This entry concerns the ways in which work in cognitive science,broadly conceived, is or may be of importance for work inphilosophical aesthetics. Our focus is largely on analytic, primarilyAnglophone, aesthetic writing and its ancestry in the empiricaltradition. Aesthetic work occurs elsewhere, inside philosophy andbeyond, but it is within the analytic tradition that connections withthe sciences of mind have been most investigated, and it is thattradition which has been most receptive to empirical theories andresults (the work of Merleau-Ponty in the phenomenological traditionis an exception; for his influence see, e.g., Solli & Netland2021).

Cognitive science spans the disciplines of psychology, linguistics,neuroscience and philosophy, and its relatively brief history has beendominated by the idea that human information processing depends oninner representations which are subject to computation (Boden 2006).It now encompasses approaches which challenge this idea, seeking toreplace or augment inner representation with dependence on theenvironment. This concern with human cognitive architecture isexemplified in such developments as Marr’s theory of vision(1982), Brooks’ subsumption architecture for robots (1986), andpredictive processing theories of perception and cognition (Friston2010, see also below,Section 3). A survey of this large domain must be very selective and we havetried to identify, for each topic, a small number of key ideas onwhich to build our discussion. Throughout we have focused on sourcesthat highlight the issues that confront us when we try to decide whensome contribution from the empirical sciences of mind provides arethink of some aesthetic doctrine, when the two disciplines offercomplementary perspectives, and when the one is of no particularrelevance to the other.

• 1. Background
• 2. Bottom-up and Top-Down Approaches to Aesthetics
• 3. Preference, Judgement and Reasons
• 4. Art, Empathy and Neuroaesthetics
• 5. Authenticity
• 6. Pictures, Imagination and Perception
• 7. Emotion
• 8. The Aesthetics of Literature and Literary Language
• 9. Aesthetics and Evolution
• 10. The Aesthetics of the Environment
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Background

Writers on aesthetics in the empiricist tradition such as Shaftsbury,Hume, and Reid thought of their contributions as broadly empirical(see Shelley 2006 [2020]), and among the very first experimentalinvestigations in psychology were studies of aesthetic preferences andresponses, for example Fechner’s attempt to discover whether the“golden section” is especially preferred to other ratios(1871). The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were rich inwork of this kind, and there were more speculative studies of“embodied” responses to architectural structures, a debatethat brought the term “empathy” to the English language(Vischer 1873; Lipps 1903). But for most of the twentieth centuryaesthetics was seen, by its proponents and its detractors, as an“armchair” project. Wittgenstein, whose conception ofphilosophy strongly influenced the field’s direction in thecentury’s latter half, said

There doesn’t seem to be any connection between whatpsychologists do and any judgement about a work of art. (1967, 19; onWittgenstein’s own experimental work on the perception of rhythmsee Guter 2020)

To the extent that aesthetics in this period was influenced bythinking about the mind it was more often prompted by ideas frompsychoanalysis (Wollheim 1993). The last thirty years have seen ashift back towards empirical inquiry, assisted by a resurgence ofinterest in the imagination, now often treated as a capacity with anevolutionary and developmental history (Fuentes 2020; Harris 2000) andas subject to selective damage (Currie 1996).

It has never been plausible to think of aesthetics as whollyapriori. Even those who think its main business is the analysis ofwidely shared folk concepts (Dickie 1962) will agree that aphilosopher of music should have a good deal of knowledge of thehistory, art making practices and traditions of criticism of somemusical tradition. In this respect aesthetics is closer to thephilosophy of physics or economics than it is to metaphysics. There isalso a frequently acknowledged connection between aesthetics and thestudy of perception. When Baumgarten (1750–58) first introducedthe term “aesthetics” he called it a “science ofperception” and according to Nanay (2014: 101)

many, maybe even most traditional problems in aesthetics are in factabout philosophy of perception and can, as a result, be fruitfullyaddressed with the help of the conceptual apparatus of the philosophyof perception.

This is a stronger claim than many would make (see Margolis 1960;Sibley 1965; Schellekens 2006; and Robson 2018) but theses inaesthetics do sometimes depend on claims, including scientificallytractable claims, about the nature of perception. A notable example isthe debate about whether perception is cognitively penetrable; if itis, the way a picture looks or a piece of music sounds may depend onwhat the observer knows about contextual factors (for the rejection ofcognitive penetrability see Danto 2001; for criticism see Rose &Nanay 2022).

Philosophical doubts about the relevance of empirical work toaesthetics are of various kinds. Some authors merely suggest thatphilosophers are apt to make hasty generalisations from slenderexperimental evidence, give insufficient attention to their detailsand limitations, and fail to acknowledge the existence of conflictingexpert opinion (Konečni 2013; Stock 2014). Philosophers,aestheticians among them, can certainly overestimate their expertiseon occasion and it may well be that they are even more prone to do sowhen it comes to empirical matters. None of this points to anything inprinciple problematic about their enthusiasm for the empirical. Otherdoubters emphasise what they see as more systemic dangers. RogerScruton (2014) suggests a tendency to try to assimilate aestheticphenomena to available scientific frameworks that turn out to be illfitting; he cites the attempt to use Chomskian linguistics to found agenerative theory of music which, he claims, fails to accommodateeither music’s structure or purpose. Gordon Graham (2014),contrasting Hume’s aesthetic theory unfavourably with that ofReid, says that the project of an “aesthetic science” mustignore or deny the role of reason and judgement. Again, one may bealive to both kinds of dangers while retaining an openness toempirical work. In particular, Graham’s challenge might beresponded to by noting that studies of the role actually played byreasons in aesthetic judgement point to a sometimes strikingdisconnect between what people think of as their reasons and thefactors that determine their preferences (Lopes 2014 and Irvin 2014;see also below,Section 3); this can hardly be irrelevant to someone investigating therationality of aesthetic judgement. Further, work which aestheticianshave thought of as conceptual analysis in a broad sense has oftenpresumed answers to what are in fact empirical questions. Noel Carrollsays that

The supposition that aesthetic properties are objective also explainsbetter how we talk about them than does the projection theory.…people involved in disputes about aesthetic properties… speak as if one side of the disagreement is right and theother wrong. (Carroll 1999: 117)

Studies in the new field of “experimental philosophy” (forsome overviews of this field, as applied to aesthetics, see Cova &Réhault 2018 and Torregrossa 2020) challenge this view. Onestudy (Cova, Olivola, et al. 2019) gathered more than two thousandresponses across 19 countries to an imagined disagreement aboutwhether an object of aesthetic interest is beautiful. It found that inall populations theleast popular view was that“someone is right and someone is wrong”. The study itselfhas come in for criticism (Zangwill 2018) but, regardless of itssuccess, it highlights the general point that we should not assumewithout evidence that the philosopher’s understanding of folkconcepts (or folk practice) matches that of the folk themselves:something that should be of concern to those, such as Dickie, whoconceive of the work of aestheticians as largely involving theelucidation of folk concepts.

The question discussed above and to which Carroll and the members ofthe Cova team give such different answers is a higher order question,concerning whether people think of aesthetic judgements as havingnormative force. We can ask similar questions about lower leveljudgements. Consider the claim that we shouldn’t form aestheticjudgements on the basis of testimony, a claim said to be supported byour supposed practice of refraining from forming such judgements (Kant1790 [2000: 9]; Nguyen 2020: 1127). Contrary to this, Robson (2014)argues that this descriptive claim about our judgement formingpractice is mistaken—something which would, if true, undermineone significant motivation for the normative claim.

From an entirely different perspective, there are those who think thatphilosophers have very little role to play in answering key aestheticquestions and that we should seek to replace, rather than merelysupplement, traditional philosophical methods with more scientificapproaches. Exemplifying this tendency, Semir Zeki says

no theory of aesthetics that is not substantially based on theactivity of the brain is ever likely to be complete, let aloneprofound,

going on to say that painting is an inquiry into the laws of the brainand that what pleases us is what pleases our brains (1999: 1–2).While attitudes such as this may not constitute a complete dismissalof philosophical aesthetics they show little awareness of its results,or understanding of the limitations of neurological studies. Factsabout brain processes do not tell us—at least without somesubstantive and controversial bridging premises—what objects areart works, or what works have value (see Hyman 2010 for wide rangingcriticism of this approach). The relations between empirical work andnormative aesthetics will recur throughout this entry.

2. Bottom-up and Top-Down Approaches to Aesthetics

A good deal of empirical work on the aesthetic, while not derivingfrom hostility to philosophical ideas, adopts a “bottomup” approach, focusing on the immediate reactions of untutoredsubjects to simple stimuli. We have seen that, by contrast,philosophical aesthetics is much concerned with normative issues ofjudgement and value, and with the claimed dependence of these thingson training, knowledge and what is sometimes called“taste”, But these empirical studies are notphilosophically irrelevant; we should not assume that the aestheticresponses of experts are discontinuous with those of naïvesubjects (though for a discussion of the burden of proof here seeWilliamson 2011), nor that expert judgements are sensitive only to thefactors that experts themselves endorse. It is important to askwhether there are baseline aesthetic responses, perhaps invariantacross cultures, from which the great variety of aesthetic traditionsemerge, and which may impose limits on those traditions and theirproducts (for a defence of this “bottom up” approach toexperiments in aesthetic see McManus 2011). Wölfflin, a founderof modern art history, had an interest in questions framed in thisway: he claimed, for example, that there is a general tendency toprefer a rightward placement of a significant object within an image(1928). Subsequent research suggests a more complex picture, withpreference dependent on physical and cultural factors: handedness, andwhether one reads/writes left-to-right or right-to-left (see Palmer,Gardner, & Wickens 2008 for references and discussion; Chahboun etal. 2017 found some limited support for the idea that placementpreference depends on the subject’s direction ofreading/writing). Other studies have shown robust preferences forcertain colours (Palmer & Schloss 2010), shapes, positioning ofobjects within a frame (Palmer, Gardner, & Wickens 2008) and size(Linsen, Leyssen, Sammartino, & Palmer 2011). These preferencesoften turn out to be ecologically driven; for example, people tend tolike the colours of liked objects, with strong and culturallyinvariant liking of saturated blue and invariant hostility to coloursassociated with faeces and vomit. There are cultural variations; forexample Japanese subjects appear to be unusual in their lack ofenthusiasm for dark red (Palmer & Schloss 2010). Some colourpreferences are very culturally specific, as with the preferences ofcollege students for colours associated with their schools (Schloss,Poggesi, & Palmer 2011).

Studies such as these may be thought valuable in their capacity toexplain persistent features of aesthetic artefact-making but areunlikely to provide more than a general background against whichaesthetic preferences and judgements, debates and disagreementsconcerning particular artefacts are played out. Saturated blue will bethe right colour in a certain context, while muddy brown will be rightin another. We cannot say that the presence of saturated blue in apicture is in general a reason, even apro tanto reason, foradmiring it or preferring it to a picture without that colour. When itcomes to aesthetic reasons and judgements rather than unreflectivepreferences—when, that is, we consider top-downeffects—cognitive science so far offers little to help us. Thismay to some extent be due to the nature of human cognition itself.Aesthetic reasons, in so far as we have them at all, are highlyresistant to formulation in general terms (Sibley 1959), and once weabandon the view that aesthetic qualities supervene on anobject’s appearance narrowly described (colour, shape and sizein the case of visual art), there is no obvious way to limit thefactors that legitimately impact on such judgements. This suggests adomain where, roughly speaking, everything is relevant to everything:the isotropy that is crucial to Fodor’s (1983) scepticism abouta cognitive science of thinking. One recent study does attempt aunification of top-down and bottom-up approaches. Bullot and Reber(2013) develop a “psycho-historical” process that beginswith a perceptual confrontation with the work, and culminates inartistic understanding, mediated by the viewer’s adoption of thedesign stance which involves reconstructing the genealogy of the work.This approach encounters two difficulties. First is their assumptionthat progress between stages is able to be done largely by theextraction of information from the perceptual signal. In fact thework’s appearance is often ambiguous or misleading as to itshistory—as when a work is carefully constructed to lookhaphazard in its construction (Levinson 2013; Ross 2013). The modelneeds to recognise the importance of art-historical knowledge gainedfrom such sources as lectures and text books, knowledge which willoften precede and inform the first stage. The second objectionconcerns the role of presumed essentialist assumptions inpeople’s approach to art works. Bullot and Reber argue that thehistorical nature of appreciation is explained by our commitment topsychological essentialism which makes us look beyond a thingsappearance to investigate its essence (2013: 132). But an inclinationto look beyond appearances need not depend on essentialism; it mightbe that the interest or value of a thing sometimes resides in itsrelational and contingent properties (Korsgaard 1983). Valuing a workon account of its history of making no more implies an essentialconnection between the work and its history than valuing an objectbecause it was a gift from a loved one implies an essential connectionbetween the object and the giver.

