The role of personal background knowledge—in particular knowledge about the context of production of an artwork—has been only marginally taken into account in cognitive approaches to art. Addressing this issue is crucial to enhancing these approaches’ explanatory power and framing their collaboration with the humanities (Bullot and Reber 2012). This paper sketches a model of the experience of artworks based on the mechanisms of intention attribution, and shows how this model makes it possible to address the issue of personal background (...) knowledge empirically. I claim that the role of intention attribution in art experience has been incorrectly accounted in the literature because of an overly narrow definition of “intention.” I suggest that the observer can recover not only the artist’s abstract projects, but any kind of mental states that have played a causal role during the production of the work. In addition, I suggest that this recovery occurs in large part unconsciously and/or implicitly. I provide support for these claims by distinguishing three families of psychological mechanisms of intention attribution that are activated by artworks: one involved in the cognition of artifacts, one devoted to communication, and one involved in action perception. (shrink)

A great deal of work in analytic philosophy of art is related to defining what counts as art. So far, cognitive approaches to art have almost entirely ignored this literature. In this paper I discuss the role of intuition in analytic philosophy of art, to show how an empirical research program on art could take advantage of existing work in analytic philosophy. I suggest that the first step of this research program should be to understand how people intuitively categorize something (...) as art. Drawing on results from cognitive science and analytic philosophy, I show that the intuitive categorization of an artifact as art rests on the intentions attributed (frequently implicitly) to the creator of the artifact based both on its appearance and on background knowledge. I discuss how the issue of categorization is related to other empirical issues concerning our relationship to works of art, such as perception, appreciation, interpretation and evaluation. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that modelling occupies a curious role in the art making process, and that it constitutes a hybrid art form. Modelling is intriguingly under-research in aesthetics, despite it being a cornerstone of art education and deeply involved in various art practices. It functions both within a supportive role to further the goals of art making, while also retaining the creative agency and performance of the professional model upon which the artist, photographer, or wider crew rely. This (...) ability entails not merely helping to steer a posing session, but experimenting with and adapting to any unexpected issues that arise in the course of the session. To understand the salient performative qualities of modelling, I first focus on expert movement, improvisation, and style. Second, I reflect on how modelling corresponds to creativity and skill. Finally, I propose that the model is a performer, and that, ultimately, modelling should be recognised as a hybrid collaborative art form which incorporates qualities of various performing arts. (shrink)

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 75-79, Winter 2020.

The nature of culture as the symbolic expression of inarticulate matter is explored from a range of different cultural perspectives. Raymond Williams's work on culture, especially his ideas on material and symbolic production, serves to introduce an analysis of matter and its place in cultural production. The mutable nature of matter is explored through the modern physics of quantum theory as well as modern art, especially the work of Jasper Johns. Late‐modern culture is viewed in terms of a mutable space (...) of matter that resists meaning and location. The implications of this resistance for understanding the cultivation of knowledge and subject‐object relations are then pursued in the contexts of art history, the ‘social body’, the society of generalized communication, multi‐media culture, and computerization. (shrink)

Titian's Rape of Europa is highly praised for its luminous colors and sensual textures. But the painting has an overlooked dark side, namely that it eroticizes rape. I argue that this is an ethical defect that diminishes the painting aesthetically. This argument-that an artwork can be worse off qua work of art precisely because it is somehow ethically problematic-demonstrates that feminist concerns about art can play a legitimate role in art criticism and aesthetic appreciation.

Aesthetic preferences and practices vary widely between individuals and between cultures. How should aesthetics proceed if we take this fact of aesthetic diversity, rather than the presumption of aesthetic universality, as our starting point? How should we theorize the cultural origins and cultural basis of aesthetic diversity? How should we think about the value and normativity of aesthetic diversity? In an effort to model what the turn toward diversity might look like in aesthetic inquiry, each author defends a different account (...) of aesthetic diversity, and they engage in a collective dialogue about these issues. (shrink)

Art historians and philosophers often talk about the interpretive significance of titles, but few have bothered with their historical origins. This omission has led to the assumption that an artwork's title is its proper name, since names and titles share the essential function of facilitating reference to their bearers. But a closer look at the development of our titling practices shows a significant point of divergence from standard analyses of proper names: the semantic content of a title is often crucial (...) to the identification, individuation, and interpretation of its associated artwork. This paper represents a first step towards an empirically centred study of our titling practices. I argue that, in order to accept titles as proper names, we must first recognize the social, rather than the referential, function of naming. (shrink)

