MIND YOUR STEP!

A cognitive guide to art research

 

Unpublished

 

 

1. Introduction:


 

In my cultural environment we say that the human being[1] is the only animal that stumbles twice on the same stone. It certainly looks amazing that, after more than fifty years of cognitive studies, when at last some scientists[2] try to bridge the gap between art and science they repeat old misconceptions. These misconceptions are, to my knowledge, almost eradicated from cognitive linguistic studies on figures of speech, such as metaphor, metonymy, etc. (i.e., Lakoff (1993), Gibbs (1994), Sperber & Wilson (1986/95), etc. etc. and etc.). Nobody pretends in these fields that they are essential to Literature. On the contrary, they have been proved ordinary ways of human communication that some writers use, of course, in communicating their artistic messages. And yet, when we come to the visual arts, there seems to stand the same old stone in which people keep stumbling once and again. What really astonishes me is that many of these scientists interested in Literature are either neurobiologists or cognitivists, people who study the human brain or the human mind with strong causal constraints in their methodology. An yet, many (if not all) miss the first requirement that Noam Chomsky proposed more than forty years ago for a research to be considered scientific: the level of OBSERVATIONAL adequacy.

 

To what object/event are we referring to when we speak about  "art"? Are we talking about the (mental and/or social) behaviour of the artists when they engage in creation (?), or about the reactions of the beholders when they watch the results of that behaviour, or is it the quality of these results themselves that are at stake?

 

Let me try to show what I understand could be a way to start a cognitive (i.e., scientific) hypothesis about ART. I am, professionally, a linguist of the Chomskyan persuasion. Maybe this is the reason why I tend to view human social phenomena as deriving from human communication. My first idea, then, was to think art was a kind of communicative behaviour that might be describable (in some algorithmic way) and, later, explained (in the natural selection framework). Now, cognitive studies in human communication received, from my point of view, a tremendous benefit from the work of Sperber and Wilson (1986/95).

 

It became apparent to me that art could not be considered only a type of communicative behaviour, they way Sperber and Wilson masterly describe it. They make an exhaustive account of the effects communicative behaviour has in order to be relevant for people. But what is more important, they study the ways of the mind in directing this sort of behaviour. And this was the light that affected my turning point in considering the object/event "art". Let me give you a couple of linguistic examples to illustrate their idea. 

 

Suppose we have the following two statements:

 

1.               I will come tomorrow

2.               John has always been very intelligent

 

Ever since Austin and Searle, we know that (1) can be a promise or a threat, among other things, according to the context in which it is processed. Austin and Searle said it could  be understood as two different speech acts. But, although they explained how one could distinguish them, they never tried to explain why they were different. Anyway, it was a beginning.

 

Ever since Grice, we know that (2) can mean what it says (i.e, that John has a positive mental quality) or imply the opposite (that John is some kind of mug) if we are able to use the flouting of the maxim "be true" in this particular case for communicative purposes. Again, Grice did never explain why this happened that way, although the importance of the context was mentioned here as well.

 

Sperber and Wilson are cognitive researchers (which, neither Austin, Searle, nor Grice were) and so they describe, not only how those two messages and many others work like they do, but also why indeed. I am not going to go into all the details, but only in the essential part of the argument. For Sperber and Wilson, we are able to treat information in different ways. This ability is what they call attitude. So, humans have different attitudes that change the way we process incoming information. Thus, in example (2), if the contextual information is for instance, the idea that John, who is already forty, still believes in Santa Klaus, the apparent contradiction is solved by processing (2) as if it came with an implicit injunction "process this message with an ironic attitude". They then explain the selective value of some of these attitudes.

 

I propose to consider "art", from a cognitive point of view as an (or a series of) attitude(s) in Sperber & Wilson's terms. The very same process that changes the above message meanings into different speech acts or senses is basically at the origin of what we call art. Only in this way, mind you, can one explain why we are able to perceive art in a broom hanging from the walls of a modern art museum, or in a war report (my favourite example!) -as Caesar's De Bellum Civile. It all depends on your attitude to it. There is a very poignant example of this in a De Sica film of the early fifties, Miracolo a Milano, in which the protagonist, Toto, convinces his very poor neighbors of one of the derelict slums of that northern Italian city to gather and watch the sun go down as an artistic performance. He succeeds so well that when the sun disappears, everybody starts applauding with great relish. You need not have a "peak shift law"[3] to explain this kind of artistic experience, though I am sure this effect may appear in many examples of art, as anything else might!

