Cognitive Ecology

Morton P. Friedman, Edward C. Carterette

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 1996
• Print ISBN: 9780121619664
• eBook ISBN: 9780080529271
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Cognitive Ecology identifies the richness of input to our sensory evaluations, from our cultural heritage and philosophies of aesthetics to perceptual cognition and judgment. Integrating the arts, humanities, and sciences, Cognitive Ecology investigates the relationship of perception and cognition to wider issues of how science is conducted, and how the questions we ask about perception influence the answers we find. Part One discusses how issues of the human mind are inseparable from the culture from which the investigations arise, how mind and environment co-define experience and actions, and how culture otherwise influences cognitive function. Part Two outlines how philosophical themes of aesthetics have guided psychological research, and discuss the physical and aesthetic perception of music, film, and art. Part Three presents an overview of how the senses interact for sensory evaluation.

The Arts

CHAPTER 3

Confluence and Divergence in Empirical Aesthetics, Philosophy, and Mainstream Psychology

Gerald C. Cupchik; Andrew S. Winston

Gustav Fechner (1876/1978) hoped that empirical aesthetics would complement, not replace, philosophical aesthetics. But during the early part of this century, North American psychologists became uncomfortable with “speculative” philosophical analyses of art (see Berlyne, 1974) and philosophical discourse in general (see Toulmin & Leary, 1985). From the psychologist’s perspective, 2500 years of philosophical debate failed to yield agreement on the nature of aesthetic objects or aesthetic processes. Philosophical conceptions of art based on imitation of the world, expression of emotion, interplay of forms, satisfying aesthetic experience, institutional practices of the art world, or family resemblance appear to have little in common. In the context of such discord, it is not surprising that psychologists would seize on operationalism and might sidestep philosophical debate by declaring that “art is whatever you say it is” (Martindale, 1990, p. 17).

Nevertheless, Western philosophical traditions have provided two interrelated themes that reverberate in the psychological aesthetics of the present day: “disinterest” and “unity in diversity.” The concept of disinterest, and the related concept of aesthetic distance, defined aesthetic experience as a separate realm in which everyday concerns and issues external to the object were excluded. The concept of unity in diversity, as a definition of beauty, implied that aesthetic objects are set apart from everyday objects. These themes provide a fundamental tension between theories that rely on basic psychological processes to explain aesthetic experience (e.g., see Child, 1978) and those that postulate unique features of aesthetic activity.

This chapter is divided into three major sections. In Section I we will briefly sketch the history of these two philosophical themes, and in Section II we will illustrate how they have guided psychological research in aesthetics. Section III of the chapter will explore the relationship between mainstream analyses of perception and cognition in everyday life and conceptualizations of aesthetic process derived from scientific aesthetics.

I ORIGINS OF UNITY IN DIVERSITY AND DISINTEREST

For both Plato and Aristotle, the important characteristic of art was its mimetic or imitative aspect. By virtue of mimesis, art was seen as a relatively inferior techne or craft in that the artist produced only imitations of objects, while a shoemaker, in contrast, produced a genuine shoe. For Plato, beauty derived from ideal proportions in complex objects and unity, regularity and simplicity in simple objects. Aristotle emphasized order, symmetry, and arrangement in his conception of beauty. The concerns of modern aesthetics are anticipated in Plotinus’s (A.D. 205–270) analysis of beauty as an independent philosophical topic.

Plotinus rejected the traditional notion that beauty consisted of symmetry or harmony of the parts of a work, and instead proposed that beauty was a singular, instantly perceivable quality that is apprehended by a special faculty. He emphasized the role of the imagination and expression of the artist in the production of beauty. Moreover, he used the notion of “unity in diversity” in his discussion of how the architect finds beauty when he sees “his inner idea stamped upon the mass of exterior matter, the indivisible exhibited in diversity” (Plotinus ?/1969, p. 58). Before Plotinus, the theme of unity in diversity, as expressed in the pre-Socratic thought of Heraclitus (e.g., see Copplestone, 1946; Kirk, 1954), was used to characterize a fundamental feature of the world and not of beauty in particular. Plotinus had a very substantial impact on Renaissance thought through the translations of Marsilio Ficino in the late 1400s.