This paper explores what happens when artists fail to execute their goals. I argue that taxonomies of failure in general, and of failed-art in particular, should focus on the attempts which generate the failed-entity, and that to do this they must be sensitive to an attempt’s orientation. This account of failed-attempts delivers three important new insights into artistic practice: there can be no accidental art, only deliberate and incidental art; art’s intention-dependence entails the possibility of performative failure, but not of (...) failed-art; and art’s intention-dependence is perfectly compatible with the role that luck plays in artistic creation. (shrink)

It is often thought that the boundaries and properties of art-kinds are determined by the things we say and think about them. More recently, this tendency has manifested itself as concept-descriptivism, the view that the reference of art-kind terms is fixed by the ontological properties explicitly or implicitly ascribed to art and art-kinds by competent users of those terms. Competent users are therefore immune from radical error in their ascriptions; the result is that the ontology of art must begin and (...) end with conceptual analysis. Against this tendency towards concept-driven ontology, I offer a trio of objections derived from: the cultural and temporal variability of concepts of art, the systematic tendency, on the part of would-be ontological assessors, to err on the side of familiar categories or, conversely, to exaggerate minor differences between familiar and unfamiliar practices, and the influence artworld precedents exert over expert and folk concepts alike. These considerations, I argue, mandate an epistemic humility that is simply unavailable to the concept-descriptivist. (shrink)

Scientific representation is a currently booming topic, both in analytical philosophy and in history and philosophy of science. The analytical inquiry attempts to come to terms with the relation between theory and world; while historians and philosophers of science aim to develop an account of the practice of model building in the sciences. This article provides a review of recent work within both traditions, and ultimately argues for a practice-based account of the means employed by scientists to effectively achieve representation (...) in the modelling sciences. (shrink)

This paper defends an inferential conception of scientific representation. It approaches the notion of representation in a deflationary spirit, and minimally characterizes the concept as it appears in science by means of two necessary conditions: its essential directionality and its capacity to allow surrogate reasoning and inference. The conception is defended by showing that it successfully meets the objections that make its competitors, such as isomorphism and similarity, untenable. In addition the inferential conception captures the objectivity of the cognitive representations (...) used by science, it sheds light on their truth and completeness, and it explains the source of the analogy between scientific and artistic modes of representation. (shrink)

According to what I call the Merit Principle, roughly, works of art that attempt to elicit unmerited responses fail on their own terms and are thereby aesthetically flawed. A horror film, for instance, that attempts to elicit fear towards something that is not scary is to that extent aesthetically flawed. The Merit Principle is not only intuitive, it is also endorsed in some form by Aristotle, David Hume, and numerous contemporary figures. In this paper, I show how the principle leads (...) to a novel paradox when applied to an undertheorized class of artworks I call ‘seductive works’. These artworks necessarily invite an unmerited response in order to invite a (merited) repudiation of that response. Thus, according to the Merit Principle, they are necessarily aesthetically flawed, which is counter-intuitive. I consider a number of unsuccessful solutions to the paradox that aim to preserve the Merit Principle, before rejecting that principle as it stands. I discuss what is challenging about seductive artworks, before briefly defending a new principle that appeals to a general way that a work’s aesthetic value is conditioned by the constraints under which it operates. This principle not only resolves the paradox, but explains the competing intuitions that give rise to it. (shrink)

This essay draws on Kenneth George's ethnographic study of the Indonesian painter Abdul Djalil Pirous and his art, as well as Pirous's own characterizations of his paintings as “spiritual notes,” to theorize and examine how paintings serve as ethical media. The essay offers a provisional definition of and methodology for “visual ethics” and considers how pictures and language can function quite differently as sites for ethical reflection. The particular painting analyzed here is a large temple mural of the death of (...) the Buddha located at Wat Unnalom, a prominent Buddhist monastery in Phnom Penh, painted in the 1980s by Cambodian artist Sum Pon. After discussing the lifeworld of Pon's Mahāparinibbāna and varied Khmer Buddhist interpretations of the painting, I suggest that the painting's rendering of “moral vision” helps us understand Buddhist ways of seeing more generally. I conclude by returning to George's question about how our understanding of ethics would change if we took pictures as the “fulcrum of moral relationships,” arguing that pictures can embody certain kinds of tensions or paradoxes that are difficult to explain and grasp discursively, such as paradoxes that arise from the inevitability and yet inexplicability of death as well as the tensions between Buddhist aims of cultivating “boundless” love and the particularities of our own individual experiences of love. (shrink)

