Approaching Cognitive Aesthetics
Tereza HADRAVOVÁ
Department of Aesthetics, Charles University, Prague
klikyhak@gmail.com
Twentieth-century history of the term 'cognitive aesthetics' offers two different stories.
First, it has been used as a label for those aestheticians and philosophers of art who has
subsumed aesthetic experience under cognitive experience. Second, it denotes an
incorporation of aesthetics into the field of the so-called cognitive science (and vice
versa).
Even if the term „cognitive“ is central for both mentioned accounts of cognitive
aesthetics, it has been mostly taken for granted and hardly ever approached as such.
However, what exactly is taken for granted is very different in both accounts. In the first
sense, „cognition“ is equivalent to (propositional) knowledge; in the second one,
„cognition“ is connected with the so-called cognitive capacities which, as was nicely
stated, encompass „all those mechanisms that behaviourists wanted to eliminate.“ (Harder
1996, p. 35).
This distinction goes along with the one proposed by Blumenthal in his famous book The
Process of Cognition, where he says: „The study of cognition traditionally concerns
questions of two types: (1) the content of human knowledge and (2) the nature of human
mental processes that enable the learning and use of that knowledge.“ (Blumenthal 1977,
p.5) Whereas the content of knowledge refers to systems of knowledge, the process
approach focuses on events, such as thought, perception, attention, remembering,
emotion, and assumes there are elements of cognition implicated in all of these.
In the following paper, I begin by outlining and qualifying both meanings of cognitive
aesthetics. Concerning the first one, I shall differentiate its field using another famous
division of the concept of cognition (taken as the content of human knowledge) into
knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance. Concerning the second one, I
shall distinguish two types of interdisciplinary approach to aesthetics and determine
whether and how cognition is involved. Finally, at the end of my contribution, I try to
connect the content-based cognitive aesthetics with the process-based one. I will
conclude by interpreting Nelson Goodman's work on the subject, believing he was the
one who actually succeeded to bring them together.
Cognitive Aesthetics (1)
Aestheticians of the first group share the vague assumption that experience of art brings
(some kind of) cognition and by cognition they usually mean knowledge. However, both,
the sort and object of such knowledge, have been the apple of discord.
Traditionally and not without controversy, two main kinds of knowledge have been
recognized: „knowing by description“ and „knowing by acquaintance“. The first one,
more often called „propositional knowledge“, is considered to be knowledge of truth,
whereas the second one, being knowledge of things, is, at least according to Russell's
original proposal, non-propositional, and cannot be simply true or false. (Russell 1912,
Chapter V.)
The critique has been focused more on non-propositional type of knowledge, which is
connected with no longer accepted sense-data theories. Despite of it, some aestheticians
have vindicated this sort of knowledge as a source of specifically aesthetic cognition.
That is how cognition comes into play for the proponents of the so-called aesthetic
attitude theory, in spite of the fact that the aesthetic attitude is characteristically qualified
as non-cognitive by definition. For instance, Eliseo Vivas, who had originally built his
definition of aesthetic experience on its opposition to cognitive experience, afterward
conceded: “The distinction (...) holds (...) between the aesthetic and the cognitive
experience if by the latter is meant inquiry, research, ratiocination, discursive thought. It
cannot be drawn between the aesthetic experience and 'knowledge by acquaintance'.”
(Vivas 1959; p. 228). According to Vivas, the aesthetic experience consists of “the
intransitive apprehension of an object's immanent meanings in their full presentational
immediacy” (Vivas 1937; p. 631), whereas in the cognitive experience, we “discover in
objects not immanent but referential meanings, which is to say, meanings which carry us
beyond the object to other objects or meaning not present upon it.” (ibid.) However
antagonistic the experiences are, they both discover some meaning and in this more
general sense, both of them are “cognitive”.
