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The Aesthetic Mind This page intentionally left blank The Aesthetic Mind Philosophy and Psychology EDITED BY Elisabeth Schellekens and Peter Goldie 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX26DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # the several contributors 2011 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn ISBN 978–0–19–969151–7 13579108642 Contents List of Figures viii Notes on Contributors ix Introduction 1 Elisabeth Schellekens and Peter Goldie Part I. The Psychology of the Aesthetic 1. The Master of the Masek Beds: Handaxes, Art, and the Minds of Early Humans 9 Gregory Currie 2. The Fragility of Aesthetic Knowledge: Aesthetic Psychology and Appreciative Virtues 32 Matthew Kieran 3. Neuroscience, Biology, and Brain Evolution in Visual Art 44 Dahlia W. Zaidel 4. Fact and Fiction in the Neuropsychology of Art 54 Roman Frigg and Catherine Howard Part II. Emotion in Aesthetic Experience 5. Emotion and Aesthetic Value 71 Jesse Prinz 6. Beauty is Felt, Not Calculated; and it Does Not Fit in Boxes 89 Roddy Cowie 7. The Ethics of Aesthetic Bootstrapping 106 Peter Goldie 8. The Origins of Aesthetics: A Neurobiological Basis for Affective Feelings and Aesthetics 116 Edmund T. Rolls Part III. Beauty and Universality 9. Beauty is Instinctive Feeling: Experimenting on Aesthetics and Art 169 I. C. McManus vi CONTENTS 10. Beauty is Not One: The Irreducible Variety of Visual Beauty 190 Jerrold Levinson 11. Aesthetics: The Approach from Social Anthropology 208 Robert Layton 12. Experiencing the Aesthetic: Kantian Autonomy or Evolutionary Biology? 223 Elisabeth Schellekens Part IV. Imagination and Make-Believe 13. Imagination Unblocked 239 Aaron Meskin and Jonathan M. Weinberg 14. An Attitude Towards the Possible: The Contributions of Pretend Play to Later Adult Consciousness 254 Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer 15. Unpacking the Boxes: The Cognitive Theory of Imagination and Aesthetics 268 Kathleen Stock Part V. Fiction and Empathy 16. Enacting the Other: Towards an Aesthetics of Feeling in Literary Reading 285 David S. Miall 17. On Keeping Psychology Out of Literary Criticism 299 Peter Lamarque 18. Mirroring Fictional Others 313 Zanna Clay and Marco Iacoboni Part VI. Music, Dance, and Expressivity 19. Moving in Concert: Dance and Music 333 Noe¨l Carroll and Margaret Moore 20. ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’? Embodied Agency, Dance, and Neuroscience 346 David Davies 21. Music and Emotion: Psychological Considerations 357 William Forde Thompson and Lena Quinto 22. Cross-Cultural Musical Expressiveness: Theory and the Empirical Programme 376 Stephen Davies CONTENTS vii Part VII. Pictorial Representation and Appreciation 23. Neurology and the New Riddle of Pictorial Style 391 Mark Rollins 24. Varieties of Pictorial Judgement: A Functional Account 414 Norman H. Freeman 25. Pictorial Representation and Psychology 427 Derek Matravers Index 439 List of Figures 1.1 Handaxe banded ironstone, c.750,000 BP, McGregor Museum, Kimberley 12 1.2 Hoxne handaxe, Lower Palaeolithic, c.400,000 BP, Hoxne, Suffolk, England 12 1.3 Handaxes from the Masek Beds, Olduvai. From M. Leakey (ed.), Olduvai Gorge, volume 5, Cambridge University Press, 1994 13 1.4 Ficron, Cuxton, England 14 1.5 Handaxe, Sima de los Huesos, Spain 400,000 BP 15 8.1 Some of the emotions associated with different reinforcement contingencies 117 8.2 Dual routes to the initiation of action in response to rewarding and punishing stimuli 123 8.3 Two Forms ( January) 1967. Barbara Hepworth 145 9.1 Examples of nine disparate sets of rectangle preferences (from McManus, Cook, and Hunt, in press) 178 9.2 The two main underlying factors for the rectangle preferences, reconstructed from the Q-mode factor analysis 179 9.3 Two computer-generated Mondrian-like images 181 9.4 Example of an image used in the cropping experiment 184 21.1 An illustration of the synchronization feedback model 371 24.1 Four entitles contract six bidirectional relations 418 Notes on Contributors NOE¨L CARROLL is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His most recent book is On Criticism (Routledge, 2008). ZANNA CLAY is a primatologist at the School of Psychology in St Andrews. She studies the cognitive mechanisms underlying communication in a species of great ape, the bonobo. Being the closest living relatives