The role of personal background knowledge—in particular knowledge about the context of production of an artwork—has been only marginally taken into account in cognitive approaches to art. Addressing this issue is crucial to enhancing these approaches’ explanatory power and framing their collaboration with the humanities (Bullot and Reber 2012). This paper sketches a model of the experience of artworks based on the mechanisms of intention attribution, and shows how this model makes it possible to address the issue of personal background (...) knowledge empirically. I claim that the role of intention attribution in art experience has been incorrectly accounted in the literature because of an overly narrow definition of “intention.” I suggest that the observer can recover not only the artist’s abstract projects, but any kind of mental states that have played a causal role during the production of the work. In addition, I suggest that this recovery occurs in large part unconsciously and/or implicitly. I provide support for these claims by distinguishing three families of psychological mechanisms of intention attribution that are activated by artworks: one involved in the cognition of artifacts, one devoted to communication, and one involved in action perception. (shrink)

A great deal of work in analytic philosophy of art is related to defining what counts as art. So far, cognitive approaches to art have almost entirely ignored this literature. In this paper I discuss the role of intuition in analytic philosophy of art, to show how an empirical research program on art could take advantage of existing work in analytic philosophy. I suggest that the first step of this research program should be to understand how people intuitively categorize something (...) as art. Drawing on results from cognitive science and analytic philosophy, I show that the intuitive categorization of an artifact as art rests on the intentions attributed (frequently implicitly) to the creator of the artifact based both on its appearance and on background knowledge. I discuss how the issue of categorization is related to other empirical issues concerning our relationship to works of art, such as perception, appreciation, interpretation and evaluation. (shrink)

Qu’a donc « voulu dire » l’artiste? Qu’a-t-il recherché? Cette question peut sembler dépassée ou naïve, comme si l’œuvre se suffisait à elle-même. Pour Alessandro Pignocchi, il est impossible de comprendre nos relations aux œuvres d’art sans s’interroger sur les intentions de l’artiste. Les avancées récentes en sciences cognitives suggèrent en effet que chaque aspect de notre expérience d’une œuvre est façonné par les intentions que nous attribuons, pour la plupart inconsciemment, à l’artiste. Nous percevons par exemple, à (...) notre insu, de nombreuses propriétés des œuvres d’art – les traits d’un dessin, certains aspects de la structure des films ou des phrases d’un roman – comme le fruit d’intentions et d’actions que nous aurions nous-mêmes pu produire. Réflexion pluridisciplinaire, cet ouvrage revisite des thèmes classiques de la philosophie de l’art – le concept d’œuvre, la place de l’auteur, du contexte, le rapport de l’œuvre au temps, le statut du jugement artistique – et élabore une série d’outils de pensée visant à enrichir nos relations aux œuvres d’art. Alessandro Pignocchi est docteur de l’EHESS en philosophie et en sciences cognitives, membre de l’Institut Jean-Nicod. Il est aussi illustrateur. (shrink)

The practice of drawing is an ideal study case for framing a cognitive approach to art. In this paper I enumerate six constraints that must be respected by any cognitive theory of drawing production. I evaluate the two major existing theories - Ruskin's theory of the innocent eye and Gombrich' theory of graphic schemes - and show the superiority of Gombrich' theory. I finally provide the first elements for a psychological development of the theory of graphic schemes.

The interaction between the recovery of the artist’s intentions and the perception of an artwork is a classic topic for philosophy and history of art. It also frequently, albeit sometimes implicitly, comes up in everyday thought and conversation about art and artworks. Since recent work in cognitive science can help us understand how we perceive and understand the intentions of others, this discipline could fruitfully participate in a multidisciplinary investigation of the role of intention recovery in art perception. The method (...) I propose is to look for cases where recovery of the artist’s intentions interacts with perception of a work of art, and this cannot be explain by a simple top-down influence of conscious propositional knowledge on perception. I will focus on drawing and show that recovery of the draftsman’s intentional actions is handled by a psychological process shaped by the motor system of the observer. (shrink)

The alleged neural basis of empathic responses to artworks is only of marginal relevance for aesthetics and for cognitive theories of art.

This paper investigates a the cognitive foundations of a pragmatic account of line drawings. It sets to highlight those features of line drawings that make them, as opposed to other types of visual representations, particularly conducive to communication. It is argued that representational and artifactual properties of drawings must be investigated together in order to understand the peculiarities of drawings as communicative tools.

