Abstract:

Current debate across academia (Anthony et al, 2023), policy makers (Bearman & Ajjawi, 2023), and business corporations (Argenti, 2025) is centred on the role of human beings in the light of the pervasive diffusion of the AI technological paradigm (Dosi, 1992). Empirical evidence has documented such phenomena as “cognitive offloading” (Risko & Gilbert, 2016) and “cognitive surrender” (Shaw & Nave, 2026) to describe the bypassing and weakening human intuitive and deliberative reasoning. Such constructs indicate the opportunity and / or necessity to safeguard the processes underlying the development and refinement of human capacity to frame, interpret, and judge, in two words “human thinking”. 

Correspondingly, academics from different disciplines have introduced new constructs to depict the quintessential elements of such “human thinking”. For instance, Luciano Floridi (2016) – a philosopher – has put forward the notion of “semantic capital” as the stock of contents through which people give meaning to experience and make sense of the world. Karim Lakhani (2026) – a management scholar – has recentlyproposed the notion of “analogue intelligence” to refer to the accumulated output of human judgment, taste, craft, and sensibility: a form of intelligence that is embodied, contextual, and irreducibly personal. 

This paper aims to address two questions: what is the role of literature today? Can literature help support the development of human thinking? To do so, it takes stock of the reflections and analysis focused on the role(s) of literature to deepen the notion that literature a cognitive process that unfolds between an author and a reader: not just a closed product created by an author and passively received by a reader. While an author initiates this process by giving form to experience, a reader completes it by interpreting that form through the lens of their own assumptions, values, and worldview. Iser (1978) submitted that literary meaning is produced through an interaction in which the reader must connect segments, negotiate indeterminacies, and perform acts of combination. Bruner (1986) argued that novels are instruments for “constructing reality,” since narrative is a mode of thought with its own way of ordering experience, distinct from logical argument. 

The paper’s argument unfolds through an analysis of the work of writers who have experimented through novel approaches to engage the reader. For instance, Italo Calvino – in his less famous trilogy – pursued a sequence of experiments in how literature makes reader think: Invisible Cities turns narration into conceptual mapping; The Castle of Crossed Destinies turns narrative into combinatorial interpretationfrom signs; If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller turns reading itself into the object, staging expectation, and readerly agency.

This paper advances the notion of literature as a cognitive technology through which readers exercise interpretation, judgment, perspective-taking, and meaning-making. The implications for education policy are clear: curricula should integrate literary learning as foundational to the formation of students. Additionally, lifelong and corporate education should be redesigned to sustain the cognitive capacities that neuroplasticity shows remain malleable across the life course. Literature, in this sense, is a disciplined practice through which individuals, organisations, and societies learn how to govern intelligent systems.

(Co-authored by Massimo Riva, Brown University and Luca Viganò, King’s College London)

 

About Andrea Prencipe

Andrea Prencipe is Professor of Organisation and Innovation at Luiss University. He has held research and teaching appointments, as well as visiting affiliations, at institutions including Columbia University, Harvard University, King’s College London, Rotterdam School of Management, Università G. d’Annunzio, the University of Sussex, and University College London. He served as Rector of Luiss University from 2018 to 2024. His research on the impact of digital / AI technologies on organisations, learning in temporary organisations, and cultural and social dimension of innovation has been published in such journals as Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, and Research Policy, and by international academic publishers including Edward Elgar, Oxford University Press, and Plagrave MacMillan. Andrea’s recent work explores how the humanities help reframe learning in the age of AI.