3. Preference, Judgement and Reasons

As well as studies designed to elicit preferences, there areempirically motivated theories that purport to explain them. Among theearliest is Wundt’s (1874) suggestion that we judge a formpleasing to the extent that the eye finds it easy to follow thecontour. Recent work generalises this thought: there is said to be atendency for stimuli to be experienced positively when our perceptualor cognitive grasp on them comes easily (Reber, Schwarz, &Winkielman 2004). This idea ofprocessing fluency is notlimited to the aesthetic domain; we generally find a proposition morebelievable, apparently, if it is expressed in rhyme or in an easy toread font and this is said to be because these things increase fluency(Reber & Schwarz 1999; McGlone & Tofighbakhsh 2000). Soaesthetic and fluent phenomena are not coextensive, and no reductionof the one to the other is possible. The most that can be said (andthis is not insignificant) is that certain kinds of fluency underpinexperiences of aesthetic pleasure and displeasure, symmetry offering aplausible example; for comments on the significance of such researchinto underlying mechanisms seeSection 4 below.

One concern about an approach to the aesthetic by way of fluency isthat fluency apparently encourages a less careful examination of thestimulus (Song & Schwarz 2008), a suggestion at odds with theaesthetic ideal of a finely discriminating attitude to art. Another isthat fluency-based likings for stimuli seem to have very limitedapplication in aesthetics beyond the domain of simple shapepreferences. Pictures which are visually complex are often widelyadmired and not merely by the art-world elite (see for exampleFrith’s busy genre paintings). It is said that the pleasurederived from fluency is relative to expectation: pleasure taken in aBach fugue depends on it being more fluent than one expects (Reber2012: 228, citing Hansen, Dechêne, & Wänke 2008). Butwhy must lovers of Bach have unrealistic expectations about thefluency of his music? Finally (a theme we will return to) citingfluency would not be a reason for admiring the picture or fugue inquestion; this approach seems to focus on pleasure and leave notionsof reason and judgement out of account. (For criticism of the fluencyprogram in aesthetics see Cochrane 2021a, Section 2.3.)

Another aspect of fluency is said to be the mere exposure effect: ourtendency to find a statement more believable if we have heard itoften, repeated hearings leading to progressively more fluentprocessing (Begg, Anas, & Farinacci 1992). Cutting (2003)investigated an aesthetic variant of the idea: liking for a picture isincreased by repeated exposure to it. This, it is suggested, mayexplain the stability of the artistic canon: works canonical att are more available to be seen, and the mere exposure effectraises the likelihood of their being canonical att + 1.Cutting does not claim that exposure is the only factor contributingto aesthetic judgement, so accepting this view does not make one anerror theorist about aesthetic value. It does, however suggest thatthe critical robustness of canonical judgements has beenoverestimated, since one’s exposure to a picture is not a reasonfor thinking it good. However, Meskin, Phelan, and colleagues (2013)compared the effect of mere exposure to (what critics have widelyjudged to be) good and bad art, finding that there was increasedliking for good art but decreased liking for bad art, the implicationbeing that increased exposure makes observers more aware of theobjective qualities of the work (see also Delplanque et al. 2015). Inthat case significant exposure to a work, while not a reason why it isgood or bad, is a reason why one’s judgement of it is reliableand so may be said to belong to the space of aesthetic reasons.Cutting (2017), while offering some methodological reservations,expresses broad agreement with the Meskin et al. study.

Recently the link between aesthetic effects and pervasive features ofperception and cognition has been highlighted again by the theory ofpredictive processing: the idea that the fundamental activityof the brain is to make predictions and test and revise them againstincoming information from the senses, the goal being the reduction inpredictive errors or what is also called reduction in uncertainty (fora survey of philosophical applications of this idea see Hohwy . It issuggested that positive affect is the product of such reductions,while negative affect results when uncertainty is increased. Works ofart are said to provide the brain with exercises, sometimeschallenging ones, in error reduction (van de Cruys & Wagemans2011). But why should we seek more exercises in prediction errorreduction than the many that the world throws at us continually? Whatis to say that the eventual reduction in error outweighs the initialincrease posed by a work of art?

We see, then, that there are a number of suggestions for how empiricalwork may shed light on our aesthetic preferences and their aetiology,while doubts remain about the capacity of this work to illuminate thenormative structure of aesthetic judgement, which is said to bereason-focused and involve Kantian features such as disinterestedness(though see Meskin, Phelan, et al. 2013: 140–1). A second andfamiliar objection is the Wittgensteinian thought that merelyexplaining the origins of a phenomenon doesn’t give us the kindof explanation which philosophers are concerned with (Vrahimis 2020).However, the idea of reasons in aesthetics itself deserves criticalinterrogation, given the evidence that the reasons people give seemoften to be confabulations and that focusing on reasons while making ajudgement can make you a worse judge rather than a better one (seeIrvin 2014 and Lopes 2014, mentioned above,Section 1). Nor is the problem here confined to the aesthetic domain: HugoMercier and Dan Sperber (2017) argue that, quite generally, reasoningworks well as an instrument of public debate but poorly as a guide topersonal judgement and decision.

4. Art, Empathy and Neuroaesthetics

German aesthetics of the late nineteenth century was particularlyfocused on explaining human attraction to form in picturing, sculptureand building. Not always easy to interpret in detail, the broaderthemes of this work include the ways that our bodily and ecologicalsituation determine the aesthetic preferences we have for such thingsas symmetry (Wölfflin 1886), how architectural form isappreciated in terms of its capacity to facilitate movement throughspace (Schmarsow 1894, and how a sense of beauty arises from ourprojecting the feelings provoked by an external object into thatobject (Lipps 1903, see Currie 2011 for discussion). After a longperiod of neglect, these and related topics have reappeared under thebanner “embodied cognition.” Freedberg and Gallese (2007)have drawn attention to the ways our bodies tend to reproduce theposture of a statue, to produce implicit or simulated movements thatmirror those that seems to have produced a brush stroke or chiselmark, to resonate sympathetically with the pain of a representedfigure. These, they say, are intrinsic aspects of aesthetic experienceneglected by theorists who emphasise an intellectualist approach toart. They also claim that evidence for these effects based onintrospective reports can now be supplemented by an empiricallyverified theory of brain processing that appeals to mirror andcanonical neurons. Critics have alleged that this approach neglectsthe aesthetic impact of top-down factors (Kesner &Horáček 2017) and that motor responses are absent in manyencounters with art (Casati & Pignocchi 2007: 410). Arguablythough, Freedberg and Gallese seek only to identify an aestheticfactor of some significance and need not claim either exclusiveness oruniversality for it. Formalists in art might object even to thisrestricted claim, arguing that what Freedberg and Gallese haveidentified are obstructions to the sort of “purelyoptical” attention to pictures that Greenberg (1960) advocated(on which see Steinberg 1965; Currie 2007). But here again aestheticprescription cannot afford to ignore empirical work: standards ofaesthetic attention that no one has ever lived up to are not to betaken seriously.

Attempting to illuminate aesthetic phenomena by appeal to mirrorneurons and other neurological processes is now so common that we havea substantial genre ofneuroaesthetic writings (seeChatterjee 2013 for the field’s growth over 30 years). Whatremains controversial, though, is the significance (if any) thisresearch into brain structures and processes has for aesthetics. Wehave already seen that—despite the bold claims sometimes made byneuro-aestheticians—some critics are inclined to dismiss thiskind of work as irrelevant to evaluating the kinds of claim whichaestheticians are concerned with. Gallese and Freedberg, responding tocritics, say that

no esthetic judgment is possible without […] mirroringmechanisms in the forms of simulated embodiment and empatheticengagement that follow upon visual observation. (2007: 411)

But to understand the aesthetic significance of facts about suchmechanisms we need to distinguish between two claims:

• Evidential claim: facts about mechanisms may provide evidence tosupport or undermine a claim about what is involved in aestheticexperience or judgement.
• Constitutive claim: facts about mechanisms may be constitutiveparts of the story we tell about what is involved in aestheticexperience or judgement.

The evidential claim is more plausible than the constitutive claim.Consider first the evidential relevance of cognitive and neurologicalmechanisms for aesthetics. We have just now referred to a disputeabout how much of our experience of visual art depends on awork’s tendency to encourage bodily empathy with what isdepicted. While people sometimes report experiences of these kinds itmay be that they vary in accessibility, with some unnoticed withouthigh levels of attention, though still making a contribution to ouroverall liking for/valuing of the work. Studies of brain activityacross a range of artistic stimuli might suggest that these empathicresponses are very common indeed—or that they are relativelyunusual—because (let us suppose) empathy has an identifiableneurological signature. Such studies would be useful as evidence forthe claim that something needs to be factored in to an account ofaesthetic experience. But the relevant something would be the empathicresponse, not the brain process (See Carroll, Moore, & Seeley2012: 54 where studies of this kind are described as“data” for aesthetic theories).

The difference between aesthetic effects and the mechanisms thatrealise them is an important one. Take the shimmering quality we findin impressionist art. It is said that this depends on the fact thatthe visual system involves two separate processing streams and thatcertain colour combinations are processed exclusively by one of them(Livingstone 2002). Should this fact, if it is one, be regarded as anaesthetic fact? Arguably no. What matters aesthetically is theexperienced shimmering quality; a world in which just that shimmeringquality was produced by some other mechanism of perceptual processingwould not be aesthetically different from our world, at least in thisrespect. The same applies to scientific studies of the stimulithemselves; chemical analysis of an ancient pigment might show that itwas a hard medium to work in, and that would be relevant tounderstanding the works of art produced by its means. But what mattersis the difficulty of the medium; discovering its chemical formulasimply provides evidence for that.

5. Authenticity

A Kant-inspired view of long standing is that aesthetics is concernednot with how things are but with how they appear (e.g., Urmson 1957),a view sometimes calledaesthetic empiricism (Currie 1989) Onthis view aesthetics takes no cognisance of authenticity, whichdepends on history and not on appearance; a fake Vermeer does notbecome authentic by being visually indistinguishable from a genuineone. Is an object’s history really aesthetically irrelevant?Those with an interest in art, craft and the design of artefactsgenerally are much concerned with the object’s history, andthere are arguments to support the view that the application of atleast some aesthetic properties depends on assumptions about thathistory. Consider two such attributions from Sibley’s (1959)extensive list of aesthetic properties:being delicate andbeing dynamic. A line that is seen as delicate when thoughtto be drawn by hand may not seem so when revealed as the product of amachine, and Walton (1970) argued that, of two works which arevisually indistinguishable, one may be fairly described as dynamic andthe other not, depending on differences in their category membership(for defences of aesthetic empiricism concerning visual art seeZanwill and, on music, Dodd; for the aesthetic relevance ofgenuineness or authenticity see Korsmeyer 2019). The suggestion of atleast the first of these examples (being delicate) is thatthe aesthetic properties of a thing, and the aesthetic values thatpossession of these properties entails, depend on the kind ofachievement that the fashioning of the work represents. What may be aconsiderable achievement for one person at one time may be a greater,lesser or at least a different achievement for someone else, workingwith different materials or in a distinct artistic culture (Dutton1979; Currie 1989; Huddleston 2012; Levinson 2016); James Grant (2020)suggests that we do better to think in terms of a work’scapacity to exhibit the skills of its maker rathen than in terms ofits constituting an achievement of the maker (see also Currie2018).

Both formulations imply a close connection between valuing the workand valuing the maker, helping thereby to explain how an interest inthe authenticity of a work can belong to the space of aestheticreasons. It also suggests a connection with our desire to preserve andpossess otherwise unremarkable objects because of their relation tosome person or event that interests us (JFK’s sweater). Somepsychologists have thought to bring art works and other valuedartefacts together under the heading of contagion, the idea that

a person’s immaterial qualities or ‘essence’ can betransferred to an object through physical contact; (Newman,Diesendruck, & Bloom 2011)

an idea that goes back to early anthropological work by Frazer (1890[1994]) and others. As the examples just given indicate, the idea thata person’s essence is transferable to an object does not dependon the object’s aesthetic merits, and this severely limits theusefulness of this idea in explaining the role of authenticity in thearts (see, however, Korsmeyer 2019 where it is argued that genuinenessis itself an aesthetic property). Bloom and colleagues stress the roleof physical contact in the contagion process: “An originalPicasso may be valuable because Picasso actually touched it”(Newman & Bloom 2012: 3). But Picasso may have got no closer thana brush length fromGuernica, a picture likely to commandhigher art-world respect (and higher prices) than a restaurant napkinsketch he then wiped his hands on. However, a more general and perhapsrather vague sense of “closeness” to the artist and theiract of making does seem to be explanatory of some art-world practices,such as a preference for lower numbered (and hence earlier) printseven where there is no decline in quality across later ones (Smith,Newman, & Dhar 2016).