Measurement is widely applied because its results are assumed to be more reliable than opinions and guesses, but this reliability is sometimes justified in a stereotyped way. After a critical analysis of such stereotypes, a structural characterization of measurement is proposed, as partly empirical and partly theoretical process, by showing that it is in fact the structure of the process that guarantees the reliability of its results. On this basis the role and the structure of background knowledge in measurement and (...) the justification of the conditions of object-relatedness ("objectivity") and subject-independence ("intersubjectivity") of measurement are specifically discussed. (shrink)

In 2011, van Dijck and Fias described a positional SNARC effect: the SPoARC. To-be-remembered items presented centrally on a screen seemed to acquire a left-to-right spatial dimension. If confirmed, this spatialization could be crucial for immediate memory theories. However, given the intricate links between visual and spatial dimensions, this effect could be due to the visual presentation, which could have probed the left-to-right direction of reading/writing. To allow a generalization of this effect, we adapted van Dijck and Fias's task using (...) an auditory version of Sternberg's paradigm. Lists of five consonants were auditorily presented at a rate of 3 s/item. A SPoARC effect was observed. The consequences are discussed first from an immediate memory perspective, putting forward the view that order could be coded through spatialization, and then in terms of similarities between SPoARC and SNARC. (shrink)

*Weitere Angaben Inhalt: Nimmt man Reinholds Behauptung ernst, wonach es >der vornehmste Zweck der Philosophie ist, der Menschheit über die Gründe ihrer Pflichten und Rechte in diesem, und ihrer Erwartung für das zukünftige Leben allgemeingiltige Aufschlüsse zu geben, erscheinen seine Hauptwerke aus der Jenaer Zeit in neuem Licht. Nicht nur die frühen Merkur-Briefe, auch der Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens und die Revisionsarbeiten an der Elementarphilosophie vom Sommer 1792 erscheinen dann als eminent praktisch motiviert. Der erste Teil der (...) Untersuchung liefert eine Interpretation von Reinholds Grundlinien der Theorie des Begehrungsvermögens und ihrer Stellung innerhalb des Versuchs von 1789. Es wird nachgewiesen, daß dieses Kapitel das Resultat der unüberwindlichen Schwierigkeit ist, den Gedanken einer absolut freien Tätigkeit innerhalb einer umfassenden Theorie des Vorstellungsvermögens auszudrücken. Der zweite Teil der Arbeit geht den Konsequenzen dieser Schwierigkeit für Reinholds Philosophie bis 1792 nach - der begrifflichen Trennung von Willen und praktischer Vernunft und der Aufwertung des gemeinen Verstandes gegenüber der philosophierenden Vernunft - und argumentiert schließlich, daß Reinhold schon im Sommer 1792 den Grund für seine Preisgabe der Elementarphilosophie. (shrink)

A number of companies allocate ownership rights to stakeholders different from shareholders, despite the fact that the law attributes these rights to the equity holders. This article contributes to an understanding of this evidence by developing a contingency model for the allocation of ownership rights. The model sheds light on why companies, despite pressures from the law, vary in their allocation of ownership rights. The model is based on the assumption that corporations increase their chance to survive and prosper if (...) the stakeholders supplying “critical contributions” receive the ownership rights. According to the model, “critical” contributions involve (1) contractual problems due to specific investments, long-term relationships, and low measurability; (2) the assumption of the uncertainty resting on the company; and (3) the supply of scarce and valuable resources. The model is dynamic because it also provides a basis for understanding why the allocation of ownership rights changes with time. Finally, the article presents the strategies companies can use to realize an efficient distribution of ownership rights among their stakeholders. (shrink)

This article reconstructs and systematically assesses Else’s Voigtländer’s theory of self-feelings. In the first section, I introduce the reader to the basic ideas of this theory by supporting the exegetical claim that the notion of self-feeling encompasses two distinct kinds of experiences: (i) a subject’s long-standing and enduring self-feeling, which is innate and biologically grounded, should be distinguished from (ii) the plurality of episodic self-feelings (or self-conscious emotions) this subject can experience. In the second section, I focus on the particular (...) class of self-feelings that Voigtländer labels as “inauthentic:” these are feelings where the evaluation of the self depends on the evaluations that others have about the self. After elaborating on the morally and epistemically negative connotation Voitgländer attaches to the notion of a feeling’s “inauthenticity,” I reject the generality of her claim in the third section: some social self-feelings are not inauthentic. (shrink)

