Aesthetics and Cognitive Science

Experiences of art involve exercise of ordinary cognitive and perceptual capacities but in unique ways. These two features of experiences of art imply the mutual importance of aesthetics and cognitive science. Cognitive science provides empirical and theoretical analysis of the relevant cognitive capacities. Aesthetics thus does well to incorporate cognitive scientific research. And aesthetics offers philosophical analysis of the uniqueness of the experience of art. Thus cognitive science does well to incorporate the explanations of aesthetics. This paper explores this general framework of expansionism: a research strategy that suggests that the explanatory goals and resources of both aesthetics and cognitive science should expand to include those of the other. Two relations are considered. First, what is the relation between aesthetics and more traditional cognitive science? And, second, what is the relation between aesthetics and new developments in cognitive science which de-emphasize mental representation and emphasize body and action? Be one an artist, viewer, or critic, experiences of art involve cognition. Cognition, like cognitive science, can be understood more or less narrowly. Most simply, cognition is just thought. Plausibly, this includes beliefs, knowledge, memory, attention, learning, reasoning and problem solving, language use, and perhaps motivational states like desire and intention. A bit more controversially, cognition might include (some of) sense perception. What cognitive science says about cognition is important for philosophical aesthetics. The explanatory implications might also run the other way. One might infer from the fact that there is an independent field of research, aesthetics and philosophy of art, that there is something special about the kinds of experiences—including cognitive ones—we have with artworks and aesthetic objects. Cognitive science has an obligation to accommodate these experiences (at least the cognitive ones) and does well to fulfil that obligation by attending to the philosophical work already done in this area. 1 1 Some philosophers distinguish ‘aesthetics’ from ‘philosophy of art’, where the first might refer to issues of beauty, value, and certain types of experiences of artworks and other objects. ‘Philosophy of art’, by contrast, is sometimes used to refer to general philosophical issues (often metaphysical and epistemological) concerning artworks and