Bloom and colleagues offer another explanation for our interest inauthentic items, this one closer in spirit to the suggestion abovethat aesthetic judgements are sensitive to achievement or themanifestation of ability:

[A]n original is different from a forgery because it is the end pointof a different sort of performance . The original is a creative workwhile the forgery is not. (Newman & Bloom 2012: 559)

Guernica, very likely, is a more creative work than the napkin sketchand plausibly valued more for that reason. A question which arises isthis: how do people make judgements of the quality of, say, apainting, if not solely on the basis of how it looks? For a few highlytrained experts the answer may be: through deep immersion in thecultural and artistic context of the work. The rest of us, where wemake a judgement at all, may be dependent on short cuts such as the“effort heuristic”, which treats evidence of effort asevidence of quality. In an experiment, people asked to judge therelative merits of picturesA andB tended to judgeA as better thanB when toldA took longerto paint, while the group who were told thatB took longerpreferredB. This effect was found equally among experts andamong laypersons, though the experts were “self-described”(Kruger et al. 2004).

6. Pictures, Imagination and Perception

Wollheim (1980) said that what is distinctive about pictorialrepresentation is its capacity to generate a certain kind ofexperience: the experience of “seeing the subject in thepicture”. For many this has seemed to capture something deeplyimportant about the nature of depictive representation, thoughWollheim’s specific claims about it are disputed. What exactlyis seeing-in? One subsequent suggestion has been that we seesomething,X, in a picture when we experience a resemblancebetween the outline shape visible in the picture and the outline shapethat would be presented from that same perspective byX(Hopkins 1998; for a related proposal see Peacocke 1987). Anotherproposal is that we seeX in a picture when we are promptedby it to imagine, of our act of seeing the picture, that it is aseeing ofX (Walton 1992). Is cognitive science able to helpus adjudicate between rival theories in this area? It does look as ifthese ostensibly philosophical theories are committing themselves, ifsomewhat vaguely, on empirical issues. Surely, we cannot settle fromthe armchair whether the perception of pictures draws on imaginativecapacities. Scientists have gone a long way towards locating areas ofthe brain implicated in certain kinds of functions, emotion and theforms of perception being good examples. But we are not similarly ableto localise imaginative activity and there may be an in-principlebarrier to our doing so; there is some reason to suppose that thereare not dedicated mechanisms of imaginative activity, but thatimagining involves the reuse of systems designed for other purposes.This issue has been a central contention in the debate over how weunderstand the minds of other people, a debate originally drawn interms of two opposing outlooks, theory-theory and simulation theory,though other approaches have come into view (Gallagher & Hutto2008). Theory-theory attributes to us a (perhaps tacit) theory of themental states of others, their connection to action and so forth, fromwhich we derive predictions and explanations of behaviour (Fodor 1992;Carruthers 1996). Simulationism, by contrast, argues that we have acapacity to use our own mental systems of inferring and deciding tomodel or simulate the thoughts and decisions of others (Gordon 1986).While Heal has emphasised what she takes to be thea prioriprinciple that when we examine the thinking of another person we haveto reproduce in our own minds the contents of and the logicalrelations between the propositions thought (1986), others havedeveloped an empirically oriented version, postulating causalmechanisms by which practical and theoretical reasoning can be taken“off-line”, or disconnected from experiential inputs andbehavioural outputs (A. I. Goldman 1989). It has been suggested thatthe simulation approach, understood largely in this empiricallyoriented way, enables us to explain a good deal about our interest inand responses to fiction (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002). Questionsabout causally effective mental architecture have played a role inother aesthetic debates such as the explanation of our capacity tobecome immersed in a narrative (Schellenberg 2013) and of the contrarytendency to “resist” imaginative involvement with storieswe perceive as morally or in other ways problematic (Weinberg &Meskin 2006; Miyazono & Liao 2016).

While some of these ideas come with a detailed “boxology”that describes the cognitive implementation of the proposal, they aregenerally the product of work at the more philosophical andspeculative end of inquiry into the architecture of mind whereevidence is at best very indirect. An exception is the suggestion thatthere is empirical confirmation for Wollheim’s (1998) notion oftwofoldness in picture perception, according to which spectators aresimultaneously aware of both the surface qualities of the picture andthe depicted content. In particular, it has been argued that

the twofold experience of pictures Wollheim talks about corresponds tothe dichotomy between our dorsal visual processing of the surface ofthe picture and our ventral visual processing of the depicted scene.(Nanay 2011: 464)

Support for this idea comes from evidence that people with damage totheir ventral processing often have difficulty deciphering the contentof a picture without corresponding difficulty in perceiving theordinary properties of the surface of the picture (Turnbull, Driver,& McCarthy 2004). This illustrates another way that theinvestigation of mechanisms may further aesthetic inquiry. Anaesthetic phenomenon—in this case twofoldness—ispostulated and the question arises as to whether there is a plausiblestory about how this is implemented. If no such story were available,doubt would be thrown on the claim.

7. Emotion

A good deal of aesthetic thinking has been taken up with arguing aboutthe limits to its capacity to appeal to the emotions. Two issues areparticularly notable, one descriptive and the other, in part,normative. What, first of all, are the facts about our (apparently)emotional responses to fictions? Do we really admire, despise or pitypeople we know do not exist? This sounds like an empirical question,perhaps one to be resolved by studies of the brains of people engagedby fictional work. But the prospects for this approach are poor, andnot only because of practical difficulties in data gathering (see Cova& Teroni 2016). Those who deny that we pity Anna Karenina do nodeny that readers may display all the physiological signs that go withthat emotion. What they claim is that genuine fear has a cognitivecomponent lacking in this case: belief in the object of one’sfear. Suppose we could show empirically that readers of Tolstoy doexperience all the pity-relevant physiological states while failing tobelieve in the existence of Anna Karenina, having instead cognitivestates such as “imagining that Anna exists”. Thephilosophical problem would remain: are people with that psychologicalprofile genuinely in a state of pitying, or is their state merely oneof what Walton (1978) calls “quasi-pity”, which involvesthe typical physiological and psychological reactions of pity butwhich falls short of being full-fledged pity because it does not gowith belief in its objects, or with the typical correspondingdispositions to action? We might at this point wonder whether whatlooked like a substantive question about fear and pity has been shownto be merely one about labelling. However, there are empiricalconsiderations that bear indirectly on the issue. Gendler andKovackovick suggest that plausible assumptions about the evolutionaryproper function of the emotions tells against the idea that fearrequires belief. It is likely on Darwinian grounds that our emotionswere shaped not merely by their capacity to have us avoid presentdangers, but also to have us avoid merely possible ones. Imagining adangerous creature lurking in the forest may be enough to send me by asafer route, raising my chances of surviving and passing on my genes.If imagined dangers are part of the reason fear has been selected forand retained why insist that responses to the imagined creatures andevents of fiction are, as Walton (1978) claims, merely quasi-fears?For other connections between aesthetics and evolutionary thinking seebelow,Section 9.

A similar problem arises when we consider our responses to music. Wesometimes talk of sad music making us sad, though the music does notprovide us with any reason for thinking that something sad hashappened (sad music sometimes reminds us of a sad event, but this isnot a general feature of cases where sad music affects us). Hereappeal to the imagination seems less helpful; unlike fictionalnarratives, emotionally affecting music does not usually provide uswith the materials for imagining some sad event. Kivy has argued thatsadness on the part of those who listen to sad music is, where itoccurs, irrelevant to musical appreciation and will indeed not occurin episodes of listening which instantiate his preferred model ofmusical listening, one which requires exclusive attention to thestructural, phenomenological, and expressive properties of the music(1990: ch. 8). Kivy does not deny however that musical listening canand indeed should be a deeply emotional experience; we may beoverwhelmed by the compositional and performance qualities the workrepresents. Some attempt has been made to challenge Kivy on empiricalgrounds by presenting evidence that music does reliable engender theemotions or moods it expresses (Sizer 2007). But Kivy denied thispossibility only for the case of canonical music listening, and saysthat there is no reason to think that subjects in the relevantexperiments were listening in that canonical way (2007). Certainly itwould not be easy to control experimental conditions so as to rule-outlistening which is non-canonical in Kivy’s sense (see also Kivy2006; Carroll 2003; Carroll & Moore 2007). However, ifexperimental tests do consistently provide evidence ofemotion-generation concordant with the emotions expressed by themusic, it will not do simply to say that we have not yet tested theright listeners. The friend of Kivy will have to find robust instancesof the sort of listening he approves of, and not depend merely on thepersonal testimony of those who favour his theory. We take it, afterall, that Kivy’s ideal mode of listening is presented as apractically achievable goal. Zangwill 2004 represents a formalism thatis less willing to accommodate the emotions; for a more limiteddefence of the formalist position see Cochrane 2021b.

Another aesthetically important question about the emotions is this:why are we attracted to representations and other devices thatgenerate negative emotions such as sorrow and fear? It is not asatisfactory answer to this question to make the suggestion referredto above that we do not really fear Dracula and other creatures offiction but merely quasi-fear them, because fear and quasi-fear aresupposed to be qualitatively the same, so if fear is unpleasantquasi-fear is also. The question can be asked about both narrativeworks and about music; recall that even Kivy grants that(non-canonical) musical listening may generate sadness. However,fiction has been the greater part of this discussion, and will be herealso. On this issue philosophers have tended to take one of threepositions (but see Smuts 2009 for a wider range of options):

• Compensation: audiences tolerate the negative emotions of tragedy,horror and other genres because they recognise compensatory benefits(Carroll 1990; Feagin 1983)
• Conversion: emotions which would otherwise be experienced asunpleasant are experienced as positive in artistic contexts (Hume 1757[1987]).
• Neutrality: it is wrong to think that the so called“negative emotions” provoked by tragedy or horror areintrinsically unpleasant and hence in need of compensation orconversion. They are not intrinsically valenced and may be experiencednegatively in some situations and positively in others (Gaut 1993;Walton 1990: 255–8)

Neutrality is a general claim about the emotions and relevant here asone way to argue in favour of conversion. But a conversion theoristsneed not be committed to Neutrality. We focus here on the contrastbetween Compensation and Conversion. Compensation, unlike Conversion,appeals to a type of psychological process that is hardlycontroversial; we accept many kinds of unpleasant experiences becauseavoiding them will have even less desirable consequences. Conversionsounds more problematic: how can an emotion “flip” itshedonic value and still be the same emotion? Psychologists interestedin negative emotions in art have cited research which purports toreveal hedonic flip for pain: subjects who expected an intense painbut experienced only a moderately painful stimulus described theexperience as “pleasant”, while subjects expectingnonpainful warmth described the same stimulus as unpleasant (Leknes etal. 2013). This doesn’t by itself show that the same thing canhappen in the case of tragedy or horror, but it suggests that theconversion claim is less outlandish than it might initially seem.

While compensation may appeal to a familiar kind of trade off, itneeds to tell us what specific compensatory benefits are to be hadfrom the negative emotions provoked by art. Philosophers have longcited epistemic benefits: the distressing events of tragedy are asource of moral and psychological learning, sometimes about ourselves(Collingwood 1938; Schier 1983). Empirical scientists have added tothe list: painful emotions generate strong pro-social feelings thathelp to unite us with both characters and authors (Bastian, Pe, &Kuppens 2017; Egloff 2017).

While philosophers have long offered theories to resolve this“paradox of tragedy,” only one substantial study of itclaims to be grounded in empirical research. Menninghaus andcolleagues propose what they call “the Distancing-Embracingmodel” (Menninghaus, Wagner, Hanich, et al. 2017) according towhich an aesthetic context, as with watching a play or film, distancesus from the situation represented and allows the positive effects oftragic emotions, notably their capacity to focus attention, to sustainthem. While a large and relevant body of empirical work is called onin support of the idea, its theoretical commitments are unclear. Insome of their formulations the function of distancing seems to be thereduction in unpleasantness of negative emotions to the point wherethey are “not inevitably incompatible with art-specificexpectations of hedonic reward” (2017: 6); this leaves them opento the charge made against compensation theories that the work’sbeing apt to generate negative emotions seems to be a major factor inattracting people to the work, rather than something negative we canbe persuaded to live with. In other formulations they speak of thefactors “involved in making negative emotions enjoyable”(2017: 3), which suggests the conversion theory. Yet they claim thattheir theory is a version of neither of these approaches (2017: 15;see S. Davies 1997). (For more on the relationship between fiction andemotion see the supplement to Liao & Gendler 2018 [2020]). Seebelow,Section 7 for further remarks on fiction and emotion.

To conclude the discussion of fiction, we note another direct appealto work at the empirical level. Derek Matravers (2014) argues that ithas been a mistake of recent theorising about fiction to appeal to theimagination. Matravers claims that work on mental models does a goodjob of explaining our processing and comprehension of, and responsesto, both fictional and nonfictional narratives without any need todistinguish fictional cases by their connection with theimagination.