The problem elicited by such approach will be only sketched. Distinguishing two types
of experience and insisting on both of them being 'cognitive' forces us to frame them into
a common picture. In epistemology, this job is done by “foundationalists”, who consider
knowledge by acquaintance to be the foundation of all knowledge. Is this picture
transmittable to aesthetics as easily as those two kinds of knowledge seemed to be? I do
not think so.
The other, more straightforward way to find aesthetic experience cognitive is to claim
that art is a source of full-hearted propositional knowledge. For instance, Theodore
Greene, who was greatly influenced by Benedetto Croce, claimed that all works of art
were essentially cognitively significant in a way that made them literally true or false.
Such a step unavoidably causes an unintuitive approximation of works of art to scientific
theories, which Greene tried to eliminate by strict detachment of the objects of cognitions
in question. Whereas science aims to discover purely objective facts, „nature's skeletal
structure“ (Greene 1938, p. 374), knowledge mediated by art concerns subjective values,
„reality seen through human eyes“ (ibid., p. 376). Both facts and values, as different
aspects of the real world, are worth exploiting and science and art respectively are
irreducible media of their cognition.
As was pointed out by Vincent Tomas (1940), there is an inner contradiction in Greene's
approach. Either are artworks true or false, which means they are propositions, or they
make us understand values, which means they are simply not true or false. Greene
himself tried to have his cake and eat it, for he held both sides of this disjunction, calling
artworks at the same time propositions conveying knowledge about reality, and 'insights'
or 'revelations' enabling us to comprehend it.
Such inner contradiction is avoided by another cognitive aesthetician, who has attributed
a propositional cognitive value to art, Nelson Goodman. In parenthesis, let me adduce
that Goodman represents cognitive aesthetics in almost every meaning of the word. As
the very title of Languages of Art discloses, Goodman treats art as a language, or, more
accurately, as a symbol system. To be a work of art, x has to be a symbol and to be a
symbol, x has to refer. Goodman differentiates several modes of reference (denotation,
exemplification, expression) and let them run in different directions; all of them,
however, share the general function of establishing some kind of relationship between a
symbol and symbolized and by this way, they provide a content to a symbol. There are no
content-less works of art. Every work of art says something.
In opposition to Greene, Goodman does not think there ought to be a difference between
content of propositions provided by art on the one hand and by science on the other.
Cognitive efficacy is a merit sought by scientists as well as by artists. Escaping Greene's
confusion, Goodman, according to some critics, commits another one. Most famously,
Robert Nozick in his short review on Languages of Art, mocks at Goodman's account
saying that “a doggerel poem by Newton presenting a theory of universal gravitation
would have been, according to Goodman, a work of aesthetic merit.” (Nozick 1972, p.
785).
To answer this objection, it is necessary to introduce another meaning of cognitive
aesthetics – that which uses the second meaning of cognition regarding it as a process.
Cognitive Aesthetics (2)
When “cognitive science” is to be introduced, the first point mentioned is usually its
interdisciplinarity. Cognitive science is a cluster of many empirical and experimental
sciences (neuroscience, cognitive psychology, AI studies) plus philosophy of mind
seasoned by flavor of some humanities (anthropology, linguistics, literary studies).
Recently, aesthetics has been included in the list in virtue of neuro-scientists' interest in
aesthetic questions and aestheticians' attention to experiments undergone in sciences.
