Recent scientific approaches to aesthetics include evolutionary theories about the origin of art behavior, psychological investigations into human aesthetic experience and preferences, and neurophysiological explorations of the mechanisms underlying art experience. Critics of these approaches argue that they are ultimately irrelevant to a philosophical aesthetics because they cannot help us understand the distinctive conceptual basis and normativity of our art experience. This criticism may seem plausible given the piecemeal nature of these scientific approaches, but a more comprehensive naturalistic framework can (...) help us understand the conceptual basis and normativity of art. In particular, the ecology of art, an understanding of how individuals interact within particular environments, can help us understand the engineered art niches in which we create and experience art. Each niche is associated with a particular deme, or set of individuals that interact within that niche, and a set of cognitive, epistemic, and pedagogical technologies that form the conceptual basis of a niche-dependent normativity. This is to be contrasted with the niche-independent normativity revealed by many of the scientific approaches. This framework, and the conflicting streams of normativity it reveals, allows us to better understand conflicts in normativity and the implausibility of unequivocal and universal normative principles. (shrink)

To analyze the relations between art and science, philosophers and historians have developed different lines of inquiry. A first type of inquiry considers how artistic and scientific practices have interacted over human history. Another project aims to determine the contributions that scientific research can make to our understanding of art, including the contributions that cognitive science can make to philosophical questions about the nature of art. We rely on contributions made to these projects in order to demonstrate that art and (...) science are codependent phenomena. Specifically, we explore the codependence of art and science in the context of a historical analysis of their interactions and in the context of contemporary debates on the cognitive science of art. (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)

In this paper we address a frontier topic in the humanities, namely how the cultural and natural construction that we call landscape affects well-being and health. Following an updated review of evidence-based literature in the fields of medicine, psychology, and architecture, we propose a new theoretical framework called “processual landscape,” which is able to explain both the health-landscape and the medical agency-structure binomial pairs. We provide a twofold analysis of landscape, from both the cultural and naturalist points of view: in (...) order to take into account its relationship with health, the definition of landscape as a cultural product needs to be broadened through naturalization, grounding it in the scientific domain. Landscape cannot be distinguished from the ecological environment. For this reason, we naturalize the idea of landscape through the notion of affordance and Gibson’s ecological psychology. In doing so, we stress the role of agency in the theory of perception and the health-landscape relationship. Since it is the result of continuous and co-creational interaction between the cultural agent, the biological agent and the affordances offered to the landscape perceiver, the processual landscape is, in our opinion, the most comprehensive framework for explaining the health-landscape relationship. The consequences of our framework are not only theoretical, but ethical also: insofar as health is greatly affected by landscape, this construction represents something more than just part of our heritage or a place to be preserved for the aesthetic pleasure it provides. Rather, we can talk about the right to landscape as something intrinsically linked to the well-being of present and future generations. (shrink)

Tension and suspense are powerful emotional experiences that occur in a wide variety of contexts (e.g., in music, film, literature, and everyday life). The omnipresence of tension experiences suggests that they build on very basic cognitive and affective mechanisms. However, the psychological underpinnings of tension experiences remain largely unexplained, and tension and suspense are rarely discussed from a general, domain-independent perspective. In this paper, we argue that tension experiences in different contexts (e.g., musical tension or suspense in a movie) build (...) on the same underlying psychological processes. We discuss key components of tension experiences and propose a domain-independent model of tension and suspense. According to this model, tension experiences originate from states of conflict, instability, dissonance, or uncertainty that trigger predictive processes directed at future events of emotional significance. We also discuss possible neural mechanisms underlying experiences of tension. The model provides a theoretical framework that can inform future empirical research on tension phenomena. (shrink)