8. The Aesthetics of Literature and Literary Language

Through the latter part of the twentieth century, theoretical andinterpretive studies of literature have been somewhat hostile to bothcognitive and aesthetic inquiry, often thought of as irrelevant toserious interpretive work and a distraction from favoured politicalagendas. Cognitive studies of literature have developed somewhat inthe last twenty years but remain a minority enterprise (Hartner 2017).One question of long standing that has concerned scholars inpsychology, literary studies and aesthetics is the idea that we learnfrom literature about the world beyond the text, an idea treated withsome suspicion by those influenced by deconstructive or post-moderntheorising, who argue that such ambitions depend on failing to realisethat characters of fiction are not, and are not like, real people(Cixous 1974). Others argue that such cognitive benefits, if theyexist, are not aesthetically relevant (Lamarque & Olsen 1994: ch.17; for criticism see Gaut 2007: ch. 7; Currie 2020: §9.6). Thereis, however, a strong tendency to suppose that the artistic merit of,say, a Shakespearean drama depends in part on our sense that it isrevelatory of deep insights into the human condition. Similar claimsare made for other arts; contemplating van Gogh’s lithographSorrow Kendall Walton notes responding imaginatively to thewoman in ways that “gain for me an understanding of what aparticular sorrow is like” (2008: 78).

Recently efforts have been made to test the idea that literature does,on occasion, provide cognitive benefits. It has been claimed thatexposure to fiction—even single episodes ofreading—measurably improves empathy and theory of mind (Kidd& Castano 2013); the effects, if real, seem to be small and theclaimed results have been hard to replicate (Panero et al. 2016; Kidd& Castano 2019). Other work in this growing field also does notpoint in a single direction. Some studies suggest that fiction has acapacity to improve aspects of social cognition (Calarco et al. 2017;Mar 2018a,b) while others find no such effect (e.g., Wimmer et al.2021a, b; see Currie 2020; chs 9–11 for general discussion).Humanistic scholars who claim educative effects for fiction mayrespond that these effects are slow and cumulative, and unlikely to bevisible in studies of single episodes of reading; testing such claimswill be difficult. But their claims are, nonetheless, empirical.

Among other examples of the cognitive study of literature areinvestigations of emotional responses. While aestheticians have tendedto focus on the apparently “paradoxical” aspects of ouremotional responses to fictions (for example why we are emotionallyaffected by the non-existent, see aboveSection 7), researchers in the cognitive sciences has begun a broader attempt tounderstand the role of emotions of all kinds in generating andmaintaining interest in narrative and poetry (Menninghaus, Wagner,Wassiliwizky, et al. 2017); Jenefer Robinson’s (2005) is anexample of work from within aesthetics that takes up this broaderambition while being strongly informed by empirical work. Morerecently, Kukkonen (2020) attempts an alignment between theexpectations of a reader sometimes surprised by plot development andthe predictive processing approach to perception and cognition (seeaboveSection 3). It is an open question whether the predictive processing accountsheds aesthetically relevant light on the reader’s experiencerather than simply providing an account of the mechanisms involved(see aboveSection 4).

A striking example of an area long thought of as resistant to theoryfrom outside the domain of art and the aesthetic is that of literarylanguage. Insight into the kind of language we think of as distinctiveof poetry, drama and the novel has traditionally been sought fromthose whose expertise is literature itself rather than from thosedeveloping general theories of communication, a view endorsed by PeterLamarque, who regards the idea that there is value in seeing literaryworks as akin to quotidian genres of utterance such as letter-writingor political speech making as “utterly misconceived”(Lamarque 2007: 34). But advocates ofrelevance theory, anaturalistically inclined development of Gricean pragmatics, rejectthe idea that there is anything fundamentally special or autonomousabout literary language, claiming that

stylistic and poetic effects traditionally associated with figurativeutterances arise naturally in the pursuit of relevance, and call forno special treatment not required for the interpretation of ordinaryliteral utterances. (D. Wilson 2018: 191)

(for work that seeks empirical confirmation for relevance theory see,e.g., Happe 1993; Sperber & Wilson 2002; van der Henst, Carles,& Sperber 2002; Noveck & Posada 2003; and van der Henst &Sperber 2004).

One ambition of relevance theory is to encourage us to see“poetic uses” of language, where an idea is veryindirectly suggested by the words used, as less marginal than we wouldif we thought of the paradigm of communication as the case where anagent utters a sentence that means exactly what the speaker wishes tocommunicate. Relevance theorists say that such cases of literalmeaning are rare or non-existent and do not constitute any kind ofcommunicative ideal. They point to the widespread phenomenon of“weak implicature”: audiences draw a range of conclusionsfrom an utterance, some of them obviously intended but others harderto identify as intended (Sperber & Wilson 1995: 197–9). Onthis view the totality of what is meant, even in mundane cases, isnever more than vaguely specifiable and would, if we bothered toinvestigate, be subject to the same unresolvable disputes as we findin poetic criticism. It need not be concluded that poetic discourse isentirely of a piece with over-the-garden-wall conversation; therelevance theorist’s point is that the differences are ones ofdegree and not of kind.

9. Aesthetics and Evolution

Theories of human evolution over the last two million years areseverely limited by the very incomplete fossil record and the factthat soft tissue disappears quickly. Given these constraints it issurprising the extent to which cognitive theorising has reached intothe very distant past, though its claims are agreed on all hands to behighly provisional. A vital resource has been the study of stoneartefacts going back two million years or more, artefacts whichpreserve very well and which are available in great quantities. We areable to reconstruct a good deal about the methods of theirconstruction and to speculate in a reasonably informed way on thecognitive capacities they require. Based on these speculationsinnovations in stone tool manufacture have been linked to thedevelopment of language (Higuchi et. al. 2009).

Any topic on which aesthetic and evolutionary methods converge islikely to be approached with two questions in mind.

1. Is the emergence and development of art-making and relatedactivities explainable wholly or very largely in cultural terms, or isthere a substantial biological component?
2. Is art-making an adaptation or a non-adaptive consequence ofdevelopments which may themselves have adaptive advantages (orsomething else)?

It might be thought that the second question arises only if oneanswers the first in a way that gives an important explanatory role tobiology. But culturally determined “phenotypes” can alsobe adaptive, maladaptive or neutral. Cooking, certainly a culturalinnovation, is highly adaptive and has led to significant change ingut size and perhaps in brain size as well (Godfrey-Smith 2013; forscepticism concerning the relation to brain size see Cornélioet al. 2016). Human biological and cultural evolution are closelyconnected.

On the question whether there is a role for biological explanationwhen it comes to human aesthetic activity, there is a constituency ofscholars hostile to this idea; they argue that “art” and“aesthetic” are notions of recent and essentially westerninvention, the application of which to other and older cultures ismistaken (Gell 1998: 97). Opponents of this view readily grant thehuge cultural variability of aesthetic activity. They argue that thereare enough commonalities between the ways very different culturesinvest in the shaping and decoration of objects, in music, dance andin story-telling to make it plausible that biology provides both theinitial impetus to and a set of constraints on these activities(Dutton 2009; Currie 2012). If we thought, as we once did, that theseactivities could be traced no further back than the cave depictions ofthe European Upper Paleolithic it would be likely that the aestheticis too late-emerging to have a biological basis. Very recentdiscoveries have now suggested a somewhat earlier origin; depictionsin Indonesia have been given dates prior to 45,000 years ago (Brumm etal. 2021). More dramatically, though, the temporal depth of aestheticactivity is vastly increased if we turn our attention to the stonetools mentioned above, many of which show a notable symmetry ofconstruction. Hand axes from the Acheulean industry which arose about1.7 million years ago are sometimes too large, small or sharplypointed to be practical implements and strongly suggest an interest inthe display of skilful making that we commonly recognise in, say, theart of the European renaissance (see Currie & Zhu 2021 and Gowlett2021, both of which in different ways emphasise the importance ofseeing aesthetic practices emerging in a social context). Some haveseen these elaborated instruments as products of sexual selection, aspeacock’s tails are said to be: reliable indicators of themaker’s qualities as a mate (Kohn & Mithen 1999). Anotherview has it that they were indicators of trustworthiness, and hence ofone’s value as a co-operator (Spikins 2012); for criticism ofboth views see Hiscock 2014.

Hand axes are unlike a peacock’s tail in being detached from thebody and so may be passed from one person to another—one reasonto doubt their reliability as signals of any particular agent’ssuitability as a mate. Where symmetry of the body itself is at issuethat objection does not apply, and bodily and especially facialsymmetry has been offered as an example of something evolution hastuned our sensibilities to because it is an indicator of health in areproductive partner. However, robust evidence has been hard to find.One recent study did “not support the idea that facial symmetryacts as a reliable cue to physiological health” (Pound et al.2014; see also Kalick et al. 1998), another that there is“little evidence that female appearance predicted health”(Foo et al. 2017; this study did support a connection between malefacial appearance and fertility). For ethical arguments, supported byempirical findings, that we should rethink our standard approach tothe aesthetics of human appearances, see Irvin 2017.

It should be noted that even a very early dating of the emergence ofaesthetic interests does not establish that they have a biologicalorigin; the Acheulean period seems to have been marked by high levelsof planning and organisation that suggest strong social relations(Hiscock 2014). In this sense aesthetic activity may be a culturallyderived “technology”, as writing is, rather than anadaptation, as language may be (S. Davies 2012: ch. 10). Could weaccount, on that hypothesis, for the seeming ease with which youngchildren take to forms of aesthetic activity such as drawing andsinging? By contrast, learning to write is effortful and requiresgreat investment in pedagogy. Recent work (Heyes 2021) seeks toreshape our assumptions about what is learned, arguing that such anearly and reliably developing ability as interpersonal understandingis really a socially acquired “gadget” (Heyes & Frith2014). To add to a complex menu of options we also note that whatbegins as a gadget or technology might, under certain circumstancesfall under complete or partial genetic control. This so-called“Baldwin effect”, once despised in evolutionary thinking,has attracted interest more recently (Weber & Depew 2003). Itproposes a mechanism by which acquired characteristics can becomebiologically heritable, without giving any ground to the Lamarkianidea that changes that accrue in an organism’s lifetime can bepassed directly to the next generation. For example, if advantagesflow from learning a skill, there may be selective pressure to easethe burden and uncertainty of learning by making the skill, or some ofits components, innate (Papineau 2005). Given the multiply crossingpaths between cultural and biological evolution there is littledefinite to be said about the origins of aesthetic interests otherthan that we see evidence for it in human populations more than half amillion years ago.

We turn now to our second question: Is art-making an adaptation or anon-adaptive consequence of developments which may themselves haveadaptive advantages? Or something else entirely? Strong and contraryviews have been expressed on this question; some have argued that thedevelopment of depiction, story-telling and music have been crucialfor social bonding (Dissanayake 1992, 2000, 2017) or mate-choice(Miller 2000; Dutton 2009; for criticism see, e.g., C. Wilson 2016),others say that the creation of aesthetic artefacts offers no adaptiveadvantage but that they gained their hold on us because they providerewards to sensory and other mechanisms in the mind that arose forquite other purposes (Pinker 1997). From a somewhat differentperspective it is suggested that we do best by seeing human aestheticactivity as simply the continuation of ubiquitous practices ofsignalling and manipulation in the world of plants and animals. Aninteresting feature of this idea is that it replaces the traditionaldistinction between the aesthetics of artefacts and the aesthetics ofnature with a distinction between, on the one hand artefactsand natural entities such as animal calls and flowercolouring, and on the other natural objects such as rocks, sunsets andthe night sky which “do not coevolve with sensory evaluations ofthem” (Prum 2013: 821; see also De Tiège, Verpooten,& Braeckman 2021). It is not clear whether we currently knowenough to decide between the available alternatives (S. Davies 2012:ch. 12; for the case of fiction, Currie 2020; §7.4). But woulddeciding whether art-making is adaptive advance the cause of aestheticinquiry? That is doubtful. The question whether art is an adaptationconcerns whether the reason we have art now is that it contributed tothe fitness of our species. That could be true without it also beingtrue that art now enriches our lives in any of the ways commonlyclaimed—giving pleasure, educating our emotions, instructing usabout morality. And it is possible that art does now have all thoseadvantages while having been an evolutionary irrelevance. It is alsotrue that even if art was not originally adaptive, it might havebecome adaptive (an “exaptation”) at some stage and mightbe adaptive now. Different answers may apply to different art forms.It is said that the novel is a particularly appropriate means by whichto exercise our capacities for empathy and mind reading (Nussbaum1990, 1995; Mar and Oatley 2008); perhaps these advantages did notappear until the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. While questionsabout art posed in evolutionary terms are certainly of scientificinterest, what matters to the aesthetician is more likely to be thevalues that art currently and historically exemplifies and the waysthose values are currently and historically responded to by us.

10. The Aesthetics of the Environment

We have referred rather briefly to the aesthetics of the natural andhumanly constructed environment and we conclude with a brief selectionof aesthetically and cognitively relevant work in this area. Much ofthis discussion continues the evolutionary theme. Note that some ofthis work relies for its evidence on people’s responses topictures of environments rather than to the environments themselves,leaving it uncertain how much of the response is to the environmentand how much to its representation.