 

2. Take my hand, I’m a stranger in Paradise:

 

I wish to believe that you accept my hand in order to walk safely through our present landscape. In other words, Let us assume that we have agreed on the idea that the word "art" refers to a way of processing information (i.e., an attitude). It is something mechanic in the sense that our mind device is put in a certain state that gives the information (to be communicated or to be received) a certain hue. If you understand what an "ironic hue" might be in the above interpretation of assertion (2), you should have no difficulty in seeing what I am trying to say. Think of the "artistic hue" one may invest in the processing of the information we receive from, say, an urinal placed in a certain context by Duchamp.

 

Now, some people get extremely worked up when one mentions that art can be reduced to an attitude -which they immediately brand as "aesthetic attitude", probably quite rightly in the light of our traditional ideas about art. They retort that this is an elitist misconception that does not take the historical evolution of the social values into account. Art, they say, did not mean the same to Cromagnon cave people, to Egyptians of the Third Dynasty, to Medieval Church Art, Renaissance, etc., through to modern times.

 

When receiving this sort of rebuke, I try to point out that I only wanted to find an external object/event which could be the concrete referent that would prevent us from discussing totally different mental representations. I suppose we all agree that art, as a mental representation, cannot be the same for a professional painter, an art dealer, a art critic, an art amateur, and so on! How do we find a common ground on which to stand in order to advance in our research? It might well be that, in the end, attitudes (i.e., distinct information processing possibilities) are not valid as a starter. It is also possible, that some researches, of which I have no knowledge, have proved that the object/event we call "art" is something else. Of course, if they have proved it, they must have been through all the steps Chomsky deemed necessary. Namely, the DESCRIPTIVE one, where the (possible) object/event is shown at work, and the EXPLANATORY one, where the reasons for it being as it is are discovered.

 

In this paper, I am not going to get to the last requirement, for its obvious length limits. What interests me is to sketch a likely guide that prevents us from stumbling on the same old stone.  It may prove to be a bad guide if, in trying to mind our step, we fall over the ridge of the mountain. But then, if we did find a new way? ... Wow!!... Let me take the chance!

 

3. Representations:

 

Many researchers have agreed that art and language are basically ways of communication among human beings. These ways distinguish us from other living creatures, even the most near ones in the phylogenetic scale. I think this is an overstatement: language, at least, is basically a way to categorize and represent reality in our minds. However, it is a very abstract way of doing it, i.e., with propositions. I understand that a proposition at this level is a mental representation in which the relationship between its constituent elements is not intrinsic. It has to be extrinsically shown. For instance: [The room were I am working RIGHT NOW is SQUARE and the computer IS ON TOP of a table which is AT THE LEFT HAND CORNER of the room NEAR a window that opens INTO a terrace, etc.]. I take it that before we were able to construct these extrinsic relationships, humans (and, I am sure, some animals) were able to have mental representations were the relationships between their constituent elements were rather similar to those in the real world, and needed not to be shown explicitly -like in a photograph, more or less. We had (and have) the possibility of making mental images of objects we perceive with our senses. So, maybe, mental image making is another more primitive way of conceptualizing reality for survival reasons.

 

Let me speculate: those two ways of processing information are basic or primary human attitudes. The one that takes mental pictures from the world is phenomenally felt as being the real thing. If I showed you a picture of my room or, better, if you would come and make a mental image of it, your feeling would be that you know how this room is. Much better than if I explained it to you by means of even more propositions. As this way of processing (this attitude) puts you, a human subject, in contact with (what you perceive is) Reality with a capital R, I will call it the subjective attitude. Thus, contrary to common held views about "subjective" impressions, I propose that they are the closest way to approach Reality as (we feel/think) it is.

 

On the other hand, propositions are felt/thought not to be the real thing. They are linguistic objects we create which, in some manner, are considered to stand between Reality and us. I often wonder why people pretend that objective knowledge -ie., the result of this way of processing- gives[4] us Reality[5]. It doesn't: it describes and explains it. It even may create a model (another object!), mental or otherwise, that functions as reality does. But it can never be the real thing. As far as science is an instance of this kind of processing, it can never, by definition, be "the Truth"(whatever that is).