This article addresses the semiotic problem of how meaning is agentially grounded: how actual meaning is possible and is justifiably supported by agents’ capabilities and purposes. This article is particularly focused on human agential grounding; however, to a great degree, insights presented here can be extended to other living beings. Specifically, agential meaning is examined here inside the framework of agentive semiotics and embodied, situated and enactive cognition theories, in line with the mind-life continuity general thesis. To offer clarity and (...) methodological precision about agential grounding, three explanation categories are proposed: phylogenetic recurrence, the evolutionary basis for corporal/embodied grounding; ontogenetic recurrence, the developmental basis for individual meaning grounding; and collective recurrence, the basis for meaning recognized, attributed and assigned inside social contexts. These recurrences are conceived as three types of general processes that constantly enclose possibilities for purpose and meaning emergence in humans. As a result of these types of recurrences, two categories of human agendas or purposes are also proposed: individual and collective. Finally, remarks about how these categories can be useful for semiotic analysis and further research are suggested. (shrink)

What is it for a person to have style? Philosophers working in action theory, ethics, and aesthetics are surprisingly quiet on this question. I begin by considering whether theories of artistic style shed any light on it. Many philosophers, artists, and art historians are attracted to some version of the view that artistic style is the expression of personality. I clarify this view and argue that it is implausible for both artistic style and, suitably modified, personal style. In fact, both (...) theories of style crack along the same line, which suggests that they can indeed be mutually illuminating. I articulate and defend a view of personal style according to which, roughly, having style is a matter of expressing one’s ideals. I show how this illuminates the widely neglected value of personal style and propose a new, analogous theory of individual artistic style: artistic style is the expression of the ideals the artist has for her art. (shrink)

The interaction between the recovery of the artist’s intentions and the perception of an artwork is a classic topic for philosophy and history of art. It also frequently, albeit sometimes implicitly, comes up in everyday thought and conversation about art and artworks. Since recent work in cognitive science can help us understand how we perceive and understand the intentions of others, this discipline could fruitfully participate in a multidisciplinary investigation of the role of intention recovery in art perception. The method (...) I propose is to look for cases where recovery of the artist’s intentions interacts with perception of a work of art, and this cannot be explain by a simple top-down influence of conscious propositional knowledge on perception. I will focus on drawing and show that recovery of the draftsman’s intentional actions is handled by a psychological process shaped by the motor system of the observer. (shrink)

I offer a set of sufficient conditions for beauty, drawing on Parsons and Carlson’s account of ‘functional beauty’. First, I argue that their account is flawed, whilst falling short of...

This article is based on the text of a talk at the University of Athens in October 2018, in which I drew brief cameo portraits of five historians who inspired me and whose lives I admire: David Herlihy (1930–1991), Michael Baxandall (1933–2008), Marino Berengo (1928–2000), Hans Baron (1901–1988), and Marvin Becker (1922–2004). It is difficult to find strong common methodological or ideological ground shared by all five. Their priorities were different, their guiding lights in each case came from an internal (...) dialogue between their own passions and the inspiration they received from teachers and readings, not by the methodological preferences that dominated the profession in their lives. What, in the end, left a deep imprint on me was their character. Their commitment was to ideas and to dialogue. National, religious, ideological, or methodological differences did not cloud their judgment of others, especially of young scholars. All five, growing up in the Fascist era, were portents of the more level tones of the liberal democracy that slowly, amid myriad obstacles, set root in the decades following 1945. (shrink)

Aesthetic values give agents reasons to perform not only acts of contemplation, but also acts like editing, collecting, and conserving. Moreover, aesthetic agents rarely operate solo: they conduct their business as integral members of networks of other aesthetic agents. The consensus theory of aesthetic value, namely that an item’s aesthetic value is its power to evoke a finally valuable experience in a suitable spectator, can explain neither the range of acts performed by aesthetic agents nor the social contexts in which (...) they operate. This paper proposes a new theory of aesthetic value specifically to explain facts about the sociality of aesthetic agents. (shrink)

Prominent philosophical accounts of artistic forgery have neglected a central aspect of the aesthetic harm it perpetrates. To be properly understood, forgery must be seen in the context of our ongoing attempts to augment our aesthetic understanding in conditions of uncertainty. The bootstrapping necessary under these conditions requires a highly refined comprehension of historical context. By creating artificial associations among aesthetically relevant qualities and misrepresenting historical relationships, undetected forgeries stunt or distort aesthetic understanding. The effect of this may be quite (...) pervasive, and removing known forgeries from museum walls will be insufficient to eradicate it. Continued attention to forgeries, once exposed, can in fact serve us by increasing our understanding of how aesthetic understanding is formed and by helping us to repair the damage they have inflicted. (shrink)