The paper defends that it is possible to offer a Kantian argument for justifying the introduction of Universal Basic Income (UBI). It first briefly presents Philippe van Parijs’ argument for UBI based on the concept of real freedom for all. In doing so, it will focus on its general structure and central insight, without entering too much into other issues like the economic feasibility of UBI. It second briefly presents Kant’s concept of external freedom and especially focuses on some of (...) its components to assess whether there is some closeness to van Parijs’ concept of real freedom. It further considers whether UBI is not only compatible with a Kantian position, but can be justified from such a position because it represents a tool for concretely realizing external freedom as presented in the _Doctrine of Right_ and for attaining the ethical ideal of virtuosity presented in the _Doctrine of Virtue_. (shrink)

Mereological atomism is the thesis that everything is ultimately composed of atomic parts, i.e., parts without proper parts. Typically, this thesis is characterized by an axiom stating that everything has atomic parts. The present paper argues that the success of this standard characterization depends on how the notions of sum and composition are defined. In particular, we put forward a novel definition of mereological sum that: (i) is not equivalent to existing definitions in the literature, if no strong decomposition principle (...) is assumed; (ii) can be used to argue that the standard characterization of atomism fails, because having atomic parts is not sufficient to be a sum of atoms; and (iii) provides a purely mereological distinction between structured and unstructured wholes, contributing to the ongoing debate on this crucial topic. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to identify and analyze a set of challenges that are likely to be encountered when one embarks on fieldwork in linguistic communities that feature small, young, and/or non-standard languages with a goal to elicit big sets of rich data. For each challenge, we (i) explain its nature and implications, (ii) offer one or more examples of how it is manifested in actual linguistic communities, and (iii) where possible, offer recommendations for addressing it effectively. Our (...) list of challenges involves static characteristics (e.g., absence of orthographic conventions and how it affects data collection), dynamic processes (e.g., speed of language change in small languages and how it affects longitudinal collection of big amounts of data), and interactive relations between non-dynamic features that are nevertheless subject to potentially rapid change (e.g., absence of standardized assessment tools or estimates for psycholinguistic variables). The identified challenges represent the domains of data collection and handling, participant recruitment, and experimental design. Among other issues, we discuss population limits and degree of power, inter- and intraspeaker variation, absence of metalanguage and its implications for the process of eliciting acceptability judgments, and challenges that arise from absence of local funding, conflicting regulations in relation to privacy issues, and exporting large samples of data across countries. Finally, the ten experimental challenges presented cover a broad typological spectrum, encompassing both spoken and sign, extant and nearly extinct languages. (shrink)

The paper recognizes the failure of contemporary non-aesthetic theories of art and aims at recovering the phenomenological notion of derealization – which re-emerges in A. Dantoʼs idea of the ʻbracketting effectʼ of art –, in order to explain art and art-experience. The main point is that art makes us free from the ʻreal worldʼ through an act of derealization that leads to the establishment of possible or fictional worlds different from the one we live in. Artworks are primarly imaginary, unreal (...) objects, due to the fact that they interest us only for its appearance and as appearance. Therefore, art cannot be understood without the frame of a particular kind of experience that we can understand in terms of Kantʼs notion of disinterestedness. This notion is still productive to understand why art has a certain power to free us from the needs of reality, although through art we do have profound views of certain aspects of reality and our life. Some objections against Kantʼs theory of aesthetic disinterestedness are discussed and refused, in order to understand the transcendental significance of the aesthetic theory of art. (shrink)

An appropriate characterization of property types is an important topic for measurement science. This paper proposes to derive them from evaluation types, and analyzes the consequences of this position for the VIM3.

In this article, Honneth’s Freedom’s Right is discussed with the intent to assess its potential for offering a view of justice, grounded in social freedom, more adequate than the theories of justic...

A Física, desde Aristóteles, perguntou se sobre a noção de tempo. Guilherme de Ockham, ao tratar do assunto, critica a concepção desenvolvida por seus predecessores, fundamentada em uma leitura ontológica, enquanto ele opta por uma leitura baseada na empiria, o que o leva a considerar o tempo como um ente de razão. Com isso, abre caminho para submeter as categorias da temporalidade à análise lingüística.

In a scientific context such as ours, a true understanding of faith needs a correct approach to its relationship with science. Defending religious belief in the modern age dominated by scientific learning is the main preoccupation expressed by Pope Benedict XVI in some of his own speeches. Tackling this task means changing the nature of our ideas on both science and faith. The belief in God is compatible with science, only if we demarcate the limits of the scientific discourse. The (...) idea that science is the framework for all kinds of cultural inquiry proves incorrect and represents a considerable risk for humanity. Moreover, a naturalist approach cannot respond to the exigency of finding a more profound meaning in natural reality. (shrink)

