Norms of Cultivation

Aisthesis, 2024

This article explores the role of habits in shaping aesthetic normativity. It asserts that standards of value within aesthetic agency are not immutable, objective criteria detached from personal engagement in appreciation and creation, nor should they be reduced to mere individual subjective pleasure. The former stance fails to consider the essential expressivity and creativity at the heart of aesthetic practices, while the latter overlooks the normative framework that underpins the significance, validity, and quality of aesthetic agency. This framework is represented in the established rules of taste, the need for aesthetic education, and the dynamics of aesthetic disagreements. Consequently, effective aesthetic normativity requires a balance: practices must be organized structurally around values that are, to a certain degree, communally shared, yet flexible enough to incorporate the expressive creativity of individual appreciation. This article contributes a nuanced explanation of aesthetic normativity by elucidating the impact of habits on aesthetic practices.

Aisthesis, 2024

It is often assumed that habits and aesthetic experiences are fundamentally and irreconcilably opposed. Typically, aesthetic experiences are considered to necessitate non-habitual behavior and to provoke unexpected mental states and extraordinary affective sensations. This article challenges this assumption. Moving beyond potential structural analogies between habitual behavior and aesthetic experience, I focus on two key aspects. Firstly, I argue that the experience of beauty and aesthetic experiences in general actually depend on certain habits, specifically those engaged in aesthetic agency and appreciation, which I term «aesthetic habits». Secondly, I propose that habits have an aesthetic origin, as they virtuously evolve and adapt to their environment. This transformative capacity, along with their ability to resonate with specific situational demands, embodies an improvisational quality that should be encouraged, reflecting the inherently unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of aesthetic experience.

2022

This paper is a preliminary attempt to bring to the fore some questions and issues regarding the role of habits in aesthetics. Indeed, much attention has recently been given to habits across a wide range of fields of inquiry: philosophers turn to the concept to investigate its significance to the historical development of Western thought; neuroscientists look into the role that habits play in the functioning of the human mind and identify the neural and psychological underpinnings of habitual behavior; anthropologists, political scientists and sociologists tap into habits as a key notion to explain social dynamics and collective behavior. For all of these waves that the notion has made in other parts of the humanities and social sciences, there have been so far, however, only a few sustained discussions of habits in conjunction with aesthetics. What is the role of habits in aesthetic experience? How do habits influence and regulate artistic creative processes?

British Journal of Aesthetics, 2017

Aesthetic non-inferentialism is the widely-held thesis that aesthetic judgments either are identical to, or are made on the basis of, sensory states like perceptual experience and emotion. It is sometimes objected to on the basis that testimony is a legitimate source of such judgments. Less often is the view challenged on the grounds that one’s inferences can be a source of aesthetic judgments. This paper aims to do precisely that. According to the theory defended here, aesthetic judgments may be unreasoned, insofar as they are immediate judgments made on the basis of, and acquiring their justification from, causally prior sensory states. Yet they may also be reasoned, insofar as they may be the outputs of certain inferences. Crucially, a token aesthetic judgment may be unreasoned and reasoned, simultaneously. A key reason for allowing inference to constitute a legitimate ground for aesthetic judgment emerges from reflection upon the nature of aesthetic expertise.

British Journal of Psychology, 2004

Although aesthetic experiences are frequent in modern life, there is as of yet no scientifically comprehensive theory that explains what psychologically constitutes such experiences. These experiences are particularly interesting because of their hedonic properties and the possibility to provide self-rewarding cognitive operations. We shall explain why modern art's large number of individualized styles, innovativeness and conceptuality offer positive aesthetic experiences. Moreover, the challenge of art is mainly driven by a need for understanding. Cognitive challenges of both abstract art and other conceptual, complex and multidimensional stimuli require an extension of previous approaches to empirical aesthetics. We present an information-processing stage model of aesthetic processing. According to the model, aesthetic experiences involve five stages: perception, explicit classification, implicit classification, cognitive mastering and evaluation. The model differentiates between aesthetic emotion and aesthetic judgments as two types of output.