to humans, the investigation of bonobo behaviour can provide important insights into the evolution of human behaviour, including empathy. Much of her fieldwork is conducted in DR Congo, where bonobos are endemic. RODDY COWIE studied philosophy and psychology as an undergraduate (at Stirling and UCLA), and his Ph.D. (at Sussex) was on the relationship between human and machine vision. He was appointed Lecturer in Psychology at Queen’s University Belfast in 1975, and Professor in 2003. His core research interest is in relationships between rational models of perception and experi- ences that are intensely subjective and seemingly counter to rational expectation. It has been followed through many areas—‘impossible objects’, misperceptions of movement, the subjective experience of hearing loss, and the perception and expression of emotion. His work on emotion included co-ordinating the EC’s HUMAINE project, which aimed to lay the foundations for emotion-oriented technology. He also has long-standing interests in music and religion, as academic and practitioner. GREGORY CURRIE teaches philosophy at the University of Nottingham. His latest book is Narratives and Narrators (OUP, 2010). He is currently working on the cognitive value of literature. DAVID DAVIES is Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. He is the author of Art as Performance (Blackwell, 2004), Aesthetics and Literature (Continuum, 2007), and Philosophy of the Performing Arts (Blackwell, forthcoming), and the editor of The Thin Red Line (2008) in the Routledge series Philosophers on Film. He has published widely in the philosophy of art on topics relating to ontology, artistic value, literature, film, music, theatre, and the visual arts. He has also published articles on topics in metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. STEPHEN DAVIES is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and an ex-President of the American Society of Aesthetics. His main research interests are in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. His books include Musical Works and Performances (Clarendon Press, 2001), Themes in the Philosophy of Music (OUP, 2003), Philosophical Perspectives on Art (OUP, 2007), and The Philosophy of Art (Blackwell, 2006). He is co-editor of Companion to Aesthetics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 2nd edn.). NORMAN H. FREEMAN is Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development and Senior Research Fellow in the School of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol. His main areas of research include drawing-production and children’s theory of pictures. He has published two x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS books on drawing, and over 100 refereed papers and invited chapters. Between 1988 and 1995 he was the Associate Editor for the British Journal of Psychology and the British Journal of Develop- mental Psychology. He is currently on the board of Social Development. ROMAN FRIGG is a Reader in Philosophy at the London School of Economics and Deputy Director of the Centre for Natural and Social Science (CPNSS). He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of London and an M.Sc. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Basel, Switzerland. His main research interests are in general philosophy of science and philosophy of physics. He has published papers on scientific modelling, quantum mechanics, the foundations of statistical mechanics, randomness, chaos, complexity theory, probability, and computer simulations, and he is currently working on a book on models and theories. PETER GOLDIE is The Samuel Hall Chair at the University of Manchester. Before moving to Manchester, he was Reader in Philosophy at King’s College London, and prior to that a Lecturer at Magdalen College Oxford. His main philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind, ethics, and aesthetics, and particularly in questions concerning value and how the mind engages with value. He is the author of The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (OUP, 2000) and On Personality (Routledge, 2004), co-author of Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art? (Routledge, 2010), editor of Understanding Emotions: Mind and Morals (Ashgate, 2002) and The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion (2010), and co-editor of Philosophy and Conceptual Art (OUP, 2007).