| |
Moderators
·Anouk Barberousse
·Nicolas Bullot
·Gloria Origgi
·John Zeimbekis
Guest Panel
·Catherine Allamel-Raffin
·Sylvie Allouche
·Daniel Andler
·Noga Arikha
·John Armstrong
·Sarah Bendaoud
·Keith Benson
·Paul Bloom
·Roberto Casati
·David Cohen
·Jean-Pierre Cometti
·Thi Bich Doan
·Jérôme Dokic
·Shimon Edelman
·Paul Egré
·Nivedita Gangopadhyay
·Merideth Gattis
·Tamar Gendler
·Donald Glowinski
·Bastien Guerry
·José Luis Guijarro
·Jim Hamilton
·Claude Imbert
·Pierre Jacob
·Andrew Kania
·Paolo Leonardi
·Jerrold Levinson
·Mohan Matthen
·Richard Minsky
·Simona Morini
·Jacques Morizot
·Alexander Nagel
·Alva Noë
·Jérôme Pelletier
·Catherine Recanati
·Sébastien Réhault
·Patrick Rysiew
·Harold A. Sedgwick
·Nola Semczyszyn
·Dan Sperber
·Keith Stenning
·Mauricio Suárez
·Anne Tüscher
·Barbara Tversky
·Jeffrey M. Zacks
|
|
The Department of Cognitive Studies at the Ecole Normale Supérieure organizes on this page a series of workshops on Art and Cognition. Each month, new papers will be open to discussion on a specific issue. Discussion is open to all who wish to contribute and the forum is moderated. A bibliography and a list of links are also available on the site by clicking on bibliography and links
The current workshop explores the issue of:
Pictures in Cognition and Science
Pictures are non-linguistic external representations; as such, they can exploit the fineness of grain that normally comes with perceptual acquaintance, as opposed to verbal description. But how does this distinctive trait of pictures translate into a form of meaning? What is the role of concepts and depth-perception in understanding pictures? What is the semantic status of perceiving images while having the multimodal experience of films or virtual simulations? (Topic I) Beyond such questions, how do we make use of pictures? The conference will concentrate on the use of pictures in science, be they drawings, diagrams or photographs. Pictures are genuine vehicles of scientific content, but the reasons why they play such an indispensable role are poorly understood. Sometimes, pictures are data. Does this mean that the observation of pictures has the same epistemic value as the observation of natural scenes? Can pictures be more than cognitive facilitators in scientific contexts? Can they be parts of arguments, or are arguments strictly linguistic? How can they depict (parts of) theoretical models? (Topic II)
A previous edition of an Art and Cognition Workshop is archived on this site. In partnership with
|
|
Art and Neuroscience
John Hyman
Some prominent neuroscientists have recently made ambitious claims about their work on the visual arts, which they regard as initiating a new scientific enterprise, called ‘neuro-aesthetics’. In particular, V.S. Ramachandran says that he has discovered ‘the key to understanding what art really is’; and Semir Zeki claims to have laid the foundations for understanding ‘the biological basis of aesthetic experience’. In this article I discuss the prospects for this new scientific field, focusing on these two authors.
Date of publication: 9 January 2006
On the nature and perception of depictions
Thomas Stoffregen
Following a venerable debate, I discuss the nature of depictions. My discussion focuses on dynamic depictions (film), but the arguments are intended to be general. I also discuss the perception of depictions. Here I argue that the perception of depictions is veridical. That is, I claim that people correctly perceive the depiction, as such, and rarely (if ever) believe that they are experiencing "the real thing" (that is, that which is depicted). Finally, I point out that while many depictions are uni-modal (e.g., paintings, silent movies), the act of perceiving depictions always involves stimulation of multiple perceptual systems. The perception of depictions is always multimodal.
Date of publication: 28 November 2005
Cross-Modal Effects in Motion Picture Perception: Toward an Interactive Theory of Film
Mark Rollins
Pictures can be distinguished from other symbol types by virtue of the fact that their interpretation is grounded on perception in certain ways. I argue that the relevant perceptual abilities involve heuristic processes that require internal representations. However, those are limited in detail and in the scope of knowledge on which they draw. To a large extent, this is due to the interactive nature of the internal mechanisms that implement them. Cross-modal effects exemplify the relevant type of interactions. I suggest that an analysis of such effects shows that movies as multimedia representations do not constitute a distinct representational genre, characterized by a special mode of interpretation that sets them apart from static pictures.