The modern use of the word aesthetics, and the conception of aesthetics as a separate branch of philosophy, developed rapidly in the eighteenth century. Although Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury’s (1711/1964) aesthetic theory has historical precedence, Baumgarten’s (1750) work marks the beginnings of aesthetics as a formal discipline. In the mid-1700s there was an explosion of scholarly production on aesthetics, art history, and art criticism, such as the influential works of Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Winkelmann, Denis Diderot, and Gotthold Lessing (see Barasch, 1990). It was during this period that the themes of unity in diversity and disinterest developed through both the British and Continental philosophical traditions.

Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury (1711/1964) was one of the earliest British philosophers to distinguish between “disinterested” enjoyment of something for its own sake, and “interested” enjoyment of anticipated benefits. Thus, one could derive pleasure either from the sheer visual beauty of a mountain lake or from the anticipated ownership and use of the lake. According to Dickie (1988), Shaftesbury saw no necessary conflict between interested and disinterested enjoyment, although the desire to possess might sometimes interfere with the appreciation of beauty.

Shaftesbury’s disciple, Francis Hutcheson (1725), articulated a more fully developed psychological theory of the experience of beauty and moved aesthetic theory toward a sharper division between aesthetics and everyday life. To define beauty, Hutcheson (1725) employed the notion of “uniformity amidst variety”:

The Figures which excite in us the Ideas of Beauty seem to be those in which there is Uniformity amidst Variety.… what we call Beautiful in Objects, to speak in the Mathematical Style, seems to be in a compound Ratio of Uniformity and Variety: so that where the Uniformity of Bodys is equal, the Beauty is as the Variety; and where the Variety is equal, the Beauty is as the Uniformity. (p. 17)

In Hutcheson’s theory, the experience of beauty involves a special sense or faculty (taste), a special criterion, and a special, disinterested pleasure that results.

Kant (1790/1914) also used the concept of disinterested satisfaction in which the existence (or nonexistence) of the object, our subjective appetites (e.g., thirst), or any other practical concerns played no role. In contrast to Hutcheson, Kant rejected the notion of a separate faculty of taste that operated subsequent to the ordinary cognitive faculties. For Kant, the experience of beauty involved the same cognitive faculties as used in the experience of ordinary objects, but with beautiful objects these same faculties would operate in a different way.

This difference lies in Kant’s difficult concept of “free play” of the cognitive faculties. In ordinary experience, we attempt to understand the object before us in terms of specific concepts (e.g., “dog” or “sunset”) and rules in a process termed determinant judgment. In the experience of beauty, there is no specific concept and the imagination engages in a cognitive game with flexible rules, searching for a satisfying structure and order in the object and thereby yielding pleasure. This process is “reflective judgment,” in which we imagine “the as yet unsensed, or as yet insufficiently sensed, portions of the object and how they are related to what has been sensed so far” (Barker, 1988, p. 82). For Dickie (1988), the important feature of Kant’s position is that the beautiful object, when contemplated in this way, is detached from the world. Thus Kant’s position forms the basis for what came to be called “aesthetic attitude” theories.

Schopenhauer (1818/1969) elaborated Kantian notions in such a way that a genuine theory of “aesthetic attitude” nearly emerges. For Schopenhauer, aesthetic consciousness is a rare state that is achieved with difficulty. Everyday consciousness is in the service of the will, but if the intellect can temporarily subdue the will, a state of objective, disinterested detachment can be achieved in which Platonic ideas can be suitably contemplated. If any trace of “interest” (e.g., the desire to own) intrudes, then this rare state of aesthetic consciousness will be disrupted. Furthermore, the representational or mimetic aspects of a work of art have no place in this special kind of contemplation. Thus, the Greek tradition emphasizing mimesis, previously incorporated into the notion of special aesthetic experience, is now expunged and the separation between aesthetic and everyday processing is complete.

The concept of “psychical distance,” introduced by Bullough (1912) in the British Journal of Psychology owes much to the Kantian tradition of “disinterest.” For Bullough, “distance is obtained by separating the object and its appeal from one’s own self, by putting it out of gear with practical needs and ends” (p. 461). He proposed that distance, as a process, had two aspects: an inhibitory process that suppressed everyday cognition and a facilitative process that fostered “elaboration of the experience” in which subtle, hitherto unnotic...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright page
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Mind and Culture
• The Arts
• Sensory Evaluation
• Index