 

I said these two attitudes might well be considered basic or primary. In order to be primary, however, we need to have secondary ones. What could they possibly be?

 

4. Here we go!

 

At this point, I am afraid I will have to be a little (?) pedant for a while and develop some ideas that I have adapted from Horton (1988), and from Pratt (1978). Can I ask you to bear with me, though?

 

Perception does not take in all the objects/facts that really exist out there. It makes a selection of their features, i.e., it re-presents some of the most relevant ones. In other words, it presents them again in a different place (in the mind) and in a different mode (as images). It then causes the organism to escape or approach, as the case might be, whenever these represented features appear again in the world environment of that organism. In order to do that, the organism must have a way to relate the representations to the courses of action required. I may be going a bit to hasty, for I want to propose one likely way to do this, namely, the process called inferencing. And if you allow my haste, I'll add that this process might well have started the propositional attitude we mentioned above with the following propositional command: if X, then Y (where X and Y stand for individual or a series of objects/actions)[6]. Inferences of this type would create their own representations; that is, representations that would not have originated in the perceptual processing of stimuli but in the inner workings of the device (which, from now on, I will call mind).

 

There is in principle no reason why these indirect representations could not be reprocessed along with the first type of representations (i.e., images), doing inferences with them and ever creating more and more abstract and indirect representations in the long run. But there is indeed a problem here: the tremendous power of the mind to create indirect representations could be a hindrance rather than an asset for survival. If your mind invents all sorts of possible representations with no limit at all, how can you react when real danger is near? In order to get selected for possible survival, a mind with this power has to find some sort of constraints here.

 

Let me summarize:

 

A)                                                      Human beings inherited a mind that was able to process representations coming from objects of the world that could be taken in by the senses. The results were used in inferencing courses of action that enhanced survival. There were natural limits to this way of processing (i.e., to this way of thinking): those of the species. We cannot think as salmons or as elephants! So, in this first type of thinking we have SPECIFIC limits that constrain its power.

 

B)                                   As human beings developed a way to create endless representations, there was a problem to solve: which were the representations to be used and which should be avoided? Being a gregarious lot, the first move was to put our destiny in the hands (or, better, in the minds) of acknowledged "wise folk". They decided which limits could not be transgressed. We might then say that the GROUP set the constraints to the production of "valid" representations. If one group with one set of representations achieved better results than another, it was clear, was it not, that its representations were the only worth to retain. The others were branded as pagans and had to be destroyed.

 

C)                                   However, this sort of group constraints did not solve many of the problems humans went on experiencing. Wise folk became powerful folk and did not want to relinquish power. Many representations that would work were considered evil and were prohibited, while other patently hopeless were kept in order to maintain law and order. Individuality emerged slowly in Western History and individuals who tried to speculate with some hope of success started  setting constraints to their thinking. The problem here was again that every individual could set different limits to her/his representational power. Little by little, some individuals reached a compromise: the production of representations should be constrained by rigid principles which would guide the thinking -not the representations themselves, as in B). That is to say, the limits have to be set (consciously) by INDIVIDUALS[7].

 

Some people call (A) thinking, "common sense", (B) "traditional thinking" and (C) "scientific thought". However, to avoid the strong emotional connotations in those terms, let me call them primary, secondary and tertiary thinking (processes)[8]. Of course, it should be clear that it is impossible to escape the primary type of thought; it is very difficult to get rid of some of the effects of secondary thinking; and it is terribly hard to follow exactly the requirements of tertiary thinking. It should not be surprising, then to find many (too many) flaws in even the tightest tertiary thinking processes[9].

 

We turn now to the primary attitude which depicts the world in a direct way inside our minds. In the present sate of our evolution, the human mind might well function as Brown (1999: 146) says it does, namely:

 

An individual may perceive an object but fail to recognize it, sort objects in categories without being able to identify them [...]. The finding that meaning can be disrupted yet remain submerged in object representation gives credence to the notion that conceptual feeling is an antecedent phase (my italics).

 

If I understand this rightly, it would mean that, before perception proper, we need to know how the perceived object fits some category or other in order to be able to represent it in our mind. Now, there might be two ways in which this could indeed be true of our mental functioning. One would be to believe that our mind comes pre-wired in many respects. Therefore, we have an innate way to process the stimuli we perceive, which is different from the one ants presumably have -as it was mentioned before. This possibility looks quite probable to me[10] and, once accepted, seems indeed inescapable.

