Naturalizing aesthetics: art and the cognitive neuroscience of vision

Keywords:

aesthetics, cognitive neuroscience, neuroaesthetics, vision, mental imagery

Available in:

JVAP 5.3 - about JVAP

Funded by:

NAFAE - about NAFAE

Pulished:

Novermber 2006

Article abstract

Recent advances in our understanding of the cognitive neuroscience of perception have encouraged cognitive scientists and scientifically minded philosophers to turn their attention towards art and the problems of philosophical aesthetics. This ‘cognitive turn’ does not represent an entirely novel paradigm in the study of art. Alexander Baumgarten originally introduced the term ‘aesthetics’ to refer to a science of perception. Artists' formal methods are a means to cull the structural features necessary for constructing clear perceptual representations from a dense flux of sensory information in conscious experience. Therefore he interpreted artists' formal methods as tools for studying the structure of perception, and art as a field whose interests overlapped with aesthetics. In what follows, I examine three approaches to cognitive science and aesthetics that rest on a tacit assumption of Baumgarten's program. I argue that, whereas this new research can explain how viewers perceptually recover the content of artworks, it does not explain what makes that content aesthetically interesting. Therefore, the challenge for cognitive science and aesthetics is to tie the perceptual practices of artists and viewers to their more narrowly construed aesthetic, or artistic, practices. What is needed to establish this link is an interpretation of Baumgarten's original definition of aesthetics that treats attention to the way the formal structure of an artwork works to perceptually convey its content as a source of aesthetic interest. Unfortunately this interpretation is not transparently established by explanations of the perceptual practices of artists and viewers. Therefore, I conclude that it remains an open question whether this research can contribute to philosophical aesthetics.

Written by: William P. Seeley

Other articles in: JVAP Volume 5 Issue 3