This essay examines the epistemology underlying cognitive and cognitive-evolutionary approaches to literary theory and criticism, situating those approaches along an epistemological continuum between the philosophical opposites of realism and relativism. The epistemology of cognitive literary studies uniquely empowers critics to deconstruct the dichotomies of realist/relativist debate, enabling them to examine literary texts and experience from within the conviction that all knowledge is species-specific and that our knowledge in particular is specific to the nature(s) of human brains, minds, and bodies; but also to acknowledge that even species-specific knowledge is by definition context-dependent and culturally indexed, subject to lesser and greater degrees of constructivity by humans' environments and cultures. Despite this epistemology that they share, however, cognitive and cognitive-evolutionary critics also differ from each other in important ways, some leaning noticeably toward privileging the stabilities inherent to species-specific ways of knowing, while others place more emphasis on the instabilities that are characteristic of all constructivist models, including some current models of evolution. The essay ends with the prediction that the latter or the more constructivist-leaning of the cognitive literary approaches will prove the more successful at garnering the attention and support of literary studies in general. [F.E.H.]