Frascaroli, J., Leder, H., Brattico, E., and Van de Cruys, S. (2024). Aesthetics and predictive processing: Grounds and prospects of a fruitful encounter. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 379, 20220410.

In the last few years, a remarkable convergence of interests and results has emerged between scholars interested in the arts and aesthetics from a variety of perspectives and cognitive scientists studying the mind and brain within the predictive processing (PP) framework. This convergence has so far proven fruitful for both sides: while PP is increasingly adopted as a framework for understanding aesthetic phenomena, the arts and aesthetics, examined under the lens of PP, are starting to be seen as important windows into our mental functioning. The result is a vast and fast-growing research programme that promises to deliver important insights into our aesthetic encounters as well as a wide range of psychological phenomena of general interest. Here, we present this developing research programme, describing its grounds and highlighting its prospects. We start by clarifying how the study of the arts and aesthetics encounters the PP picture of mental functioning (§1). We then go on to outline the prospects of this encounter for the fields involved: philosophy and history of art (§2), psychology of aesthetics and neuroaesthetics (§3) and psychology and neuroscience more generally (§4). The upshot is an ambitious but well-defined framework within which aesthetics and cognitive science can partner up to illuminate crucial aspects of the human mind. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives’.

Inquiry

Are aesthetic judgements cognitive, belief-like states or non-cognitive, desire-like states? There have been a number of attempts in recent years to evaluate the plausibility of a non-cognitivist theory of aesthetic judgements. These attempts borrow heavily from Non-cognitivism in metaethics. One argument that is used to support metaethical Non-cognitivism is the argument from Motivational Judgement Internalism. It is claimed that accepting this view, together with a plausible theory of motivation, pushes us towards accepting Non-cognitivism. A tempting option, then, for those wishing to defend Aesthetic Non-cognitivism, would be to appeal to a similar argument. However, both Caj Strandberg and Walter Sinnott-Armstong have argued that Internalism is a less plausible claim to make about aesthetic judgements than about moral judgements by raising objections against Aesthetic Internalism. In this paper I will argue that both of these objections can be raised against Internalism about moral judgements as well. As a result, Internalism is no less plausible a claim to make about aesthetic judgements than about moral judgements. I will then show how a theory of Internalism about normative judgements in general is capable of avoiding both of these objections.

2013

Psychological Record, 2018

Despite an extensive history of serviceable analyses of behavior-environment conditions arranged by artists to elicit aesthetic experience, unforeseen transformational effects controlling aesthetic responses are often relegated to an unknowable dimension of mind or spirit. Francis Mechner demystifies aesthetic effects by describing their plausible relations to distal events in phylogeny and ontogeny in accord with principles of an experimentally derived, general process theory of behavior. In identifying a blending of temporally extended concept repertoires as the key generic component of aesthetic effects, Mechner's approach provides a potential educational or treatment goal for individuals limited in aesthetic experience. The synergetic brews that might otherwise evoke a confluence of repertoires may not have sufficient positive reinforcing potency to ensure the requisite emission of the behaviors that produce them. Moreover, dynamically combinatorial events might even become aversive when acts are differentially punished in their presence. By creating operant chains in which the production, attendance to, or interaction with synergetic stimuli become a differential context of positive reinforcement, the frequency of occurrence of aesthetic appreciation might be multiplied.

Work (Reading, Mass.), 2012

This article explores the development of an aesthetics framework that aims to provide designers with parameters to understand emotion, taste, and aesthetic judgment under their own cultural influence. This framework will equip designers with tangible criteria for judging cultural influences that have an impact on industrial design while preventing designers from adopting subjective options or being "followers of the current trend." To address the complexity of the topic, a systemic approach is taken so as to be able to capture its several elements. Therefore, the aesthetics framework adopts a systemic approach, which enables its constituents to be compared and the interplay or "links" between these different elements to be identified.