on the Chomskian and relevance-theoretic ventures. In line with the epistemic commitments sketched earlier, my discussion does not involve some kind of direct application of theory from the generative programme or the relevance-theoretic edifice to the question of the essence of literature and art, in the way, for instance, Jakobson’s conception of interdisciplinarity involved a direct application of morphostructural linguistic analysis to unearthing the essence of the ‘poetic’. Yet the outlook of my discussion and the way it ventures into paradigm-transforming interdisciplinary theory development is crucially underpinned by the relevance-theoretic model of ostensive inferential communication, the relevance-driven view of human cognition, the relevance-theoretic arguments in favour of linguistic and cognitive plasticity and the heated debates over the nature of concepts and their relation to word meaning pursued in the linguistic and cognitive strand of relevance theory and the relatively newly emerging field of lexical pragmatics. In a two-way interdisciplinary modality, my discussion also feeds back to relevance theory by providing tentative evidence that the propositional type of effects (cognitive effects) extensively explored in relevance theory so far might be complemented by partly or wholly embodied types of effects, which might in turn enable us delineate further partly or wholly embodied types of relevance. At the same time, my outlook is also crucially inspired by the Chomskian view of language as a biological object and, hence, natural kind, charting new territory for the epistemological and theoretical implications of Chomsky’s cognitive perspective in the cognitive study of literature and art: my new-coined notion of art as an intra-individual occurrence, as well my subsequent notions of cognitive essences and a cognitive metaphysics, may well be seen as innovative theoretical and epistemic implications of the Chomskian mentalistic and psychologistic model for I-language, and the Chomskian cognitive perspective in the domains of the anthropology and ontology of literature and art as well as in the broader domain of philosophical metaphysics. If my assumption that literature and art as an action is enabled by art-specific engineering in the mind-internal reality of human creators is correct, then literature and art is not a set of artefacts out there in the world as is standardly thought but rather a cognitive and biological object and, hence, a natural kind.

To bring this introduction to an end, one of the first systematic accounts of literariness and arthood in the twentieth century (the poetics of language) was facilitated by intellectual breakthroughs in linguistics. This book represents one of the first systematic accounts of literariness and arthood in the twenty-first century (a poetics of action) and is once again facilitated by intellectual breakthroughs in linguistics. In this sense, this book could be seen as a novel type of paradigm-transforming discursive practice and two-way interdisciplinary research initiative that provides yet another reason why linguistics may well deserve to be thought of as one of the most influential intellectual ventures of modern times.