Literature and the psychology lab by Gregory Currie - TLS

Literature and the psychology lab by Gregory Currie - TLS
A suggestion about how to read – treat it as an exercise in pretence
Gregory Currie  [h/t Books, Inq....]
Excerpt:
Arguing for the ignorance and insularity of people in the arts and humanities, C. P. Snow noted that they rarely know much about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Unsurprisingly, the literary establishment was not shaken by this observation. Henry James’s fingertip examination of the psyche would not have been done better if the author had taken Physics 101, and the same can be said for the other literary illuminations of the human world. That is not the world of particles and waves, but of thoughts and feelings. It is not a world we understand through microscopes and accelerators but through ordinary, if highly focused and attentive, experience. The experience got, says James in the preface to The Princess Casamassima, by walking the London streets after dinner.
Perhaps Snow simply chose the wrong example. Focused on big science, he probably thought little of psychology, which did not then, and probably never will, have a second law, or even a first one. But things have been happening in cognitive psychology, and they may cause trouble for some who think the two-cultures attack has been seen off. What has been happening has no overarching theory or grand narrative to claim our allegiance, and much of its detail may not survive the next decade of theoretical reconfiguration. Still, there are hints of something radically at odds with how we ordinarily think about the mind. To the extent that literature is that ordinary picture writ large, embellished, deepened and refined, this research deserves the attention of those who produce, theorize or merely read what we uncomfortably call serious fiction.
Stop there, you may say. You are talking as if literature made claims about the mind...