 

There is another way to process incoming information. Not all stimuli are useful to the organism at a given time. Only the relevant ones. There has been a lot of talk about relevance[11], but, to my knowledge, only Sperber & Wilson (1986/95) have described its functioning in an understandable manner. Information is relevant if it produces contextual effects. These contextual effects are the result of the interrelation between a certain incoming stimulus and the representations that exist already in the mind[12]. If the mind can find no such relations, the incoming stimulus is not processed as information and disappears (from consciousness, at least!). Is that way of ordering the acquisition of information inescapable too, I wonder?

 

Let me suppose it could be avoided and still become useful information for the individual.  On what grounds do I propose this possibility? It seems to me that the newborn baby does not have the possibility of a representational context of this sort and, still, it does acquire useful information that, little by little, develops into a relevance-giving mental context. This could also be said (perhaps with less fundament) of another moment in the life of individual human beings: the mating process. Is not the so-called "falling in love at first sight" something very similar to process information without using mental representational contexts? (S)he knows that everything is against the beloved and yet...

 

It seems that this way of processing incoming information can be trained. All mystical schools, from our Christian Tradition through the Muslim and over to the Buddhist one, have ways, physical or otherwise, in which the mental context is washed away in order to let incoming information flow in its pure (?!) form, or so they say. They call this experience "illumination" and it seems it gives you a sort of elation that is deeply desirable.

 

5. Light mysticism, indeed!

 

It is amazing to notice that many authors consider that art tries basically to produce a similar sort of elation in people -as it were, a light version of the mystical experience. However, the way they postulate it seems an exaggerated wishful goal. I really doubt that many people enter in trance when beholding a given stimulus as an artistic experience. However, I do not deny that this sort of attitude could enter in a, yet not well described, way as one of the possible sub-attitudes which would constitute the overall artistic attitude[13].

 

An added problem with this light mystical attitude lies more in my approach than in the (un)likely illuminating experience. What happens in the case of an entirely propositional art, like Literature (with a capital L), you may ask? If the gist of this attitude is to process the incoming stimuli in a (super-) direct way, how come that an entirely indirect processing, like interpreting propositions, achieves this quality? Or does it?

 

There is a way out, of course. There always is. If we accept the Relevance Theory approach to human communication, it is clear that contextual effects are also achieved in our communicative interactions. In fact, according to the theory, the individual representations that we try to make manifest to others need to follow the same principle as any other type of information. They need to be relevant. Let me sketch how: humans interpret linguistic expressions in two (almost synchronic) steps, as it were. The first is a computational process called decoding by means of which linguistic expressions become meaningful (probably in a way akin to the one proposed by generative linguists). The second process is an inferencing sort of computation which uses the meanings obtained through decoding as an initial premise; the meaning of this premise is then put in relation with further premises which are mentally represented (i.e., a context); the conclusion reached creates a relevant sense for the occasion. This sense is what we call the communicated message.

 

Now, if by way of disrupting this relevance seeking process, we would be able to force receptors into creating their own sense, we should have come very close to another direct manner of processing incoming information. In this case, sound waves in an apparent mutually manifest code that, once decoded, cannot be used as premise to any inferencing activity. As I said before, I doubt this to be indeed the normal case in written art. But a light version of it might. For instance, if what is conveyed is not a unique meaning, but a combination of weak manifest representations, the receptor must decide to elect a more likely one or, in the better instances of Literature, let her/his mind wander to and fro. In this way he will be creating a dynamic result (a dynamic sense) that can never be totally fixed and may therefore be considered a new experience.

 

Beware! This basic uncertainty in probable senses appears very often in (so-called) everyday conversation and nobody ever thinks of it as Literature. My only aim here was to show that, even in propositional (i.e., indirect) processing, a direct way could also be conceived and put to use as part of the subjective attitude. It must be clear, though, that the artistic attitude has to be described by the functioning of more subcomponents in order to be of any interest in defining what it might amount to.

 

6 Communication, at last.

 

We have silently made a leap: from considerations of individual information processing to the actual way of communicating it in social interactions. Note that communication was not as essential for starting our description as some (I, for one) inform it to be. However, this doesn't mean that it never enters into the picture. It sure does, thereby making art a social phenomenon, like public language.