Yet being truly interdisciplinary is not an easy task to perform. This question in different
context has been recently addressed by Dan Sperber, who has distinguished cosmetic
from genuine interdisciplinarity. The former is based on “superficial similarities, for
instance identical words used with quite different meanings.” (Sperber 2004) I am afraid
we can find numerous examples of such superficially interdisciplinary approach in many
recent studies in cognitive aesthetics. As an example, I chose an experiment carried out
by Camilo J. Cela-Conde and his colleagues and published under a title: “Activation of
the prefrontal cortex in the human visual aesthetic perception.” (Cela-Conde, Marty,
Maestú, Ortiz, Munar, Fernández, Roca, Rosseló, Quesny, 2004)
The team studied the localization of brain areas activated during the visual aesthetic
perception by recording the brain activity of the participants asked to perform an
aesthetic judgment. Although I have many objections to the way they proceeded, I
confine myself to the most serious one. Their conception of aesthetic perception is
unacceptable since they ignored a history of the term in aesthetics, and, in particular,
they omitted a question of own activity of a perceiver – his abilities, awareness,
sensibility – all the aesthetic skills (traditionally called “taste”) needed to perform a
genuine aesthetic judgement. In other words, they did not consider aesthetic perception to
be cognitive at all. Thus “aesthetic perception”, term which should have mediated
connection between aesthetics and neuroscience, does not have an identical meaning in
the two fields and using it, “difference [between disciplines] is made worse, not
attenuated.” (Sperber 2004).
Naturally, the question follows: How does the genuine interdisciplinarity look like?
Sperber is less concrete on that. He conditions it by “a clear and detailed understanding of
the work done in other disciplines.” (ibid.) But to have such an insight means, according
to me, to find a common theme mirrored in different languages. This is what happened in
cognitive science, where various scientists, philosophers as well as artists have found a
common theme – which I put it rather dogmatically for the lack of space – that
mental/brain processes (perception, emotions, memory, problem-solving etc.) are
essentially cognitive, that is active capacities – and all of them should be “seen as various
reflections of one central process of cognitive functioning.” (Blumenthal 1977, p. 8).
Cognitive aesthetics (1 + 2)
Nowadays, young scholars whose work might be used as an illustration of genuine
interdisciplinarity between aesthetics and science are not so rare. Nevertheless, I shall
exemplify it using a theory of a rather old fellow, Nelson Goodman. The reason of my
choice is not only a fact that I owe him a defense against Nozick's objection, but also my
personal conviction that Nelson Goodman was the first genuinely cognitive aesthetician
whatsoever.
We left Goodman saying that each work of art is a symbol and being a symbol, it
necessarily refers to something else. I suppose the reference – be it denotation, expression
or exemplification – has always a form of a proposition “X is Y”, which expresses a kind
of knowledge brought by works of art (as well as by other symbols). The problem, as
Nozick pointed out, seems to be a confusion between a cognitive content of art and other
symbols, especially those used in scientific theories.
Goodman's destruction of a radical difference between arts and sciences does not imply
there is just one symbol system in the universe. On the contrary, there are many
syntactically and semantically different as well as similar symbol systems that occur
across the jointed cognitive realm of sciences and arts. An interpretation of every symbol
and evaluation of its cognitive efficacy presupposes its right classification, determination
of a symbol system, to which the symbol in question belongs. This highly stressed
element of Goodman's theory, which was overlooked by Nozick, is a place where
cognition as a process comes into play.
Thus to perceive a picture and to understand its cognitive content depends on our ability
to determine its symbol system, which, in Goodman's words, “involves making delicate
discriminations and discerning subtle relationships, identifying symbol systems and
characters within these systems...”. (Goodman XXX. p. 240) This kind of knowledge is
not propositional because it does not deal with contents; it is a cognition as a process.
Thus far, the explanation applies to interpretation of all symbols, be it an artwork or a
theory. Works of art, however, are such symbols whose system is not identifiable once
and for all: “Endless search is always required here [in literature] as in other arts to
determine precisely what is exemplified or expressed.” (ibid., p. 240) Infinite search –
infinite interpretation, if you want – is caused by interdependency of propositional
knowledge brought by an artwork and cognitive abilities needed two recognize it. To put
it bluntly, determining a symbol system the work belongs to leads us to grasp its
cognitive content; grasping its cognitive content influences our cognitive abilities and
provokes to search a symbol system again; re-identification of symbol system changes (or
clarifies) interpretation of cognitive content of the artwork...
So interpreted, Nelson Goodman opens up a door to cognitive science. I hope there will
be more and more scientists who dare to enter.