In a recent discussion of disenchantment and re-enchantment Charles Taylor suggests that it is possible to respond to the disenchanted view of the world, in which meaning and value are understood as subjective projections, by articulating a re-enchanted sense of nature or the universe from the perspective of human ‘agency-in-the-world’, in which meaning and value are objective. The question I address in this thesis is, what could it mean to articulate a re-enchantment from within our ‘agency-in-the-world’? In Chapter One I (...) examine the work of John McDowell in order to explore the possibility that he gives sense to the idea of a re-enchantment from within our agency-in-the-world. I conclude that he provides one way of doing so. However I argue that McDowell’s naturalism of second nature can seem limited as it does not address the ‘proto-religious’ dimension to Taylor’s understanding of re-enchantment. In Chapter Two I turn to the work of Roger Scruton to consider whether he provides a re-enchantment from within our agency-in-the-world that does accommodate this proto-religious dimension. I conclude that he does, but raise concerns about how convincing Scruton’s re-enchantment is. I argue that, from a McDowellian point of view, a case can be made that Scruton implicitly accepts as true certain significant elements of the disenchanted view of the world. In Chapter Three I look to the later Heidegger for an alternative re-enchantment from within our agency-in-the-world that attempts to accommodate the proto-religious. I focus on two interpretations of the later Heidegger given by Julian Young and Charles Taylor. In response to a worry put forward by Young, I argue that Charles Taylor’s interpretation can accommodate a proto-religious dimension. In my Conclusion I argue that McDowell’s naturalism of second nature and the understanding of our agency-in-the-world as presented by Taylor’s Heidegger, form interestingly continuous re-enchantments. On this basis I argue that although McDowell himself does not extend his idea of second nature to accommodate the proto-religious, the example of later Heidegger shows that there is nothing inherently limited about the framework of second nature that means it cannot be extended to encompass important proto-religious responses to the world. (shrink)

Empirical evidence is reviewed indicating that the extraordinary aspects of the human mind are due to our species’ ability to go beyond simple “dyadic associations” and to process the relations among three items of information simultaneously. Classic explanations of the “triadic” nature of human skills have been advocated by various scholars in the context of the evolution of human cognition. Here I summarize the core processes as found in (i) the syntax of language, (ii) tool-usage, and (iii) joint attention. I (...) then review the triadic foundations of two perceptual phenomena of great importance in human aesthetics: (iv) harmony perception and (v) pictorial depth perception. In all five subfields of human psychology, most previous work has emphasized the recursive, hierarchical complexity of such “higher cognition,” but a strongly reductionist approach indicates that the core mechanisms are triadic. It is concluded that the cognitive skills traditionally considered to be “uniquely” human require three-way associational processing that most non-Primate animal species find difficult or impossible, but all members of Homo sapiens – regardless of small cultural differences – find easy and inherently intriguing. (shrink)

Two dominant interpretations of Kant's notion of adherent beauty, the conjunctive view and the incorporation view, provide an account of how to form informed aesthetic assessments concerning artworks. According to both accounts, judgments of perfection play a crucial role in making informed, although impure, judgments of taste. These accounts only examine aesthetic responses to objects that meet or fail to meet the expectations we have regarding what they ought to be. I demonstrate that Kant's works of genius do not fall (...) within either of these categories. The distinguishing features of these works, namely, originality and exemplarity, become unrecognizable on these interpretations because originality and exemplarity lie in the work's ability to exceed one's expectations concerning its form and content. They contribute to artistic beauty through alternative transformation methods distinct from that of abstraction, namely, concept expansion and repudiation. These additional accounts of transformation lead to a rather surprising outcome: works of genius turn out to be paradigm cases where one can and indeed ought to form informed pure judgments of taste. (shrink)

Based on the field of aesthetics, for centuries philosophers and more recently scientists have been concerned with understanding the artistic experience focusing on emotional responses to the perception of artworks. By contrast, in the last decades, evolutionary biology has been concerned with explaining the artistic experience by focusing on the cognitive processes underlying this experience. Up until now, the cognitive mechanisms that allow humans to experience objects and events as art remain largely unexplored and there is still no conventional use (...) of terms for referring to the processes which may explain why the artistic experience is characteristically human and universal to human beings (Dissanayake, 1992, p. 24; Donald, 2006, p. 4). In this paper, I will first question whether it is productive to understand the artistic experience in terms of perception and emotion, and I will subsequently propose a possible alternative explanation to understand this experience. Drawing upon the work of Ellen Dissanayake (1992, 2000, 2015), Merlin Donald (2001, 2006, 2013), Antonio Damasio (1994, 2000, 2003, 2010), Barend van Heusden (2004, 2009, 2010), and Alejandra Wah (2014), I will argue that this experience is characterized by particular degrees of imagination and consciousness. (shrink)