 

It is at this point that a cogntivization of some of Pratt's (1977) insights, who was working in the Speech Act Theory frame with a touch of Gricean pragmatics here and there -certainly not a cognitive approach- could be very useful indeed. She thought that the essential felicity conditions of an artistic illocutionary act included what she called the "tellability condition" and its likely side effect, the "elaborativity condition". Let me quote her:

 

Assertions whose relevance[14] is tellability must represent states of affairs that are held to be unusual, contrary to expectations, or otherwise problematic [...]. In making an assertion whose relevance is tellability, a speaker is not only reporting but also verbally displaying a state of affairs, inviting his addressees to join him in contemplating it, evaluating it, and responding to it (p.136).

 

Let us convert this essential felicity condition into a displaying attitude that immediately accounts for any way of processing information which, as it were, obliges us to take the frame along with the picture. As the ironic attitude did, this way of processing forces us to take in consideration mental representations that were not needed to interpret the basic unframed representation. Indeed they change our perception of it -a war report becomes a work of Literature, and the scribbling of a chimp, or even the result of an erosion process (i.e., an "objet trouvé") become artistic paintings or sculptures. This way of processing sets our mind in a state that permits it to seek some kind of value. If we then describe values as public representations shared by people of a community, we could also trace their origin, success, and disappearance. That is, they change according to many social factors which we do not need to analyze here. Suffice it to say that some are disseminated consciously through explicit education, while others spread in an unconscious manner[15].

 

Elaborativity, according to Pratt, is a possible side effect of the tellability condition:

 

"Informativeness", "perspicuity", "brevity" and "clarity" are not the criteria by which we determine the effectiveness of a display text, though there are limits on how much elaboration we will find worth it. [...] Indeed, one might say that what literary works chiefly do is elaborate on the states of affairs they posit (pp. 147/8).

 

Although she is not clearly stumbling on the same old stone yet again, she is very close to it, I am afraid. It is, of course, true that elaborativity is a possible aspect in which we can fix value and share it with our peers by adopting a displaying attitude. But, then, anything (let me stress, ANYTHING) in the stimulus can be so processed and be made into an object/event worth watching and evaluating.

 

Perhaps, if we should want to be more precise in order to distinguish art from other interesting and valuable experiences, the subjective attitude would be more central than the elaborativity condition. Some artists do try to present their emotions (or, at least their concepts colored by one emotion or other) in a direct way. Beholders, then, might get a glimpse at these emotions and feel they can value them according to their standards. But in order to understand what I am trying to say right now, one should be able to describe emotions in a clear way, a thing I have not done yet.

 

Steven Pinker (1997) believes emotions are devices that determine which are the objectives of an organism at any given moment. No organism can accomplish all its goals simultaneously; organisms need to work on a unique goal in every situation. Once triggered by the appropriate circumstances, emotions fire a series of sub-goals and sub-sub-goals that constitute our mental operations we have basically inherited in order to survive and reproduce.

 

Perhaps, and as many people believe, art is really centered on displaying and valuing emotions of all types. I doubt this to be true, in general, but let's assume it is so for the sake of the argument. Let me also assume that we accept, if only for a moment, the notion of emotion that Pinker has described above. Why are those devices so valuable as an object of display? Do they work in the same manner in processing information which is not framed in order to be displayed as they do when they are presented as objects to value? I think the answer here is clearly "no". Fear, for one thing, seems to be a strong emotion that prepares us to achieve the goal of deliverance from danger. But, if anything, it is never valued positively as things normally go. We prefer not to experiment this emotion and avoid circumstances where it may be indispensable. And yet, if it is processed with the displaying attitude, it may be valued in a positive manner, i., e., it may be considered enjoyable, indeed! An interesting theory of art should be able to explain this phenomenon.

 

I have, as yet, no clear idea on how this could be done in the highly constrained framework I am trying to sketch in this paper. Other things remain to be stated, though.

 

7. Materialism as a personal limit:

 

In this preliminary guide, I have loosely described what I consider a subjective and a displaying attitude are bound to do in our minds to make us experience ART. As you may have gathered, I do think, however, that (my) tertiary thinking should be further constrained in a materialist framework. That is to say, a description of a cognitive phenomenon (as I think art really is) should have a tight materialist methodology to be of any use. For the time being, I think the three levels proposed by David Marr could be a good starting point. Let me summarize them in order to show how this research should be extended.