This two‐part article examines the very limited engagement by philosophers with museums, and proposes analysis under six headings: cultural variety, taxonomy, and epistemology in Part I, and teleology, ethics, and therapeutics and aesthetics in Part II. The article establishes that fundamental categories of museums established in the 19th century – of art, of anthropology, of history, of natural history, of science and technology – still persist. Among them, it distinguishes between hegemonic (predominantly Western) and subaltern (minority or Indigenous) museums worldwide. (...) It argues that relations between hegemonic and subaltern museums are often agonistic, and are compromised by claims of universalism on the part of proponents of the former. The article observes that most discussion of museums focuses exclusively and misleadingly on their public exhibition function, and contends that scholarship – not exhibition – is central to all museums. However, that predominantly taxonomic scholarship, while innovative and central to a dominant epistemology based on the observation of tangible things in the 19th century, was compromised by the epistemic shift to abstraction and experimentation in the 20th, which resulted in a loss of initiative and authority. Although epistemological changes currently in progress favor a renewed attention to tangible things as complex matrices to which museums ought to contribute significantly, the fundamental taxonomy of museums by collection type is a clog on the ability of museum scholars to engage with and themselves produce big ideas. In order to function well as sites of scholarship in the future, museums will have to be far more adaptable and attentive to a wider range of things and ideas (including Indigenous ideas incompatible with Western assumptions) than their existing collection divisions permit. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to theorize how materials can play an active, constitutive, and causally effective role in the production and sustenance of cultural forms and meanings. It does so through an empirical exploration of the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA). The article describes the museum as an “objectification machine” that endeavors to transform and to stabilize artworks as meaningful “objects” that can be exhibited, classified, and circulated. The article explains how the extent to which (...) the museum succeeds in this process of stabilization ultimately depends on the material properties of artworks and, more specially, on whether these behave as “docile” or “unruly” objects. Drawing on different empirical examples, the article explores how docile and unruly objects shape organizational dynamics within the museum and, through them, the wider processes of institutional and cultural reproduction. The article uses this empirical example to highlight the importance of developing a new “material sensibility” that restores heuristic dignity to the material within cultural sociology. (shrink)

First critical survey devoted to the history of philosophical contributions to this topic. Brings to light neglected contributions prior to the second half of the 20th century including works in Danish, German, and French. Provides a division of issues and clarifies key ambiguities related to modality.

What is cognition? Despite the existence of a science of cognition there is no clear agreement on what makes certain phenomena cognitive, and others not. Within cognitivism the issue was neglected. Human intelligence was used as a standard, and any process—natural or artificial—that fitted this standard sufficiently could be considered ‘cognitive’. For post-cognitivist psychology the situation is different. It cannot rely on the ‘human standard’ in the same way. One might even say that the need for a post-cognitivist psychology arose (...) because cognitivism began with this most complex of all cognitive systems without a good understanding and appreciation of more basic, biological cases. Embodied cognition approaches remedy this anthropocentric bias by addressing a more varied set of processes that are not strictly limited to humans. Under these circumstances the question what we take cognition to be is more urgent. Are phenomena like insect walking (Brooks) and goal-seeking missiles (O’Regan and Noë) examples of cognition or not? What criteria do we use to answer such questions? Given this problem, the notion of perception-action coupling (or sensorimotor contingencies) becomes an important and fairly obvious option to provide a foundation for the notion of cognition. However, and intriguingly, the same problem occurs again: What are perception-action couplings? What would make something an example of perception-action coupling? Where are we to draw a line, if anywhere? It is self-evident that O’Regan and Noë’s (2001) example of a goal-seeking missile is controversial, but why exactly? What is missing? Can we ever do more than making intuitive judgments here? A way out of this dilemma may be found by developing the claim that perception-action coupling must be grounded in a biological context (Keijzer, 2001), and following what Lyon (2005) calls a biogenic approach. This option raises a whole new field of issues and topics that is of central concern for a postcognitivist psychology. (shrink)