Research seeking a scientific foundation for the theory of art appreciation has raised controversies at the intersection of the social and cognitive sciences. Though equally relevant to a scientific inquiry into art appreciation, psychological and historical approaches to art developed independently and lack a common core of theoretical principles. Historicists argue that psychological and brain sciences ignore the fact that artworks are artifacts produced and appreciated in the context of unique historical situations and artistic intentions. After revealing flaws in the (...) psychological approach, we introduce a psycho-historical framework for the science of art appreciation. This framework demonstrates that a science of art appreciation must investigate how appreciators process causal and historical information to classify and explain their psychological responses to art. Expanding on research about the cognition of artifacts, we identify three modes of appreciation: basic exposure to an artwork, the artistic design stance, and artistic understanding. The artistic design stance, a requisite for artistic understanding, is an attitude whereby appreciators develop their sensitivity to art-historical contexts by means of inquiries into the making, authorship, and functions of artworks. We defend and illustrate the psycho-historical framework with an analysis of existing studies on art appreciation in empirical aesthetics. Finally, we argue that the fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure can be amended to meet the requirements of the framework. We conclude that scientists can tackle fundamental questions about the nature and appreciation of art within the psycho-historical framework. (shrink)

We introduce Neuroartes as a biological humanism that concentrates on the development of social interventions. We review several connections between art and the human body, mainly the brain. We suggest art, painting in the present case, as a tool to work with the elderly with cognitive and/or motor impairment for the purpose of helping them with their subjectivity and autonomy.

Today, music is ubiquitous, highly valued in all known cultures, playing many roles in human daily life. The ethnographic study of the music of extant human foragers makes this quite apparent. Moreover, music is ancient. Sophisticated bird-bone and ivory flutes dated from 40 kya reveal an even earlier musical-technological tradition. So is music likely to be an entrenched feature of human social life during the long passage to behavioral modernity—say, by 150 kya—or earlier? In this article I sketch an evolutionary (...) model that focuses on hominin vocal musicality and communication in the Pleistocene, tracking between series of phenotypes and changes in ecological, social, cognitive, and informational contexts. The model links musicality and protomusic to a bigger picture of hominin socio-cognitive evolution, making some connections clearer, motivating further theorizing and the search for new evidence. (shrink)

There is a paucity of neuroaesthetic studies on prose fiction. This is in contrast to the very many impressive studies that have been conducted in recent times on the neuroaesthetics of sister arts such as painting, music and dance. Why might this be the case, what are its causes and, of greatest importance, how can it best be resolved? In this article, the pitfalls, parameters and prospects of a neuroaesthetics of prose fiction will be explored. The article itself is part (...) critical review, part methodological proposal and part opinion paper. Its aim is simple: to stimulate, excite and energize thinking in the discipline as to how prose fiction might be fully integrated in the canon of neuroaesthetics and to point to opportunities where neuroimaging studies on literary discourse processing might be conducted in collaborative work bringing humanists and scientists together. (shrink)

Most art is made by people with a well-developed concept of art and who are familiar with its forms and genres as well as with the informal institutions of its presentation and reception. This is reflected in philosophers’ proposed definitions. The earliest artworks were made by people who lacked the concept and in a context that does not resemble the art traditions of established societies, however. An adequate definition must accommodate their efforts. The result is a complex, hybrid definition: something (...) is art (a) if it shows excellence of skill and achievement in realizing significant aesthetic goals, and either doing so is its primary, identifying function or doing so makes a vital contribution to the realization of its primary, identifying function, or (b) if it falls under an art genre or art form established and publicly recognized within an art tradition, or (c) if it is intended by its maker/presenter to be art and its maker/presenter does what is necessary and appropriate to realizing that intention. Meanwhile, artworlds—historically developed traditions of works, genres, theories, criticism, conventions for presentation, and so on—play a crucial but implicit role in (b) and (c). They are to be characterized in terms of their origins. (shrink)

Bullot & Reber (B&R) put forth a design stance to fuse psychological and art historical accounts of visual thinking into a single theory. We argue that this aspect of their proposal needs further fine-tuning. Issues of transgression and coherence are necessary to provide stability to the design stance. We advocate looking to Art Education for such fundamentals of picture understanding.

Bullot & Reber (B&R) make a strong case for the role of causal reasoning in the appreciation of artwork. Although I agree that an artistic design stance is important for art appreciation, I suggest that it is a subset of a more general framework for evaluating artworks as the causal extensions of individuals, which includes inferences about the creator's mind, as well as more physical notions of essence.