 

The first thing we should be able to show is what kind of movements (i.e., of computations) should be done in order to convert external stimuli into “artistic” representations by going through the two processing attitudes I proposed in a rather impressionistic manner. This is a tough bone, I warn you!

 

The second step should be (at least, apparently) more manageable: it must explicit the representations that are considered to be “artistic” in a certain culture. If we were members of an African tribe with an oral culture, we would probably represent a person’s name as a likely artistic representation, while the thing we call “theatre” would never be postulated as a candidate. And so on!

 

The third level is very seldom analyzed in research about art. What are the implements that make us approach or process given stimuli from the world as artistic (museums, books, etc.). How have cognitive qualities been adapted to material objects to facilitate our processing? Would I have had an illumination if I had found Rothko’s pictures in a dust bin?

 

There is a lot to be done in all these respects in order to have a clear picture of what Art (with a capital first letter) really amounts to for human beings.

 

But, as I said at the beginning, in order to achieve interesting results on this topic, one should agree on some basic constraints within a likely cognitive theory of art. It is better to try and do this first move instead of attempting to describe and explain unrelated bits and pieces of so-called artistic intentions and/or reactions. I don't pretend to have hit upon the theory that would help in organizing unrelated discoveries. I have only tried to offer a very tentative guide to avoid falling in the same old stones.

 

8. The same in pictures:

 

I have the odd sensation that my ideas are too obscure for people to grasp at first. I get all sorts of unexpected reactions against things that I think I never implied by what I said. Let me then sum up my goals in a picture so that you may know what they really are.

 

1)                        This paper is not my proposal for a theory of art. It is a much more humble attempt: I have only tried to show the possibility of building a framework.

 

2)    A framework (which does not have to be the one outlined here) is a place in which people place their findings so that they might make sense as a whole. I do not wish to compare my enterprise with the one Chomsky started for language fifty odd years ago. But let me remind you that his first model, the one where so-called deep structure went from the syntactic base component into the so-called semantic component, whereas surface structure went from the syntactic transformational component to the phonological one, was abandoned many years ago and underwent several modifications (like our computer programs do, for instance). But that old diagram has helped a lot of researchers to place their findings in a useful context.

 

3)    As there is only one God, Chomsky, and I am his prophet (at least in this part of the world), I will try another very simple diagram to visualize what I had in mind  above. That is, it is not a finished model (i.e., a fully working abstract machine of the Turing kind) but a mere blueprint for constructing one.

 

4)    The verbal communication model is not presented in full here. I propose the Relevance Theory one.

 

 

SCHEMATIC VIEW OF MY PROPOSAL

 

 

 

 


A living organism

 


    in order to survive and reproduce

 

    needs some sort of device(s)

    that make contact with the World

 


     A human being

 

has two such devices:

 

 


A perceptual device

with which she notices the

relevant features of the World

 


A representational device

which further abstracts perceived relevant features and places them in the mind.

 


Intrinsic                                                         Extrinsic

representations                        ?                     representations

i.e., images                       (inferencing?)        i.e., propositions

 


                   

                    This gives way to                                           This gives way to

                    a SUBJECTIVE                                              an OBJECTIVE     

                    attitude                                                           attitude

                   

[MYSTIC experience]

PRIMARY THINKING

a)      Sensed objects/events

b)      Inferencing rule

c)      Specific constraints

SECONDARY THINKING

a)      Sensed and imagined objects/events

b)      Inferencing rule

c)      Group constraints

TERTIARY THINKING

a)      sensed and imagined objects/events

b)      Materially restricted inferencing rule

c)      Individual constraints

 

 

 

 

 


    The above private representations can be made public by

 

communicating  them

 


Non verbally                                                            Verbally

 


Pointing                 Making                            Oral                                 Writing Showing               

Showing

objects in                            behaviour                                                                  (Relevance Theory)

the world                             and/or the                                                                                       

                                             results thereof

 


                                                                       Displaying attitude

                                                           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


         

F  I  N  A  L                  O  U  T  P  U  T

 

 

 

REFERENCES

 

Brown, J. W. (1999): "On aesthetic perception" in J.C.S. Vol 6, pp.144-60

 

Gibbs, R.W. (1994): The poetics of Mind, New York: Cambridge University Press

 

Hollis, M. & S Lukes (1988): Rationality and Relativism, Oxford, Basil Blackwell

 

Horton, R. (1988): "Tradition and modernity revisited" in Hollis & Lukes, eds.