Recent literature on emotional participation in narratives witnesses a contrast between those who emphasize the role of readers and spectators of narratives as participants and those who emphasize their role as mere onlookers. The former refer to notions like identification, empathy, and what Richard Wollheim calls «central imagining». The latter criticize the idea of identification, and use notions like sympathy and Wollheim’s «acentral imagining». I claim this debate to be vitiated by simplistic accounts of identification and empathy, a lack of (...) attention for the relationships between self- and other-oriented emotions, a misinterpretation of Wollheim’s central/acentral distinction in relation to another distinction suggested by him, that between «iconic» and «non-iconic» imagining. I defend an understanding – different from Wollheim’s correctly interpreted one – of these two distinctions and maintain the importance of iconic and central imaginings to the interpretation and appreciation of narratives. (shrink)

Résumé La critique éthique considère que la valeur éthique d’une œuvre d’art affecte sa valeur artistique. Elle s’intéresse ordinairement à la valeur éthique du point de vue que l’œuvre adopte, ou à celui des effets qu’elles produisent, mais ne considère guère celle du processus de production de l’œuvre. Or celui-ci peut intéresser l’éthique comme lorsqu’une toile est réalisée en laissant des poissons rouges enduits de peinture agoniser et s’agiter sur une toile. C’est précisément de la valeur éthique des procédés utilisés (...) dont il est ici question. L’auteur défend un moralisme des moyens, selon lequel le jugement éthique des procédés a une place légitime dans l’évaluation artistique, et formule deux versions compatibles de cette position : la thèse esthétique et la thèse artistique. (shrink)

In 2020, with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, academics and scientists began to question the triage criteria for allocating insufficient healthcare resources, trying to ethically justify the answer to the question, Who should receive medical care first? In this article, I will argue that even if we apply triage criteria, we won't be able to avoid the violation of human dignity or of the right to life and to health care. I will then suggest that, maybe, the real ethical (...) triage dilemma lies not in the question, Who should receive medical care first? but in the question, How are we to decide who should receive medical care first? (shrink)

[Two notions of humanity and the judgment argument for human rights].

It has been argued that the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were a crucial period in the medieval development of the idea of contagion. Theologians and physicians cooperated in devising a conceptual model based on medical literature (Hippocratico-Galenic and Avicennian) and formulated primarily to explain the origin, transmission, and development of contagious diseases, but that was flexible enough to be applied to a number of other different phenomena (the communication of sin and vices, love sickness, fascination, etc.). This article explores the (...) ways in which Albert the Great contributed to the formation of this broad and highly articulated notion of contagion. First, he provided a systematic analysis of the mechanisms of pathogenesis and transmission of contagious diseases (in particular, pestilences and leprosy). Moreover, his interests encompassed several different forms of contagion, including the powers of stones (e.g., the attractive virtue of the magnet) and animals, the influences of the woman’s body and mind (mulier menstruata and vetula), fascination. Albert also provided different models for the explanation of the “contagious influence” (mechanical explanation based on physical contact, the Avicennian theory of psychosomatic transformations, the Avicennian doctrine of the power of the soul over external bodies, spiritual transmission of sins). As a result of his investigation into the mechanisms of disease transmission, air contamination, noxious influences, and fascination, Albert came to problematize the usual idea of natural causality based on the principle of contact between substances, and to test the potentials and limits of action at-a-distance. In particular, the present paper will examine Albert’s views on some of the phenomena explained through the concept of contagion: pestilences, leprosy, the basilisk, the menstruating woman, and fascination. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend that the concept of systemic suffering represents a useful tool for social criticism. I shall first make some preliminary methodological remarks (1) and present different meanings that have been attributed to the concept of social suffering (2). I will then suggest that we adopt the concept of systemic suffering instead (3). The next step consists in showing how this form of suffering is connected to the existence of non-material aspects that contribute to social reproduction and (...) that can be defined as systemic doctrines (4). Finally, I shall offer some remarks on possible strategies for criticizing systemic suffering (5). (shrink)

Alfred North Whitehead famously compares the philosophical method of knowledge acquisition with the process of flying an airplane. Likewise, “shamanic flight” marks stages of cognitive processing in navigation through perceptible and imperceptible worlds. This article focuses on the cosmovision of the Amazon people Huni Kuin, the Whiteheadian method of imaginative rationalization, and the concept of Amerindian perspectivism. This study also investigates shamanism as an experience of knowledge generation. Furthermore, “shamanic flight,” as an ecstatic technique experienced in many diverse Amerindian rituals, (...) will be explored as a method in the discovery and organization of nonhuman alterities. Finally, Amazonian-based shamanic epistemology will be discussed within a “multinaturalist” ontology. (shrink)