Over four decades, my ideas about the arts in human evolution have themselves evolved, from an original notion of art as a human behaviour of “making special” to a full-fledged hypothesis of artification. A summary of the gradual developmental path (or route) of the hypothesis, based on ethological principles and concepts, is given, and an argument presented in which artification is described as an exaptation whose roots lie in adaptive features of ancestral mother–infant interaction that contributed to infant survival and (...) maternal reproductive success. I show how the interaction displays features of a ritualised behavior whose operations (formalization, repetition, exaggeration, and elaboration) can be regarded as characteristic elements of human ritual ceremonies as well as of art (including song, dance, performance, literary language, altered surroundings, and other examples of making ordinary sounds, movement, language, environments, objects, and bodies extraordinary). Participation in these behaviours in ritual practices served adaptive ends in early Homo by coordinating brain and body states, and thereby emotionally bonding members of a group in common cause as well as reducing existential anxiety in individuals. A final section situates artification within contemporary philosophical and popular ideas of art, claiming that artifying is not a synonym for or definition of art but foundational to any evolutionary discussion of artistic/aesthetic behaviour. (shrink)

Unlike human beings, landscapes, cities and buildings cannot feel anything in the literal sense. They do not have nervous systems. Nevertheless, we attribute “Stimmungen” such as peacefulness and melancholy to them. On what basis? With what right? And why does it matter anyway? This paper attempts an answer to this bunch of questions. The first section clarifies the concept of “Stimmung,” by distinguishing its three major meanings, namely harmony, mood and atmosphere. Section two discusses various models of how “Stimmung” is (...) infused into our natural and artificial environment. Section three lists several ways of how we experience atmosphere, preparing the ground for the specifically aesthetic claim in section four: how, when we experience atmosphere aesthetically, we respond to it by resonating or feeling at home. (shrink)

The aim of this dissertation is to create a naturalistic philosophical picture of creative capacities that are specific to our species, focusing on artistic ability, religious reflection, and scientific study. By integrating data from diverse domains within a philosophical anthropological framework, I have presented a cognitive and evolutionary approach to the question of why humans, but not other animals engage in such activities. Through an application of cognitive and evolutionary perspectives to the study of these behaviors, I have sought to (...) provide a more solid footing for philosophical anthropological discussions of uniquely human behavior. In particular, I have argued that art, religion and science, which are usually seen as achievements that are quite remote from ordinary modes of reasoning, are subserved by evolved cognitive processes that serve functions in everyday cognitive tasks, that arise early and spontaneously in cognitive development, that are shared cross-culturally, and that have evolved in response to selective pressures in our ancestral past. These mundane cognitive processes provide a measuring rod with which we can assess a diversity of cultural phenomena; they form a unified explanatory framework to approach human culture. I have argued that we can explain uncommon thoughts in terms of interactions between common minds. This dissertation is subdivided into four parts. Part I outlines the problem of human uniqueness, examining theories on how humans conceptualize the world, and what their mental tool box looks like. Part II discusses the evolutionary and cognitive origins of human artistic behavior. Part III focuses on the cognitive science of religion, especially on how it can be applied to the reasoning of theologians and philosophers of religion. Part IV considers the cognitive basis of scientific practice. (shrink)

Dominic McIver Lopes and Yuriko Saito claim that the Japanese tea ceremony, or chadō, is a non‐Western art form. Stephen Davies also defends that claim. In this article, I utilize the tea ceremony as a test case for pancultural definitions of art that claim to be inclusive of non‐Western cultures without relying on Western ethnocentrism to justify their status as artworks. I argue that Davies's (2015) hybrid definition is not justified in assuming a homogenous art tradition and/or a unified conception (...) of artistic practices in a non‐Western culture. Moreover, the cladistic structure of his definition fails to accommodate the spontaneous instantiation of new art traditions. Additionally, Jerrold Levinson's Intentional‐Historical definition cannot satisfactorily accommodate chadō. First, the nonart origins that were formative for the regard that is required for appreciation of the tea ceremony mean that the relational interpretation of the definition fails. Second, Rikyū’s tea ceremony does not count as art incidentally, as it is not a form of mimesis nor does the Japanese wabi aesthetic that is central to chadō have a precursor in known Western art. Third, if chadō does satisfy Levinson's extended theory, it comes at the cost of embracing Western ethnocentrism. (shrink)

In this article, I examine whether Jerrold Levinson's intentional-historical definition of art can successfully accommodate revolutionary art. For Levinson, an item is art if it was intended to be regarded as some prior art was regarded. But revolutionary art involves a regard that is “completely distinct” from preexisting art regards. I consider and reject Levinson's proposed solutions to the problem of accommodating revolutionary art. I then defend an alternative account of transgressive art regard. Unfortunately for the intentional-historical definition, the acceptance (...) of transgressive art regard in conjunction with some recent theories of the development of human behavioral modernity may commit the definition to including nonart, prehistoric tools. (shrink)