The empirical study of environmental preferences has long been ofinterest to planners, and largely represents the bottom-up mode ofinquiry referred to above (seeSection 2), as the aim is to discover what people in general like rather than toassess their likings against the normative constraints of connoisseursand philosophers. Topics explored include the differences inpreference across age groups, ethnicity, education and income (e.g.,Kaplan & Talbot 1988). One conclusion often drawn is that there isa widespread, perhaps universal, human preference for savannalandscapes, even among communities whose own historically stablehabitat is very different, and that this preference is reflected inthe design of parks and gardens (Falk & Balling 2010). It isfurther asserted that this is the product of our evolutionarydevelopment in an East African context (E. O. Wilson 1975 is an earlysource of this idea); for detailed discussion, references, and somereservations see S. Davies 2012: ch. 6.

The non-prescriptive nature of much empirical research into responsesto the environment contrasts with a view influential in philosophicalaesthetics according to which there are quite demanding cognitiverequirements for a correct aesthetic appreciation of nature. Thequestion mirrors one we have already discussed for the arts: whatfactors, other than the sensory appearance of an object, are relevantto enjoying, appreciating and judging it aesthetically? In the case ofthe arts we saw that one answer is to consider the work’scategory—the (artistic) kind of thing it is (Walton 1970; seeaboveSection 5). Allen Carlson (2000) extends this idea to the aesthetics of nature,arguing that a scene or object must be understood as belonging to anatural kind, and as having the causal history characteristic of thatkind; that is the right way to perceive it and aesthetic judgementsabout it are correct only if they are tied to that category. Thisimplies that much human aesthetic experience of nature has beenradically incorrect, being uninformed by the relevant scientific factsand often infused with notions of supernatural creation. Some willfind this an acceptable consequence; we are used to thinking that manylong-standing human ethical judgements have been radically mistaken,and aesthetic judgements might go the same way. Others however,question whether the aesthetic delight one takes in, say, a bird inflight depends for its acceptability on understanding the naturalhistory of the creature (Budd 2001).

A different and perhaps more accommodating approach to identifyingwhat is distinctive in aesthetic appreciation of the environmentconnects an older way of thinking with recent work on cognition. Theeighteenth century focused attention on notions of the sublime(notably Burke [1757], but in a line of thought from Longinus) and thepicturesque (Gilpin 1782, with roots in the older concept ofpittoresco). These, particularly the former, have generatedcontroversies about their relations to beauty—are theysubspecies of beauty or categories distinct from it?—and abouttheir extensions—is it only nature that can be sublime? Thequestion also arises as to whether terms like “thesublime” pick out a class of objects to which there is actuallya common aesthetic response. This sounds like something on which wecould get help from the cognitive sciences, and work by Keltner andHaight (2003), drawing on a range of empirical and reflective sources,has been particularly noticed. Their work was on the concept of awerather than the sublime but they note obvious connections, given thethought that the sublime involves a response to things physically orconceptually vast. They suggest that awe involves the recognition ofthe apparent vastness of the object or scene attended to and theinability of the subject to assimilate it to their existing mentalschemas. Other research suggests a strongly pan-cultural component innonverbal expressions of this emotion (Keltner et al. 2019), and itsassociation with a diminished sense of self (Piff et al. 2015; TomCochrane (2012) has argued that the sublime is characterised by afeeling of self-negation). It is suggested therefore that theexperience of the sublime is an aesthetic form of awe wherein theobject is attended to for its own sake (Clewis 2019; Arcangeli et al.2020), an idea elaborated by Shapsay (2021) who suggests that thesublime sometimes takes a cognitively elaborated form involvingreflection of the challenge posed to existing schemata by the scene orobject one confronts.