This study investigates the composer-performer relationship in terms of the site of responsibility for the aesthetic features of the musical performance. It considers the extent to which the performer's view of that relationship affects the performance itself. This is accomplished by examining four focal points: the composer-performer relationship; composers' intentions; Nelson Goodman's account of notation, expression and style; and the work--including the writings--of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. ;The composer is seen by some as predominantly responsible for the performance, with the (...) performer's role as that of fulfilling the composer's intentions. A contrasting perspective, cognizant of the significance of interpretive decisions, situates the performer as co-creator. ;Pivotal in this debate are the discrepancies surrounding the role of composers' intentions. Critical discussion of the Early Music Movement, considered here as a paradigm of historical authenticity, distinguishes between its proponents, for whom composers' intentions are authoritative, and its opponents, who perceive that historical authenticity, even if attainable, would be insufficient to ensure a work's aesthetic merit. ;This divergence derives from the fact that the musical performance is underdetermined by Western musical notation. Nelson Goodman addresses this by assigning to the musical score the function of identification: Any performance which complies with the score constitutes an instance of the work. Moreover, Goodman's account of expression and style recognizes the score's non-notational elements as instrumental to the aesthetic qualities of the performance. ;Goodman's theoretical account is then applied to the work of Glenn Gould. First, Gould's consideration of the performer as co-creator is identified as instrumental in determining the aesthetic features of his performances. The interpretive autonomy afforded by his perspective, it is argued, led to the development of a performance and compositional style characterized by a predilection for a manifestly contrapuntal rather than hierarchical structure. Gould's performances and compositions are shown to express views of an ethical as well as aesthetic nature, contributing to what Goodman terms "worldmaking," affirming the symbolic function of music. ;In conclusion, the performer's view of the performer-composer relationship is fundamental and determinant in defining the aesthetic features of the musical performance. (shrink)

Over the last decades, disciplines such as cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology and the neurosciences have shown an increasing interest for art. It remains unclear what kind of relation these "young disciplines" should have with more traditional endeavors and, more generally, in which way they can enrich our understanding of art. In this paper, I lay down the foundations of a methodological framework which distinguishes between three basic topics: the investigation of the cognitive phenomena elicited by the experience of things that (...) we call 'artworks', the investigation of the psychological structures determining the intuitive categorization of something as art and the study of the intuitions and arguments used to build justifications about whether something is a work of art. Each of these topics can benefit from the cognitive approaches, provided that some specific methodological recommendations are respected. (shrink)

Attempting art: an essay on intention-dependenceIt is a truism among philosophers that art is intention-dependent—that is to say, art-making is an activity that depends in some way on the maker's intentions. Not much thought has been given to just what this entails, however. For instance, most philosophers of art assume that intention-dependence entails concept-dependence—i.e. possessing a concept of art is necessary for art-making, so that what prospective artists must intend is to make art. And yet, a mounting body of anthropological (...) and art-historical evidence and philosophical argument suggests that not only is such a criterion unsatisfied by most of the art-historical canon, but it also rests on a false premise: concepts of 'art' are not shared between cultures, nor even in the same culture across time. My dissertation aims to rectify this error by first exploring what our commitment to art's intention-dependence actually entails, and then showing that, properly understood, intention-dependence sets a number of important constraints on theories of art with respect to explanatory desiderata such as the success- and failure-conditions of art-attempts, the cross-cultural identification of art, and the reference of 'art' and art-kind terms. I begin by situating art's intention-dependence in the philosophical literature on intentional action, arguing that, properly conceived, intention-dependence is a weak criterion which can be satisfied either directly or indirectly. It therefore does not necessarily entail concept-dependence. I then use this distinction to motivate a new treatment of the success- and failure-conditions for art-attempts, arguing that the extant model's emphasis on compliance with 'the manner intended' is far too restrictive to capture actual artistic practices. I go on to show that Ruth Millikan's model of linguistic conventions supplies an independently plausible explanation of art's concept-independent origins in terms of the development of a system of indirectly intention-dependent conventions called an 'artworld'. I argue that this account of artworld development supplies us with the tools we need to distinguish art-kinds from other artifactual kinds. Finally, I turn my attention to methodological issues, arguing that even though 'art' is a social kind with its roots in arbitrary and historically-contingent networks of conventions, the philosophy of art is not merely an exercise in bare conceptual analysis. In fact, there is now a great deal of evidence to show that the ways we think about 'art' are inconsistent, incomplete, imperialistic, and largely unprincipled. Yet I argue that this does not mean that the artworld data have no bearing on theories of art. Instead, I argue that our best reflective understanding of our artworld practices sets the constraints on the reference of 'art' and art-kind terms. I argue that we have no privileged epistemic access to the ontology of social kinds; our only privilege lies in our ability to determine the proper subject of our inquiries. (shrink)