This paper examines people's reasoning about identity continuity and its relation to previous research on how people value one-of-a-kind artifacts, such as artwork. We propose that judgments about the continuity of artworks are related to judgments about the continuity of individual persons because art objects are seen as physical extensions of their creators. We report a reanalysis of previous data and the results of two new empirical studies that test this hypothesis. The first study demonstrates that the mere categorization of (...) an object as “art” versus “a tool” changes people's intuitions about the persistence of those objects over time. In a second study, we examine some conditions that may lead artworks to be thought of as different from other artifacts. These observations inform both current understanding of what makes some objects one-of-a-kind as well as broader questions regarding how people intuitively think about the persistence of human agents. (shrink)

I offer a Darwinian perspective on the existence of aesthetic interests, tastes, preferences, and productions. It is distinguished from the approaches of Denis Dutton and Geoffrey Miller, drawing instead on Richard O. Prum's notion of biotic artworlds. The relevance of neuroaesthetics to the philosophy of art is defended.

ABSTRACTIn philosophical analyses of the value of sport, a relatively unheralded feature is the opportunity that sport offers for admiration. While we readily salute many of the things that people...

(2010). Nature's Longing for Beauty: Elegance as an Evolutionary Attractor, with Implications for Human Systems. World Futures: Vol. 66, No. 7, pp. 504-510.

A few years ago I gave a paper on the aesthetics of ‘noise,’ that is, on the ways in which non-musical sounds can be given aesthetic shape and structure, and thereby form the basis of significant aesthetic experience. Along the way I made reference to Arnold Schoenberg's musical theory, in particular his notion of Klangfarbenmelodie, literally ‘sound colour melody,’ or musical form based on timbre or tonal colour rather than on melody, harmony or rhythm. Schoenberg articulated his ideas about Klangfarbenmelodie (...) in the final section of his Harmonielehre. ‘Pitch is nothing else but tone colour measured in one direction,’ wrote Schoenberg. ‘Now, if it is possible to create patterns out of tone colours that are differentiated according to pitch, patterns we call ‘melodies’…then it must also be possible to make such progressions out of the tone colours of the other dimension, out of that which we simply call “tone colour.”’ In other words, traditional melodies work by abstracting and structuring the dominant pitch characterizing a musical sound, while ‘sound colour melodies’ work, Schoenberg argues, by structuring the combined set of pitches contained in a given musical sound. Schoenberg is emphatic that, although a neglected and underdeveloped possibility within Western classical music, ‘sound colour melody’ is a perfectly legitimate and viable form of musical expression; indeed for Schoenberg it is a musical form with enormous potential. (shrink)

This essay brings together questions from aesthetic theory and museum management. In particular, I relate a contextualist account of the value of copies to a pluralistic understanding of the purpose of museums. I begin by offering a new defence of the no longer fashionable view that the aesthetic (as opposed to the ethical, personal, monetary, historical, or other) value of artworks may be detached from questions regarding their provenance. My argument is partly based on a distinction between the process of (...) creating a work of art and the artwork in question.Next, I defend a pluralism about the purpose of museums and their exhibitions. I combine this with a pluralist account of the value of replicas which falls out of the above argument, exposing our preference for originality as being frequently fetishistic. I maintain that the importance of the provenance of artworks is relative to the specific purposes of any given exhibition or museum. Those that are primarily educational (such as encyclopaedic ones) are in many cases best served with high-quality replicas. This view may be extended to artefacts that are not artworks, such as fossils and dinosaur skeletons. Finally, I expound the variety of roles that replicas may play in museums and relate these to notions of authenticity. (shrink)

Menninghaus et al. distinguish art from fiction, but no current arguments or data suggest that the concept of art can be meaningfully circumscribed. This is a problem for aesthetic psychology. I sketch a solution by rejecting the distinction: Unlike most animal communication, in which signals are either true or false, art and fiction consist of signals without determinate truth values.

Books Christy Mag Uidhir, Art andObjects [Elisa Caldarola, p. 182] • Julie Jaffee Nagel, Melodies of the Mind. Connections Between Psychoanalisis and Music [Michele Gardini, p. 185] • Dominic McIver Lopes, Beyond Art [Filippo Focosi, p. 187] • Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Herta Nagl-Docekal, Erzsébet Ròsza, Elisabeth Weisser-Lohmann, Hegels Ästhetik als Theorie der Moderne [Lorenzo Leonardo Pizzichemi, p. 190] Comments Toward an Integrated Science of Aesthetics. Getting Rid of the Main Misunderstandings in Evolutionary Aesthetics [Mariagrazia Portera, p. 194].

