Many artists, art critics, and poets suggest that an aesthetic appreciation of artworks may modify our perception of the world, including quotidian things and scenes. I call this Art-to-World, AtW. Focusing on visual artworks, in this paper I articulate an empirically-informed account of AtW that is based on content-related views of aesthetic experience, and on Goodman’s and Elgin’s concept of exemplification. An aesthetic encounter with artworks demands paying attention to its aesthetic, expressive, or design properties that realize its purpose. Attention (...) to these properties make percipients better able to spot them in other entities and scenes as well. The upshot is that an aesthetic commerce with artworks enlarges the scope of what we are able to see and has therefore momentous epistemic consequences. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of depiction sometimes suffer from a lack of differentiation between several questions concerning the nature of pictorial representation. To provide a suitable framework I distinguish six such questions and several levels on which one might want to proceed in order to answer some of them. With this background, I reconstruct Goodman's and Elgin's answer to the specific question: What distinguishes the pictorial from the verbal or linguistic? I try to reveal some major motivations behind their system-oriented approach and (...) to indicate some reasons why a strategy of this kind is to a certain extent mandatory to grasp the nature of the pictorial. The system-relative and functional character of depiction has to be captured by every adequate theory. (shrink)

Cognitive advancement is not always a matter of acquiring new information. It often consists in reconfiguration--in reorganizing a domain so that hitherto overlooked or underemphasized features, patterns, opportunities, and resources come to light. Several modes of reconfiguration prominent in the arts--metaphor, fiction, exemplification, and perspective--play important roles in science as well. They do not perform the same roles as literal, descriptive, perspectiveless scientific truths. But to understand how science advances understanding, we need to appreciate the ineliminable cognitive contributions of non-literal, (...) non-descriptive symbols. (shrink)

A constructivist thesis of worldmaking is characterized and some misinterpretations of its claims are dispelled. An attempt is then made to reply to various common criticisms of the thesis. Although this defense of worldmaking takes into account general challenges to the thesis, the focus of the paper is narrower. It is aimed primarily at those critics who typically accept related pragmatic assumptions and themes, but still think it necessary to resist the idea of worldmaking.

A theory of Goodman and Elgin concerning the individuation of literary works is examined and criticized. An alternative account is offered to meet various of the difficulties in their proposal. In addition, it is suggested that there may not be asingle account of the notion of a literary work that can best do all the jobs we expect of it.