Bibliography

• Anderson, Judith L., Charles B. Crawford, Joanne Nadeau, and TracyLindberg, 1992, “Was the Duchess of Windsor Right? ACross-Cultural Review of the Socioecology of Ideals of Female BodyShape”,Ethology and Sociobiology, 13(3):197–227. doi:10.1016/0162-3095(92)90033-Z
• Andow, James, 2018, “Aesthetic Testimony and ExperimentalPhilosophy”, in Cova and Réhault 2018: 35–58.
• Arcangeli, Margherita, Marco Sperduti, Amélie Jacquot,Pascale Piolino, and Jérôme Dokic, 2020, “Awe andthe Experience of the Sublime: A Complex Relationship”,Frontiers in Psychology, 11(June): 1340.doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01340
• Aubert, Maxime, Rustan Lebe, Adhi Agus Oktaviana, Muhammad Tang,Basran Burhan, Hamrullah, Andi Jusdi, Abdullah, Budianto Hakim,Jian-xin Zhao, I. Made Geria, Priyatno Hadi Sulistyarto, Ratno Sardi,and Adam Brumm, 2019, “Earliest Hunting Scene in PrehistoricArt”,Nature, 576(7787): 442–445.doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1806-y
• Bartel, Christopher, 2018, “The Ontology of Musical Worksand the Role of Intuitions: An Experimental Study: Ontology of MusicalWorks: An Experimental Study”,European Journal ofPhilosophy, 26(1): 348–367. doi:10.1111/ejop.12247
• Bastian, Brock, Madeline Lee Pe, and Peter Kuppens, 2017,“Perceived Social Pressure Not to Experience Negative Emotion IsLinked to Selective Attention for Negative Information”,Cognition and Emotion, 31(2): 261–268.doi:10.1080/02699931.2015.1103702
• Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 1750–58,Aesthetica/Ästhetik, Dagmar Mirbach (ed.), 2 volumes,Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2007; partial translation in AlexanderGottlieb Baumgarten and Hans Rudolf Schweizer,Ästhetik alsPhilosophie der sinnlichen Erkenntnis: Eine Interpretation der“Aesthetica” A.G. Baumgartens mit teilweiser Wiedergabeder lateinischen Textes und deutscher Übersetzung, Basel:Schwabe, 1973.
• Begg, Ian Maynard, Ann Anas, and Suzanne Farinacci, 1992,“Dissociation of Processes in Belief: Source Recollection,Statement Familiarity, and the Illusion of Truth”,Journalof Experimental Psychology: General, 121(4): 446–458.doi:10.1037/0096-3445.121.4.446
• Boden, Margaret, 2006,Mind as Machine: A History of CognitiveScience, 2 volumes, New York: Oxford University Press.
• Brooks, R., 1986, “A Robust Layered Control System for aMobile Robot”,IEEE Journal on Robotics and Automation,2(1): 14–23. doi:10.1109/JRA.1986.1087032
• Brumm, Adam, Adhi Agus Oktaviana, Basran Burhan, Budianto Hakim,Rustan Lebe, Jian-xin Zhao, Priyatno Hadi Sulistyarto, MarlonRirimasse, Shinatria Adhityatama, Iwan Sumantri, and Maxime Aubert,2021, “Oldest Cave Art Found in Sulawesi”,ScienceAdvances, 7(3): eabd4648. doi:10.1126/sciadv.abd4648
• Budd, Malcolm, 2001, “Review ofAesthetics and theEnvironment, by Allen Carlson”,Mind, 110(438):448–452. doi:10.1093/mind/110.438.448
• Bullot, Nicolas J. and Rolf Reber, 2013, “The Artful MindMeets Art History: Toward a Psycho-Historical Framework for theScience of Art Appreciation”,Behavioral and BrainSciences, 36(2): 123–137.doi:10.1017/S0140525X12000489
• Burke, Edmund, 1757,A Philosophical Inquiry into the Originof our Idea of the Sublime and Beautiful, London: R. and J.Dodsley.
• Calarco, Navona, Katrina Fong, Marina Rain, and Raymond Mar, 2017,“Absorption in narrative fiction and its possible impact onsocial abilities”, in Frank Hakemulder, Moniek M. Kuijpers, EdS. Tan, Katalin Bálint and Miruna M. Doicaru (eds.),Narrative Absorption, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.doi:10.1075/lal.27.15cal
• Carlson, Allen, 2000,Aesthetics and the Environment: TheAppreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture, London:Routledge.
• Carroll, Noël, 1990,The Philosophy of Horror, or,Paradoxes of the Heart, New York: Routledge.
• –––, 1996, “Moderate Moralism”,British Journal of Aesthetics, 36(3): 223–238.doi:10.1093/bjaesthetics/36.3.223
• –––, 1999,Philosophy of Art: A ContemporaryIntroduction, London: Routledge
• –––, 2003, “Art and Mood: PreliminaryNotes and Conjectures”,The Monist, 86(4):521–555. doi:10.5840/monist200386426
• –––, 2014, “The Arts, Emotion, andEvolution”, in Currie, Kieran, Meskin, and Robson 2014:159–180. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199669639.003.0009
• Carroll, Noël and Margaret Moore, 2007, “NotReconciled: Comments for Peter Kivy”,The Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism, 65(3): 318–322.doi:10.1111/j.1540-594X.2007.00263.x
• Carroll, Noël, Margaret Moore, and William P. Seeley, 2012,“The Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics, Psychology, andNeuroscience: Studies in Literature, Music, and Visual Arts”, inShimamura and Palmer 2012: 31–62.doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199732142.003.0019
• Carruthers, Peter, 1996, “Simulation and Self-Knowledge: ADefence of Theory-Theory”, in Carruthers and Smith 1996:22–38. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511597985.004
• Carruthers, Peter and Peter K. Smith (eds.), 1996,Theories ofTheories of Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.doi:10.1017/CBO9780511597985
• Casati, Roberto and Alessandro Pignocchi, 2007, “Mirror andCanonical Neurons Are Not Constitutive of Aesthetic Response”,Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(10): 410.doi:10.1016/j.tics.2007.07.007
• Chahboun, Sobh, Andrea Flumini, Carmen PérezGonzález, I. Chris McManus, and Julio Santiago, 2017,“Reading and Writing Direction Effects on the AestheticAppreciation of Photographs”,Laterality: Asymmetries ofBody, Brain and Cognition, 22(3): 313–339.doi:10.1080/1357650X.2016.1196214
• Chatterjee, Anjan, 2013, “Neuroaesthetics: Range andRestrictions”,Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(2):137–138. doi:10.1017/S0140525X12001586
• –––, 2017, “Orange Is the NewAesthetic”,Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 40: e355.doi:10.1017/S0140525X17001637
• Cixous, Hélène, 1974, “The Character of‘Character’”, Keith Cohen (trans.),New LiteraryHistory, 5(2): 383–402. doi:10.2307/468401
• Clewis, Robert R., 2019, “Towards a Theory of the Sublimeand Aesthetic Awe”, inThe Sublime Reader, Robert R.Clewis (ed.), London: Bloomsbury, pp. 340–353.
• Cochrane, Tom, 2012, “The emotional experience of thesublime”,Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 42(2):125–148. doi:10.1353/cjp.2012.0003
• –––, 2021a,The Aesthetic Value of theWorld, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2021b, “Moved by Music Alone”,British Journal of Aesthetics, 61(4): 455–470.doi:10.1093/aesthj/ayab007
• Collingwood, R. G., 1938,The Principles of Art, Oxford:Oxford University Press.
• Cornélio, Alianda M., Ruben E. de Bittencourt-Navarrete,Ricardo de Bittencourt Brum, Claudio M. Queiroz, and Marcos R. Costa,2016, “Human Brain Expansion during Evolution Is Independent ofFire Control and Cooking”,Frontiers in Neuroscience,10(April): 167. doi:10.3389/fnins.2016.00167
• Cova, Florian and Nicolas Pain, 2012, “Can Folk AestheticsGround Aesthetic Realism?”,The Monist, 95(2):241–263. doi:10.5840/monist201295214
• Cova, Florian and Sébastien Réhault (eds.), 2018,Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics, London:Bloomsbury Academic.
• Cova, Florian, Christopher Y. Olivola, Edouard Machery, StephenStich, David Rose, Mario Alai, Adriano Angelucci, RenatasBerniūnas, Emma E. Buchtel, Amita Chatterjee, et al., 2019,“De Pulchritudine Non Est Disputandum? ACross‐cultural Investigation of the Alleged IntersubjectiveValidity of Aesthetic Judgment”,Mind & Language,34(3): 317–338. doi:10.1111/mila.12210
• Cova, Florian and Fabrice Teroni, 2016, “Is the Paradox ofFiction Soluble in Psychology?”,PhilosophicalPsychology, 29(6): 930–942.doi:10.1080/09515089.2016.1164306
• Currie, Greg, 1989,An Ontology of Art, Basingstoke:Macmillan.
• –––, 1996, “Simulation-Theory,Theory-Theory, and the Evidence from Autism”, in Carruthers andSmith 1996: 242–256. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511597985.016
• –––, 2007, “Visual Conceptual Art”,inPhilosophy and Conceptual Art, Peter Goldie and ElisabethSchellekens (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 33–50.
• –––, 2011, “Empathy for Objects”, inEmpathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, AmyCoplan and Peter Goldie (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press,82–95.
• –––, 2012, “Art and theAnthropologists”, in Shimamura and Palmer 2012: 107–128.doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199732142.003.0034
• ––– 2018, “Pictures and theirsurfaces”, in J. Pelletier & A. Voltolini (eds.),ThePleasure of Pictures, London: Routledge.
• –––, 2020,Imagining and Knowing: The Shapeof Fiction, New York: Oxford University Press.doi:10.1093/oso/9780199656615.001.0001
• Currie, Greg and Ian Ravenscroft, 2002,Recreative Minds.Oxford University Press.
• Currie, Greg and Xuanqi Zhu, 2021, “Aesthetic Sense andSocial Cognition: A Story from the Early Stone Age”,Synthese, 198(7): 6553–6572.doi:10.1007/s11229-019-02476-3
• Currie, Greg, Matthew Kieran, Aaron Meskin, and Jon Robson (eds.),2014,Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199669639.001.0001
• Cutting, James E., 2003, “Gustave Caillebotte, FrenchImpressionism, and Mere Exposure”,Psychonomic Bulletin& Review, 10(2): 319–343. doi:10.3758/BF03196493
• –––, 2017, “Mere Exposure and AestheticRealism: A Response to Bence Nanay”,Leonardo, 50(1):64–66. doi:10.1162/LEON_a_01081
• Danto, Arthur C., 2001, “The Pigeon within Us All: A Replyto Three Critics”,The Journal of Aesthetics and ArtCriticism, 59(1): 39–44. doi:10.1111/0021-8529.00005
• Davies, David, 2014, “‘This Is Your Brain onArt’: What Can Philosophy of Art Learn fromNeuroscience?”, in Currie, Kieran, Meskin, and Robson 2014:57–74. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199669639.003.0004
• Davies, Stephen, 1997, “Why Listen to Sad Music if It MakesOne Feel Sad?” inMusic and Meaning, Jenefer Robinson(ed.), Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 242–254.
• –––, 2010, “Why Art Is Not aSpandrel”,British Journal of Aesthetics, 50(4):333–341. doi:10.1093/aesthj/ayp071
• –––, 2012,The Artful Species: Aesthetics,Art, and Evolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press.doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199658541.001.0001
• –––, 2017, “Distancing, Not Embracing, theDistancing-Embracing Model of Art Reception”,Behavioral andBrain Sciences, 40: e357. doi:10.1017/S0140525X17001650
• De Tiège, Alexis, Jan Verpooten, and Johan Braeckman, 2021,“From Animal Signals to Art: Manipulative Animal Signaling andthe Evolutionary Foundations of Aesthetic Behavior and ArtProduction”,The Quarterly Review of Biology, 96(1):1–27. doi:10.1086/713210
• Delplanque, Sylvain, Géraldine Coppin, LaurèneBloesch, Isabelle Cayeux, and David Sander, 2015, “The MereExposure Effect Depends on an Odor’s InitialPleasantness”,Frontiers in Psychology, 6(3 July): art.920. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00920
• Dickie, George, 1962, “Is Psychology Relevant toAesthetics?”,The Philosophical Review, 71(3):285–302. doi:10.2307/2183429
• Dissanayake, Ellen, 1992,Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comesfrom and Why, New York: Free Press.
• –––, 2000,Art and Intimacy: How the ArtsBegan, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
• –––, 2017, “Ethology, InterpersonalNeurobiology, and Play: Insights into the Evolutionary Origin of theArts”,American Journal of Play, 9(2):143–168.
• Dorsch, Fabian, 2011, “The Aesthetic Relevance of EmpiricalFindings”,Kongress-Akten der Deutschen Gesellschaftfür Ästhetik, 2: 1–21
• Dutton, Denis, 1979, “Artistic crimes: The problem offorgery in the arts”,British Journal of Aesthetics,19(4): 302–314. doi:10.1093/bjaesthetics/19.4.302
• –––, 2003, “Aesthetics and EvolutionaryPsychology”, inThe Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics,Jerrold Levinson (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press,693–705.
• –––, 2009,The Art Instinct: Beauty,Pleasure, and Human Evolution, New York: Bloomsbury Press.
• Egloff, Boris, 2017, “You Are Not Alone—Social Sharingas a Necessary Addition to the Embracing Factor”,Behavioraland Brain Sciences, 40: e358. doi:10.1017/S0140525X17001662
• Falk, John H. and John D. Balling, 2010, “EvolutionaryInfluence on Human Landscape Preference”,Environment andBehavior, 42(4): 479–493. doi:10.1177/0013916509341244
• Feagin, Susan L., 1983, “The Pleasures of Tragedy”,American Philosophical Quarterly, 20(1): 95–104.
• Fechner, Gustav Theodor, 1871,Zur experimentalenAesthetik, Leipzig: Hirzel.
• Fodor, J.A., 1983,The Modularity of Mind, Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.
• –––, 1992, “A Theory of the Child’sTheory of Mind”,Cognition, 44(3): 283–296.doi:10.1016/0010-0277(92)90004-2
• Foo, Yong Zhi, Leigh W. Simmons, and Gillian Rhodes, 2017,“Predictors of Facial Attractiveness and Health inHumans”,Scientific Reports, 7(1): 39731.doi:10.1038/srep39731
• Frazer, James George, 1890 [1994],The Golden Bough: A Studyin Comparative Religion, 2 volumes, London: Macmillan. Anabridged version of the second and third editions asThe GoldenBough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Robert Fraser (ed.),Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Freedberg, David and Vittorio Gallese, 2007, “Motion,Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience”,Trends inCognitive Sciences, 11(5): 197–203.doi:10.1016/j.tics.2007.02.003
• Friston, Karl, 2010, “The Free-Energy Principle: A UnifiedBrain Theory?”,Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2):127–138. doi:10.1038/nrn2787
• Fuentes, Agustín, 2020, “The Evolution of a HumanImagination”, inThe Cambridge Handbook of theImagination, Anna Abraham (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 13–29. doi:10.1017/9781108580298.002
• Gallagher, Shaun and Daniel D. Hutto, 2008, “UnderstandingOthers Through Primary Interaction and Narrative Practice”, inThe Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity, JordanZlatev, Timothy P. Racine, Chris Sinha, and Esa Itkonen (eds) ,London: John Benjamins, 17–38.
• Gallese, Vittorio and David Freedberg, 2007, “Mirror andCanonical Neurons Are Crucial Elements in Esthetic Response”,Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(10): 411.doi:10.1016/j.tics.2007.07.006
• Gaut, Berys, 1993, “The Paradox of Horror”,British Journal of Aesthetics, 33(4): 333–345.doi:10.1093/bjaesthetics/33.4.333
• –––, 2007,Art, Emotion and Ethics,Oxford: Oxford University Press.doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199263219.001.0001
• Gell, Alfred, 1998,Art and Agency, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.