 

Journal of Consciousness Studies. Controversies in Science and the Humanities. Vol 6 (1999) June/July.

 

Lakoff, G. (1993): "The contemporary theory of metaphor" in Ortony, ed., pp., 202-251.

 

Ortony, A. (1993): Metaphor and Thought, New York: Cambridge University Press (2nd edition)

 

Pratt. M-L (1977):

 

Ramachandran, V.S. & W. Hirstein (1999): "A neurological theory of aesthetic experience", in J.C.S. Vol.6. (pp.15-51)

 

Sperber, D. & D. Wilson (1986/1995): Relevance. Communication and Cognition, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

 

 

 



[1] We really say man, but ours is considered a  macho culture by others, as if they were not!

 

[2] See, for instance, Journal of Consciousness Studies, "Art and the Brain", June/July, Vol 6,  1999

[3] Ramachandran and Hirstein, 1999

[4] Antonio Guijarro: personal communication.

 

[5] If you ask my students, as I often do, what the difference between ART and SCIENCE is, there is always a unanimous answer: Art, they say, is subjective (i.e., it concerns our feelings and emotions), it cannot be proved and, therefore, does not give us knowledge about the real world. On the other hand, science is objective knowledge of reality for it allows us to prove its truth in a clear way. I take it this idea is widely accepted in our culture at large. I hope my departure from some of its implications become as clear to my potential readers as they do for my students at the end of my course. I agree, though, this might be a very pretentious wish indeed!

 

[6] This might be pushing things too far, for then all living organisms that are able to learn from experience would be capable of (some kind of) propositional attitude. I am not sure whether this is a correct assumption. I will use the old nominalist trick and change the name of the "propositional representation" to the more general one of "indirect representation". In any case, I don’t see how this could destroy my argument in any substantial way. One can always point to evolutionary ways that finally set this mode into our human processing possibilities. That is exactly what I try to do impressionistically in the following paragraph.

[7] Chomsky's three requirements are a case in point. So are Mayr's (1982), which I will mention later

 

[8]  As Horton (1988) does.

 

[9]I believe (and so I tell my students) that every type of thinking is a good way for our mind to progress. They should, therefore, not despise any of our computational possibilities, for all of them enlarge our intellectual horizon in one way or another. What I tell them should be avoided is to pretend one is doing one kind of thinking, say, the tertiary one, while one is indeed functioning in the secondary mode.

 

[10] See, among others, Tooby & Cosmides (1992) and Pinker (1997).

 

[11] For instance, Grice (1975)

 

[12] This is what we call "context".

 

[13] In fact, although I consider myself an art admirer, I can only recollect two instances of a similar experience in my life. One was in one of my visits to the Tate Gallery. I had been enjoying all the modern paintings that I already knew, when, all of a sudden, I came into a big hall where huge canvasses in which the black ground contained red squares with uncertain edges and viceversa struck my eye. It was as if I had received an insult from the painter. I couldn't bear it and I began to call him names -luckily in a mental language! I left completely furious with that so-called "artist". I went on visiting the museum and then, slowly, I returned to the big hall and... I stayed there for two hours! It had taken three quarters of an hour for my mind to accept and categorize the message I processed subjectively. Since then, Mark Rothko is one of my favorite modern painters, but, alas, I have never again had this illumination (?) with his otherwise enjoyable work. Something very similar happened to me again with a piece of music, Officium, by Jan Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble. But nevermore!

[14] She is here pointing to Grice's maxim of relation (which he stated but never described), Be relevant! This social injunction is not (repeat, NOT) a cognitive principle like the one proposed by Sperber & Wilson -though many people have thought so.

 

[15] For instance, I knew somebody who did not care about reading to give a sense to his life. He was a well-to-do electronic engineer with a very cultivated wife who, on the contrary, spent her whole life among books and looking for cultural novelties. In the fifties, a performance of Beckett's Waiting for Godot took place. The lady took her husband to see it, but he became so worked up with the “meaningless gibber” that he left in the middle of the performance. She stayed and enjoyed it enormously. Thirty years after, although he had still never read a single line, another performance of the same play was offered and they both returned to see it. My father really enjoyed the play this time. Moreover, he couldn't believe my mother when she tried to make him aware of how he reacted the first time. How did the meaning of Beckett's play percolate into my father's mind, if not in an unconscious manner?