When Władysław Tatarkiewicz wrote that there are only two things that can be said about art: that it is a human activity, not a product of nature, and that it is a conscious activity (or its product), adding that every statement about art different from the ones mentioned above was always finally overthrown (Tatarkiewicz, 1980, p. 37), he probably did not think that the first claim could be questioned by anyone. In the following paper, I will trace the history of (...) observations of “artistic behaviors” that were made by animal ethologists and then processed by evolutionary art philosophers who may lead to the hypothesis about the validity of assigning artistic abilities to animals. In respect to this article is aimed at a wide audience. I will also demonstrate that the question: whether, and in what sense, animals create art is in fact a question about a definition of art that could include this type of intentional animal acts. (shrink)

Both scienticity and artistry have been listed in cluster concept definitions for both science and art. However, these clusters have not been considered together before. I contrast and combine these different clusters for the first time, and I argue that doing so better elucidates the properties of the natural sciences, humanities and fine arts than the science and art cluster concepts do separately. This is because all disciplines have varying levels of scienticity and artistry, but this is not captured fully (...) by the science or art cluster concepts separately. An integrated scienticity and artistry cluster provides a new way of describing the commonly argued notion that the sciences and arts share qualities, methods and practices, but the integrated scienticity-artistry cluster shows how, when and where these qualities blend into each other across disciplines. (shrink)

It is widely recognized that the innate versus acquired distinction is a false dichotomy. Yet many scientists continue to describe certain traits as “innate” and take this to imply that those traits are not acquired, or “unlearned.” This article asks what cognitive role, if any, the concept of innateness should play in the psychological and behavioural sciences. I consider three arguments for eliminating innateness from scientific discourse. First, the classification of a trait as innate is thought to discourage empirical research (...) into its developmental origin. Second, this concept lumps together a number of different biological properties that ought to be treated as distinct. Third, innateness is associated with the outmoded folk biological theory of essentialism. In response to these objections, I consider two attempts to revise the concept of innateness which aim to make it more suitable for scientific explanation and research. One proposal is that innateness can be defined in terms of the biological property of environmental canalization. On this view, a trait is innate to the extent that it is developmentally buffered against a range of different environments. Another proposal is that innateness serves as an explanatory primitive for cognitive science. This view holds that there exist a sharp boundary between psychological and biological explanations and that to identify a trait as innate means that it falls into the latter explanatory domain. This essay ends with some questions for future research. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper examines Mohan Matthen's account of aesthetic pleasure. The first part explores implications of Matthen's notion of ‘fit’ between features of art objects and our pleasurable contemplation of them. Through historical comparisons with Plato and Dewey, I challenge his claim not to be offering a theory of aesthetic norms. The second part of my paper sketches how Matthen might address two important problems of contemporary aesthetics: the first concerning interpretation, and the second concerning genres of art that evoke negative (...) or painful emotions such as tragedy, melodrama, and horror. (shrink)

Are there any theoretical resources – conceptual, lexical or argumentative ones – in the interdisciplinary debate on the evolutionary origins of the arts that can help us go beyond the traditional autonomistic conception of art, in favour of a more continuist and inclusive interpretation of human artistic practices? The paper examines the different voices in the debate, against the background of a cultural naturalist attitude inspired by John Dewey, by focusing on those contributions which can be interpreted in non-reductionist, anti-foundationalist (...) and pluralistic terms. What are particularly valuable are those positions emphasizing the phatic, communicative dimension of artifying behaviours in connection with the acute structural exposure of human organisms to their natural and naturally social environment. (shrink)

ABSTRACTCan a Naturalist Definition of art replace the historical and institutional positions argued for by philosophical aesthetics? This article considers Denis Dutton’s work in evolutionary psychology and his cluster Naturalist Definition of art. I begin with an analysis of the validity of what Dutton takes to be the most important criterion: Imaginative Experience. I propose a criticism of Dutton’s set of criteria coupled with a re-evaluation of what may be implied when referring to a naturalist basis for the arts. Specifically, (...) I argue that philosophical aesthetics, which has been criticized by Dutton as a form of cultural relativism, is instead able to address features of our interaction with the arts that have adaptive and evolutionary value. (shrink)