• Gilpin, William, 1782,Observations on the River Wye, andSeveral Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to PicturesqueBeauty; made in the Summer of the Year 1770, London: R. Blamire.Reprinted Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
• Godfrey-Smith, Peter, 2013, “Review ofThe ArtfulSpecies: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution, by StephenDavies”,Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, August. [Godfrey-Smith 2013 available online]
• Goldman, Alvin I., 1989, “InterpretationPsychologized”,Mind & Language, 4(3):161–185. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0017.1989.tb00249.x
• Gordon, Robert M., 1986, “Folk Psychology asSimulation”,Mind & Language, 1(2): 158–171.doi:10.1111/j.1468-0017.1986.tb00324.x
• Gowlett, John A. J., 2021, “Deep Structure in the AcheuleanAdaptation: Technology, Sociality and Aesthetic Emergence”,Adaptive Behavior, 29(2): 197–216.doi:10.1177/1059712320965713
• Graham, Gordon, 2014, “Aesthetics as a NormativeScience”,Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 75:249–264. doi:10.1017/S1358246114000216
• Grammer, Karl, Bernhard Fink, Anders P. Møller, and RandyThornhill, 2003, “Darwinian Aesthetics: Sexual Selection and theBiology of Beauty”,Biological Reviews, 78(3):385–407. doi:10.1017/S1464793102006085
• Grant, James, 2020, “Art and Achievement”,Philosophical Studies, 177(9): 2517–2539.doi:10.1007/s11098-019-01324-x
• Greenberg, Clement, 1960, “Modernist Painting”, radiobroadcast,Forum Lectures, Washington, DC: Voice of America.Revised printed version in 1965,Art and Literature, 4:193–201.
• Grice, H. P., 1957, “Meaning”,The PhilosophicalReview, 66(3): 377–308. doi:10.2307/2182440
• Guter, Eran, 2020, “The Philosophical Significance ofWittgenstein’s Experiments on Rhythm, Cambridge 1912-13”,Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics, 57(1):28–43. doi:10.33134/eeja.27
• Hansen, Jochim, Alice Dechêne, and Michaela Wänke,2008, “Discrepant Fluency Increases Subjective Truth”,Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44(3):687–691. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2007.04.005
• Happé, Francesca G.E., 1993, “CommunicativeCompetence and Theory of Mind in Autism: A Test of RelevanceTheory”,Cognition, 48(2): 101–119.doi:10.1016/0010-0277(93)90026-R
• Harris, Paul L., 2000,The Work of the Imagination,Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Hartner, Marcus, 2017, “Scientific Concepts in LiteraryStudies”, inCognitive Literary Science: Dialogues betweenLiterature and Cognition, Michael Burke and Emily T. Troscianko(eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 17–34.doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190496869.003.0002
• Heal, Jane, 1986, “Replication and Functionalism”, inLanguage, Mind, and Logic, Jeremy Butterfield (ed.),Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Heyes, Cecilia, 2021, “Is Morality a Gadget? Nature, Nurtureand Culture in Moral Development”,Synthese, 198(5):4391–4414. doi:10.1007/s11229-019-02348-w
• Heyes, Cecilia M. and Chris D. Frith, 2014, “The CulturalEvolution of Mind Reading”,Science, 344(6190):1243091. doi:10.1126/science.1243091
• Higuchi, Satomi, Thierry Chaminade, Hiroshi Imamizu, and MitsuoKawato, 2009, “Shared Neural Correlates for Language and ToolUse in Broca’s Area”,NeuroReport, 20(15):1376–1381. doi:10.1097/WNR.0b013e3283315570
• Hiscock, Peter, 2014, “Learning in Lithic Landscapes: AReconsideration of the Hominid ‘Toolmaking’ Niche”,Biological Theory, 9(1): 27–41.doi:10.1007/s13752-013-0158-3
• Hohwy Jacob, 2020, “New directions in predictiveprocessing”,Mind &Language, 35: 209–223.doi.org/10.1111/mila.12281HOHWY223
• Hopkins, Robert, 1998,Picture, Image and Experience: APhilosophical Inquiry, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.
• Huddleston, Andrew, 2012, “In Defense of ArtisticValue”,The Philosophical Quarterly, 62(249):705–714. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9213.2012.00089.x
• Hume, David, 1757 [1987], “Of Tragedy”, in hisEssays, Moral, Political, and Literary, Part I, Essay 22.Reprinted, Eugene F. Miller (ed.), Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics,1987.
• Hyman, John, 2010, “Art and Neuroscience”, inBeyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Art andScience, Roman Frigg and Matthew Hunter (eds.), (Boston Studiesin The Philosophy of Science 262), Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands,245–261. doi:10.1007/978-90-481-3851-7_11
• Irvin, Sherri, 2014, “Is Aesthetic ExperiencePossible?”, in Currie, Kieran, Meskin, and Robson 2014:37–56. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199669639.003.0003
• –––, 2017, “Resisting Body Oppression: AnAesthetic Approach”,Feminist Philosophy Quarterly,3(4): art. 3. doi:10.5206/fpq/2017.4.3
• Johnson, Galen A., 2009,The Retrieval of the Beautiful:Thinking Through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics, Evanston, IL:Northwestern University Press.
• Johnson-Laird, P. N., 1983,Mental Models: Towards a CognitiveScience of Language, Inference, and Consciousness, Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.
• Joyce, Richard, 2007,The Evolution of Morality,Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• –––, 2013, “Irrealism and the Genealogy ofMorals”,Ratio, 26(4): 351–372.doi:10.1111/rati.12027
• Kalick, S. Michael, Leslie A. Zebrowitz, Judith H. Langlois, andRobert M. Johnson, 1998, “Does Human Facial AttractivenessHonestly Advertise Health? Longitudinal Data on an EvolutionaryQuestion”,Psychological Science, 9(1): 8–13.doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00002
• Kamber, Richard, 2011, “Experimental Philosophy ofArt”,The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,69(2): 197–208. doi:10.1111/j.1540-6245.2011.01461.x
• Kaplan, Rachel and Janet Frey Talbot, 1988, “Ethnicity andPreference for Natural Settings: A Review and Recent Findings”,Landscape and Urban Planning, 15(1–2): 107–117.doi:10.1016/0169-2046(88)90019-9
• Kant. Immanuel, 1790 [2000],Kritik der Urteilskraft,Berlin. Translated asCritique of the Power of Judgment (TheCambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant), Paul Guyer (ed.),Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (trans), Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.
• Keltner, Dacher and Jonathan Haidt, 2003, “Approaching Awe,a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion”,Cognition andEmotion, 17(2): 297–314. doi:10.1080/02699930302297
• Keltner, Dacher, Disa Sauter, Jessica Tracy, and Alan Cowen, 2019,“Emotional Expression: Advances in Basic Emotion Theory”,Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 43(2): 133–160.doi:10.1007/s10919-019-00293-3
• Kesner, Ladislav and Jiří Horáček, 2017,“Empathy-Related Responses to Depicted People in ArtWorks”,Frontiers in Psychology, 8(24 February): art.228. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00228
• Kidd, David Comer and Emanuele Castano, 2013, “ReadingLiterary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind”,Science,342(6156): 377–380. doi:10.1126/science.1239918
• –––, 2019, “Reading Literary Fiction andTheory of Mind: Three Preregistered Replications and Extensions ofKidd and Castano (2013)”,Social Psychological andPersonality Science, 10(4): 522–531.doi:10.1177/1948550618775410
• Kim, Hanna, Markus Kneer, and Michael T. Stuart, 2018, “TheContext-Dependence of Imaginative Resistance”, Cova andRéhault 2018: 143–166.
• Kivy, Peter, 1990,Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections onthe Purely Musical Experience, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress.
• –––, 2006, “Mood and Music: SomeReflections for Noël Carroll”,The Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism, 64(2): 271–281.doi:10.1111/j.0021-8529.2006.00248.x
• –––, 2007, “Moodology: A Response to LauraSizer”,The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,65(3): 312–318. doi:10.1111/j.1540-594X.2007.00262.x
• Kohn, Marek and Steven Mithen, 1999, “Handaxes: Products ofSexual Selection?”,Antiquity, 73(281): 518–526.doi:10.1017/S0003598X00065078
• Konečni, Vladimir J., 2013, “Music, Affect, Method,Data: Reflections on the Carroll Versus Kivy Debate”,TheAmerican Journal of Psychology, 126(2): 179–195.doi:10.5406/amerjpsyc.126.2.0179
• Korsgaard, Christine M., 1983, “Two Distinctions inGoodness”,The Philosophical Review, 92(2):169–195. doi:10.2307/2184924
• Korsmeyer, Carolyn, 2019,Things: In Touch with the Past,Oxford: Oxford University Press.doi:10.1093/oso/9780190904876.001.0001
• Kruger, Justin, Derrick Wirtz, Leaf Van Boven, and T. WilliamAltermatt, 2004, “The Effort Heuristic”,Journal ofExperimental Social Psychology, 40(1): 91–98.doi:10.1016/S0022-1031(03)00065-9
• Kukkonen, Karin, 2020,Probability Designs: Literature andPredictive Processing, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Lamarque, Peter, 2007, “Aesthetics and Literature: AProblematic Relation?”,Philosophical Studies, 135(1):27–40. doi:10.1007/s11098-007-9090-3
• Lamarque, Peter and Stein Haugom Olsen, 1994,Truth, Fictionand Literature: A Philosophical Perspective, Oxford: ClarendonPress.
• Leknes, Siri, Chantal Berna, Michael C. Lee, Gregory D. Snyder,Guido Biele, and Irene Tracey, 2013, “The Importance of Context:When Relative Relief Renders Pain Pleasant”,Pain,154(3): 402–410. doi:10.1016/j.pain.2012.11.018
• Levinson, Jerrold, 2006,Contemplating Art: Essays inAesthetics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199206179.001.0001
• –––, 2013, “Causal History, Actual andApparent”,Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(2):150–151. doi:10.1017/S0140525X12001707
• –––, 2016, “Artistic Achievement andArtistic Value”, in hisAesthetic Pursuits: Essays inPhilosophy of Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press,47–59.
• Lewis, David K., 1978, “Truth in Fiction”,American Philosophical Quarterly, 15(1): 37–46.
• Liao, Shen-yi and Tamar Gendler, 2018 [2020],“Imagination”, inThe Stanford Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy (Summer 2020), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/imagination/>
• Linsen, Sarah, Mieke H. R. Leyssen, Jonathan Sammartino, andStephen E. Palmer, 2011, “Aesthetic Preferences in the Size ofImages of Real-World Objects”,Perception, 40(3):291–298. doi:10.1068/p6835
• Lipps, Theodor, 1903,Ästhetik: Psychologie desSchönen und der Kunst: Grundlegung der Ästhetik, ErsterTeil, Hamburg, Germany, L Voss.
• Livingstone, Margaret, 2002,Vision and Art: The Biology ofSeeing, New York: Abrams
• Locher, Paul J., 2014, “Contemporary ExperimentalAesthetics: Procedures and Findings”, inHandbook of theEconomics of Art and Culture, Volume 2, Victor A. Ginsburgh andDavid Throsby (eds.), Oxford: Elsevier, 49–80.doi:10.1016/B978-0-444-53776-8.00003-9
• Lopes, Dominic McIver, 2014, “Feckless Reason”, inCurrie, Kieran, Meskin, and Robson 2014: 21–36.doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199669639.003.0002
• Margolis, Joseph, 1960, “Aesthetic Perception”,The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 19(2):209–213. doi:10.2307/428287
• Marr, David, 1982,Vision: A Computational Investigation intothe Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information,San Francisco, CA: W. H. Freeman and Company.
• Mar, Raymond A., 2018a, “Stories and the Promotion of SocialCognition”,Current Directions in PsychologicalScience, 27(4). doi:10.1177/0963721417749654
• –––, 2018b, “Evaluating whether storiescan promote social cognition: Introducing the Social Processes andContent Entrained by Narrative (SPaCEN) framework”,Discourse Processes, 55(1): 1–26.doi:10.1080/0163853X.2018.1448209
• Mar, Raymond A. and Keith Oatley, 2008, “The Function ofFiction Is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience”,Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(3): 173–192.doi:10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00073.x
• Matravers, Derek, 2014,Fiction and Narrative, Oxford:Oxford University Press.doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199647019.001.0001
• McGlone, Matthew S. and Jessica Tofighbakhsh, 2000, “Birdsof a Feather Flock Conjointly (?): Rhyme as Reason inAphorisms”,Psychological Science, 11(5):424–428. doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00282
• McManus, I. C., 2011, “Beauty Is Instinctive Feeling:Experimenting on Aesthetics and Art”, inThe Aesthetic Mind:Philosophy and Psychology, Elisabeth Schellekens and Peter Goldie(eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 169–189.doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199691517.003.0010
• Menninghaus, Winfried, Valentin Wagner, Julian Hanich, EugenWassiliwizky, Thomas Jacobsen, and Stefan Koelsch, 2017, “TheDistancing-Embracing Model of the Enjoyment of Negative Emotions inArt Reception”,Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 40:e347. doi:10.1017/S0140525X17000309
• Menninghaus, Winfried, Valentin Wagner, Eugen Wassiliwizky, ThomasJacobsen, and Christine A. Knoop, 2017, “The Emotional andAesthetic Powers of Parallelistic Diction”,Poetics,63: 47–59. doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2016.12.001
• Mercier, Hugo and Dan Sperber, 2017,The Enigma ofReason, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Meskin, Aaron, Mark Phelan, Margaret Moore, and Matthew Kieran,2013, “Mere Exposure to Bad Art”,British Journal ofAesthetics, 53(2): 139–164. doi:10.1093/aesthj/ays060
• Meskin, Aaron, Jon Robson, Anna Ichino, Kris Goffin, and AnneliesMonseré, 2018, “Philosophical Aesthetics and CognitiveScience”,WIREs Cognitive Science, 9(1): e1445.doi:10.1002/wcs.1445
• Miller Geoffrey F., 2000,The Mating Mind: How Sexual ChoiceShaped the Evolution of Human Nature, New York: Doubleday.
• Miyazono, Kengo and Shen-yi Liao, 2016, “The CognitiveArchitecture of Imaginative Resistance”, inThe RoutledgeHandbook of Philosophy of Imagination, Amy Kind (ed.), New York:Routledge, pp. 233–246.
• Møller, A. P. and R. Thornhill, 1998, “BilateralSymmetry and Sexual Selection: A Meta‐Analysis”,TheAmerican Naturalist, 151(2): 174–192.doi:10.1086/286110
• Monseré, Annelies, 2015, “Experimental Philosophy andIntuitions on What Is Art and What Is Not”,Teorema: RevistaInternacional de Filosofía, 34(3): 159–176.
• Nanay, Bence, 2011, “Perceiving Pictures”,Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 10(4):461–480. doi:10.1007/s11097-011-9219-x
• –––, 2014, “Philosophy of Perception as aGuide to Aesthetics”, in Currie, Kieran, Meskin, and Robson2014: 101–120.doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199669639.003.0006
• Newman, George E., Gil Diesendruck, and Paul Bloom, 2011,“Celebrity Contagion and the Value of Objects”,Journal of Consumer Research, 38(2): 215–228.doi:10.1086/658999
• Newman, George E. and Paul Bloom, 2012, “Art andAuthenticity: The Importance of Originals in Judgments ofValue.”,Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,141(3): 558–569. doi:10.1037/a0026035