Date of publication: 7 November 2005
Film as Dynamic Event Perception
Heiko Hecht
This paper assesses the differences between natural viewing and motion pictures viewing. This is done from a psychological perspective labeled dynamic event perception. A set of perceptual regularities constitute natural events. Film has the opportunity (and artistic necessity) to violate some of these regularities. But why do directors choose to violate some laws of natural viewing while they stay away from violating others? I argue that directors have violated almost every single spatio-temporal law that holds for natural events. The causality of natural events, on the other hand, is rarely touched in film. Directors fall into a realism trap that prevents them from commit ting causality violations.
Date of publication: 19 September 2005
Any Way You Slice It: The Viewpoint Independence of Pictorial Content
John Kulvicki
We understand pictures irrespective of the point from which we view them, even though pictures depict things from a point of view. Philosophers and psychologists tend to claim that we somehow compensate for odd viewing angles when viewing a picture. I show that once we understand the complexities of pictorial content, compensation becomes unnecessary.
Date of publication: 27 June 2005
Scientific Reasoning, Mental Models, and Depiction
Laura Perini
Figures seem to play an important role in scientific reasoning, but the nature of reasoning with images is not yet understood. In this paper I will draw on the literature on mental models to provide some insight into the reasoning that scientists apply when working with visual representations.
Date of publication: 20 June 2005
Dual Recognition of Depth and Dependent Seeing
John Dilworth
An explanation of the seeing of depth both in reality and in pictures requires a dual content theory of visual recognition. In addition, there are two necessary conditions on genuine seeing of depth-related content. First, the right kinds of dependence relations must hold between a physical picture, its content and its perceiver, and second, the perceiver must be in an appropriate, functionally defined perceptual state.
Date of publication: 6 June 2005
Drawing in the Social Sciences: Lithic Illustration
Dominic Lopes
Images are used in science to present data. Taking the physical and life sciences as paradigms, one might suppose that machine-made images always serve this purposes better than hand-made images. A broader view of the use of scientific images, which includes the social sciences, shows this supposition to be false. Archaeological drawings of human artifacts, such as stone tools, are preferred to photographs. The explanation of this is that the human drawing system is an observational tool with special powers.
Date of publication: 23 May 2005
Sulla finzione necessaria
Maria Bettetini
An ethics of seeing, of reading, of listening would allow us to distinguish between the necessary "fiction" intrinsic to any artwork and the further degrees of fiction that arise out of its communicative use. A neo-platonic approach to an ethics of seeing.
Date of publication: 28 April 2005
From Original to Copy and Back Again
James Elkins
Historians have been largely silent during the debates on Goodman's claim that one cannot distinguish an authentic from a forged painting by "merely looking". This paper opens the limited dialogue between art history and aesthetics by exploring the ways that forgeries, copies, and originals function within historical and critical discourse. Instead of comparing authentic and inauthentic, I will be comparing imperceptible difference with immediately obvious difference.
Date of publication: 22 November 2004
Replicative forgery
John Zeimbekis
I argue that there is no distinction between allographic and autographic representations. One consequence of this is that replicative forgeries have the same aesthetic and artistic value as originals, and are accurate records of actions. I end with some reflections on the pragmatic structure of forgery.
Date of publication: 2 November 2004
Forgery and Reproduction
Gregory Currie
Forgery needs to be distinguished from reproduction. It is sometimes said that the aesthetically relevant question raised by the existence of artistic forgery is whether a picture visually indistinguishable from a valuable picture is itself valuable--to the same or to any degree. Yet I suggest that one may have no qualms, aesthetic or of any other kinds, about the honest reproduction of art while at the same time thinking that forgery is a bad thing.
Date of publication: 18 October 2004
The ontology of forgery
Roger Pouivet
Forgery doesn’t have an autonomous existence, because it depends on a mistaken, intentionally misleading, attribution. The mode of existence of forgery is parasitic on authenticity. Thus the right question is not “What is a forgery?” but “What can be the object of a forgery?”
Roger Pouivet argues here that Nelson Goodman’s most criticized distinction between autographic and allographic works of art provides a starting point for an ontology of forgery.
Date of publication: 4 October 2004
Authenticity in Art
Denis Dutton
Works of art possess what we may call nominal authenticity, defined simply as the correct identification of the origins, authorship, or provenance of an object, ensuring that an object of aesthetic experience is properly named. However, the concept of authenticity often connotes something else, having to do with an object’s character as a true expression of an individual’s or a society’s values and beliefs. This second sense of authenticity can be called expressive authenticity. The following discussion will summarize some of the problems surrounding nominal authenticity and will conclude with a general examination of expressive authenticity. This paper is excerpted from a longer version published in the Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics.
Date of publication: 15 September 2004
|
|