Aesthetics and the scope and limits of cognitive science.

摘要

Recently, cognitive science and related fields have shown a growing interest in aesthetics and the arts, as evidenced by the titles of recently published books such as The Aesthetic Mind, The Aesthetic Brain, and Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind. In one sense, this flurry of activity represents a new development in cognitive science. In another sense, it marks the latest chapter in a centuries-old quest to understand the nature of aesthetic judgment and value, dating back (at least) to David Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste" (1757).;In my dissertation, I examine this ongoing quest with two overarching questions in mind. First, what can we hope to learn about aesthetics from cognitive science? Second, what can cognitive scientists learn from the checkered history of their predecessors? In analyzing past scientific research on aesthetics, I focus on various attempts to explain aesthetic value or preference in terms of rules, laws, or formulas. I argue that these efforts inevitably fall short of their ambitions, not because the science is still immature (the "it's still early" argument), but because there ultimately are no rules, laws, or formulas that can be applied in general, context-free fashion, independently of human judgment.;However, the fact that we cannot formalize aesthetic judgment in this way does not mean that it is fundamentally mysterious. I show that by carefully distinguishing between different levels of description, we can reconcile the capacity for aesthetic judgment, which is not bound by strict rules or laws, with the notions of mechanism and computation, which are fundamental to explanation in cognitive science. Yet I also stress that aesthetic judgment and appreciation are human activities that take place within a broader context of social and cultural practices, which are not reducible to the level of brain activity or computational models thereof.