• Nguyen, C Thi, 2020, “Autonomy and AestheticEngagement”,Mind, 129(516): 1127–1156.doi:10.1093/mind/fzz054
• Noveck, Ira, & Andres Posada, 2003, “Characterizing thetime course of an implicature: An evoked potentials study”,Brain and Language, 85(2): 203–210.doi:10.1016/S0093-934X(03)00053-1
• Nussbaum, Martha Craven, 1990,Love’s Knowledge,Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1995,Poetic Justice: The LiteraryImagination and Public Life, Boston: Beacon Press.
• Orians, Gordon H. and Judith H. Heerwagen, 1992, “EvolvedResponses to Landscapes”, inThe Adapted Mind: EvolutionaryPsychology and the Generation of Culture, Jerome H. Barkow, LedaCosmides, and John Tooby (eds.), New York: Oxford University Press,555–580.
• Paden, Roger, Laurlyn K. Harmon, and Charles R. Milling, 2012,“Ecology, Evolution, and Aesthetics: Towards an EvolutionaryAesthetics of Nature”,British Journal of Aesthetics,52(2): 123–139. doi:10.1093/aesthj/ays001
• Palmer, Stephen, Jonathan Gardner, and Thomas Wickens, 2008,“Aesthetic Issues in Spatial Composition: Effects of Positionand Direction on Framing Single Objects”,SpatialVision, 21(3–5): 421–449.doi:10.1163/156856808784532662
• Palmer, Stephen E. and Karen B. Schloss, 2010, “AnEcological Valence Theory of Human Color Preference”,Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(19):8877–8882. doi:10.1073/pnas.0906172107
• Panero, Maria Eugenia, Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Jessica Black,Thalia R. Goldstein, Jennifer L. Barnes, Hiram Brownell, and EllenWinner, 2016, “Does Reading a Single Passage of Literary FictionReally Improve Theory of Mind? An Attempt at Replication.”,Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111(5):e46–e54. doi:10.1037/pspa0000064
• Papineau, David, 2005, “Social Learning and the BaldwinEffect”, inEvolution, Rationality, and Cognition: ACognitive Science for the Twenty-First Century, AntónioZilhão (ed.), New York: Routledge, 40–60.
• Peacocke, Christopher, 1987, “Depiction”,ThePhilosophical Review, 96(3): 383–410.doi:10.2307/2185226
• Piff, Paul K., Pia Dietze, Matthew Feinberg, Daniel M. Stancato,and Dacher Keltner, 2015, “Awe, the Small Self, and ProsocialBehavior.”,Journal of Personality and SocialPsychology, 108(6): 883–899. doi:10.1037/pspi0000018
• Pinker. Steven, 1997,How the Mind Works, New York: W. W.Norton.
• Pound, Nicholas, David W. Lawson, Arshed M. Toma, StephenRichmond, Alexei I. Zhurov, and Ian S. Penton-Voak, 2014,“Facial Fluctuating Asymmetry Is Not Associated with ChildhoodIll-Health in a Large British Cohort Study”,Proceedings ofthe Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 281(1792): 20141639.doi:10.1098/rspb.2014.1639
• Prum, Richard O., 2013, “Coevolutionary Aesthetics in Humanand Biotic Artworlds”,Biology & Philosophy, 28(5):811–832. doi:10.1007/s10539-013-9389-8
• Reber, Rolf, 2012, “Processing Fluency, Aesthetic Pleasure,and Culturally Shared Taste”, in Shimamura and Palmer 2012:223–249. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199732142.003.0055
• Reber, Rolf and Norbert Schwarz, 1999, “Effects ofPerceptual Fluency on Judgments of Truth”,Consciousness andCognition, 8(3): 338–342. doi:10.1006/ccog.1999.0386
• Reber, Rolf, Norbert Schwarz, and Piotr Winkielman, 2004,“Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in thePerceiver’s Processing Experience?”,Personality andSocial Psychology Review, 8(4): 364–382.doi:10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_3
• Robinson, Jenefer, 2005,Deeper than Reason: Emotion and ItsRole in Literature, Music, and Art, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress. doi:10.1093/0199263655.001.0001
• Robson, Jon, 2014, “A Social Epistemology of Aesthetics:Belief Polarization, Echo Chambers and Aesthetic Judgement”,Synthese, 191(11): 2513–2528.doi:10.1007/s11229-014-0437-y
• –––, 2018, “Is Perception the CanonicalRoute to Aesthetic Judgment?”,Australasian Journal ofPhilosophy, 96(4): 657–668.doi:10.1080/00048402.2017.1389964
• Rose, Sam and Bence Nanay, 2022, “Perception”, inBlackwell Companion to Arthur Danto, Jonathan Gilmore andLydia Goehr (eds.), Oxford: Blackwell.
• Ross, Stephanie, 2013, “Context, Causality, andAppreciation”,Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(2):155–156. doi:10.1017/S0140525X12001768
• Schellenberg, Susanna, 2013, “Belief and Desire inImagination and Immersion”,Journal of Philosophy,110(9): 497–517. doi:10.5840/jphil2013110914
• Schellekens, Elisabeth, 2006, “Towards a ReasonableObjectivism for Aesthetic Judgements”,British Journal ofAesthetics, 46(2): 163–177. doi:10.1093/aesthj/ayj020
• Schier, Flint, 1983, “Tragedy and the Community ofSentiment”, inPhilosophy and Fiction: Essays in LiteraryAesthetics, Peter Lamarque (ed.), Aberdeen: Aberdeen UniversityPress, 73–92.
• Schloss, Karen B., Rosa M. Poggesi, and Stephen E. Palmer, 2011,“Effects of University Affiliation and ‘SchoolSpirit’ on Color Preferences: Berkeley versus Stanford”,Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18(3): 498–504.doi:10.3758/s13423-011-0073-1
• Schmarsow, August, 1894,Das Wesen der architektonischenSchöpfung: Antrittsvorlesung, gehalten in der Aula der K.Universität Leipzig am 8. November 1893, Leipzig: Karl W.Hiersemann; translated as “The Essence of ArchitecturalCreation”, inEmpathy, Form, and Space: Problems in GermanAesthetics, 1873–1893, Harry Francis Mallgrave, andEleftherios Ikonomou (eds. and trans.), Santa Monica, CA: Getty Centerfor the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994, 281–297.doi:10.11588/DIGLIT.49891
• Scruton, Roger, 2014, “Music and Cognitive Science”,Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 75: 231–247.doi:10.1017/S1358246114000277
• Shapsay, Sandra, 2021, “A Two-Tiered Theory of theSublime”,The British Journal of Aesthetics, 61(2):123–143. doi:10.1093/aesthj/ayaa047
• Shelley, James, 2006 [2020], “18th Century BritishAesthetics”, inThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(Winter 2020), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/aesthetics-18th-british/>
• Shimamura, Arthur P. and Stephen E. Palmer, 2012,AestheticScience: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199732142.001.0001
• Sibley, Frank, 1959, “Aesthetic Concepts”,ThePhilosophical Review, 68(4): 421–450.doi:10.2307/2182490
• –––, 1965, “Aesthetic andNonaesthetic”,The Philosophical Review, 74(2):135–159. doi:10.2307/2183262
• Sizer, Laura, 2007, “Moods in the Music and the Man: AResponse to Kivy and Carroll”,The Journal of Aesthetics andArt Criticism, 65(3): 307–312.doi:10.1111/j.1540-594X.2007.00261.x
• Smith, Rosanna K., George E. Newman, and Ravi Dhar, 2016,“Closer to the Creator: Temporal Contagion Explains thePreference for Earlier Serial Numbers”,Journal of ConsumerResearch, 42(5): 653–668. doi:10.1093/jcr/ucv054
• Smuts, Aaron, 2009, “Art and Negative Affect”,Philosophy Compass, 4(1): 39–55.doi:10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00199.x
• Solli, Mattias and Thomas Netland, 2021, “Enacting a JazzBeat: Temporality in Sonic Environment and SymbolicCommunication”,British Journal of Aesthetics,61(4):485–504. doi:10.1093/aesthj/ayab048
• Song, Hyunjin and Norbert Schwarz, 2008, “Fluency and theDetection of Misleading Questions: Low Processing Fluency Attenuatesthe Moses Illusion”,Social Cognition, 26(6):791–799. doi:10.1521/soco.2008.26.6.791
• Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson, 1995,Relevance:Communication and Cognition, second edition, Oxford: Blackwell.First edition 1986.
• –––, 2002, “Pragmatics, Modularity andMind-reading”,Mind & Language, 17(1‐2):3–23. doi:10.1111/1468-0017.00186
• Spikins, Penny, 2012, “Goodwill Hunting? Debates over the‘Meaning’ of Lower Palaeolithic Handaxe FormRevisited”,World Archaeology, 44(3): 378–392.doi:10.1080/00438243.2012.725889
• Steinberg, Leo, 1965, “Other Criteria”, reprinted inhisOther Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-CenturyArt, New York: Oxford University Press, 1972, 55–92.
• Stock, Kathleen, 2014, “Physiological Evidence and theParadox of Fiction”, in Currie, Kieran, Meskin, and Robson 2014:205–226. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199669639.003.0011
• Stojanovic, Isidora, 2018, “An Empirical Approach toAesthetic Adjectives”, in Cova and Réhault 2018:221–240.
• Stokes, Dustin, 2009, “Aesthetics and CognitiveScience”,Philosophy Compass, 4(5): 715–733.doi:10.1111/j.1747-9991.2009.00226.x
• Torregrossa, Clotilde, 2020, “A Defence of ExperimentalPhilosophy in Aesthetics”,Inquiry, 63(8):885–907. doi:10.1080/0020174X.2017.1385527
• Turnbull, Oliver H., Jon Driver, and Rosaleen A. McCarthy, 2004,“2D But Not 3D: Pictorial-Depth Deficits in a Case of VisualAgnosia”,Cortex, 40(4–5): 723–738.doi:10.1016/S0010-9452(08)70167-9
• Urmson, J. O., 1957, “What makes a situationaesthetic?”Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society(Supplementary Volume), 31: 75–92.
• Van de Cruys, Sander and Johan Wagemans, 2011, “Gestalts asPredictions—Some Reflections and an Application to Art”,Gestalt Theory, 33(3–4): 325–344.
• Van der Henst, Jean-Baptiste, Laure Carles, and Dan Sperber, 2002,“Truthfulness and Relevance in Telling The Time”,Mind& Language, 17(5): 457–466.doi:10.1111/1468-0017.00207
• Van der Henst, Jean-Baptiste and Dan Sperber, 2004, “Testingthe Cognitive and Communicative Principles of Relevance”, inExperimental Pragmatics, Ira A. Noveck and Dan Sperber (eds),London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 147–171.
• Vrahimis, Andreas, 2020, “Wittgenstein and Heidegger againsta Science of Aesthetics”,Estetika: The European Journal ofAesthetics, 57(1): 64–85. doi:10.33134/eeja.29
• Vischer Robert, 1873,Über das optische Formgefühl:ein Beitrag zur Aesthetik, Leipzig: Credner.
• Walton, Kendall L., 1970, “Categories of Art”,ThePhilosophical Review, 79(3): 334–367.doi:10.2307/2183933
• –––, 1973, “Pictures andMake-Believe”,The Philosophical Review, 82(3):283–319. doi:10.2307/2183897
• –––, 1978, “Fearing Fictions”,Journal of Philosophy, 75(1): 5–27.doi:10.2307/2025831
• –––, 1983, “Fiction, Fiction-Making, andStyles of Fictionality”,Philosophy and Literature,7(1): 78–88. doi:10.1353/phl.1983.0004
• –––, 1990,Mimesis as Make-Believe: On theFoundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press.
• –––, 1992, “Seeing-In and SeeingFictionally”, inPsychoanalysis Mind and Art: Perspectiveson Richard Wollheim (Aristotelian Society Series 11), Jim Hopkinsand Anthony Savile (eds.), Oxford: Blackwell, 281–290.
• –––, 2008,Marvelous Images: On Values andthe Arts, New York: Oxford University Press.
• Weber, Bruce H. and David J. Depew (eds.), 2003,Evolution andLearning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered (Life and Mind),Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Weinberg, Jonathan M. and Aaron Meskin, 2006, “Puzzling Overthe Imagination: Philosophical Problems, ArchitecturalSolutions”, in S. Nichols (ed.),The Architecture of theImagination, Oxford: oxford University Press, 175–202.
• Wilkins, John S. and Paul E. Griffiths, 2012, “EvolutionaryDebunking Arguments in Three Domains: Fact, Value, andReligion”, Gregory W. Dawes and James Maclaurin (eds.), inANew Science of Religion, New York: Routledge, 133–144.
• Williamson, Timothy, 2011, “Philosophical Expertise and theBurden of Proof”,Metaphilosophy, 42(3): 215–229.doi:10.1111/j.1467-9973.2011.01685.x
• Wilson, Catherine, 2016, “Another DarwinianAesthetics”,The Journal of Aesthetics and ArtCriticism, 74(3): 237–252. doi:10.1111/jaac.12283
• Wilson, Deirdre, 2011, “Relevance and the Interpretation ofLiterary Works”, inObserving Linguistic Phenomena: AFestschrift for Seiji Uchida, A. Yoshimura (ed.), Tokyo:Eihohsha, 3–19.
• –––, 2018, “Relevance theory and literaryinterpretation”, in Terence Cave & Deirdre Wilson (eds.),Reading Beyond the Code: Literature and Relevance Theory,Oxford: Oxford University Press, 185–204.
• Wilson, Deirdre and Dan Sperber, 2012,Meaning andRelevance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.doi:10.1017/CBO9781139028370
• Wilson, Edward O., 1975,Sociobiology. The New Synthesis,Cambridge, MA: The Belnap Press.
• Wimmer, Lena, Gregory Currie, Stacie Friend, and Heather JaneFerguson, 2021a, “Testing Correlates of Lifetime Exposure toPrint Fiction Following a Multi-Method Approach: Evidence From Youngand Older Readers”,Imagination, Cognition andPersonality, 41(1): 54–86.doi:10.1177/0276236621996244
• Wimmer Lena, Stacie Friend, Gregory Currie, Heather J. Ferguson,2019b, “Reading Fictional Narratives to Improve Social and MoralCognition: The Influence of Narrative Perspective, Transportation, andIdentification”,Frontiers in Communication, 5: 611935.doi:10.3389/fcomm.2020.611935
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1967,Lectures & Conversations onAesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, Cyril Barrett (ed.),Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig and B. Muscio, 1912, “Experiments onRhythm (Demonstration)”,British Journal of Psychology,5: 356.
• Wölfflin, Heinrich, 1886,Prolegomena zu einerPsychologie der Architektur, Berlin: Mann Verlag.
• –––, 1928, “Uber das Rechts und Linkl inBild”, in hisGedanken zur Kunstgeschichte, Basel:Schwabe, pp. 82–90.
• Wollheim, Richard, 1980, “Seeing-As, Seeing-In, andPictorial Representation”, in hisArt and Its Objects,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 205–226.
• –––, 1993,The Mind and its Depths,Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 1998, “On PictorialRepresentation”,The Journal of Aesthetics and ArtCriticism, 56(3): 217–226. doi:10.2307/432361
• Wundt, Wilhelm, 1874,Grundzuge der physiologischenpsychologie, Leipzig: W. Engelman.
• Zangwill, Nick, 2004, “Against emotion: Hanslick was rightabout music”,British Journal of Aesthetics, 44(1):29–43.
• –––, 2018, “Beauty and the Agreeable: ACritique of Experimental Aesthetics”, in Cova and Réhault2018: 289–308.
• Zeki, Semir, 1999, “Art and the Brain”,Journal ofConsciousness Studies, 6(6–7): 76–96.
• Zeki, Semir, Yan Bao, and Ernst Pöppel, 2020,“Neuroaesthetics: The Art, Science, and Brain Triptych”,PsyCh Journal, 9(4): 427–428. doi:10.1002/pchj.383

Academic Tools

	How to cite this entry.
	Preview the PDF version of this entry at theFriends of the SEP Society.
	Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO).
	Enhanced bibliography for this entryatPhilPapers, with links to its database.

Other Internet Resources

• Phelan, Mark, 2017, “XPhi Replicability Project: Replication of Liao, Strohminger, and Sripada 2014”,Open Science Framework, 28 July 2017.

Related Entries

aesthetics: British, in the 18th century |authenticity |cognitive science |emotion |empathy |imagination |linguistics: philosophy of |neuroscience, philosophy of |perception: the contents of