A Tale of Two Reds by Dr. Dena Shottenkirk as published in Erkenntnis - An International Journal of Scientific Philosophy (Springer, January 2021)

Shottenkirk, D. A Tale of Two Reds. Erkenn (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00351-z

Abstract

The question regarding how to characterize aesthetics has been revived with the publication of Bence Nanay’s Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception. This paper takes seriously Dustin Stokes’ criticisms of Nanay’s book regarding Nanay’s inability to distinguish between ordinary expert visual tasks (e.g., sorting for sock color or ornithology) and aesthetic experience. Using empirical research on gist perception and its reliance on low-level features in visual experience, I develop a theory that distinguishes expert visual tasks and aesthetic experiences by differentiating two different kinds of distributed attention over properties. I argue that expert visual tasks are instances of property attribution in a mode of conscious attention, while aesthetics is a kind of distributed attention that significantly relies on the reiteration of gist-like lowlevel features. Gist, often referred to in visual science as “preattentive” mode, gives us a model to understand the perceptual processes that are specific to aesthetics. This comports with our common-sense definition of aesthetics as both distinguishable from ordinary expert visual tasks and an experience that makes prominent sensory aspects of visual experience.

Synthese Library Springer Nature | Studies in Epistemology, Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science

Art as Cognition: Framing the Aesthetic Experience as a Conversation by Dr. Dena Shottenkirk (forthcoming Springer Verlag, 2021)

Aesthetics has generally been analyzed from the point of view of the viewer. But as aesthetics is importantly about artworks, and since they involve both a viewer and a maker, a more satisfactory account of the aesthetic experience would be one that was derived from both kinds of perceptual experiences. The aim of this book therefore is to examine the aesthetic experience from the point of view of both the viewer of visual artworks and the maker of visual art, and to analyze how the social phenomena of art arises consequent to the interaction of these two. Thus, art is seen as a kind of conversation.

Perception, Cognition and Aesthetics. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy. Edited by Dena Shottenkirk, Manuel Curado and Steven S. Gouveia. (Routledge 1st Ed., May 2019)

This edited volume questions the traditional distinction between the structure of perceptual phenomenon and that of cognition. That traditional distinction saw perception as passively-obtained and providing the content for an actively-operating cognition, but the last several years have seen various challenges to this paradigm, including challenges to the general notion of content. The conversation around the interface between perception and cognition has become widely published in journals and monographs during the last few years, and the importance of this edited volume is in the bringing together many of the major voices in this conversation in the philosophy of perception and adding to them the voices of newer and younger thinkers, resulting in a compilation that properly addresses the main obstacle still present in the discourse: namely, the relationship between perception and thought. 

 But it is not only the timeliness of the issue that makes this volume distinct, it is also its embracing of aesthetics under the larger umbrella of perception and thought. Much recent work in aesthetics has pulled aesthetics out from the sidelines of Platonic beauty or Humean taste, and has instead insisted on aesthetics’ rightful discourse amid the concerns of research into perceptual experience. This is true both within the analytic tradition as well as within the continental. In the former, research in aesthetics has been addressed most often by empirically-minded philosophers who, building upon scientific research in various fields, see art as an important instance of perceptual experience. The latter tradition e.g., continental philosophy, addresses the concerns of phenomenological research into perceptual experience. Thus, within both traditions, there has been a shift toward taking aesthetics as an integral part of perception theory. We agree with this trend and thus have given aesthetics equal weight in the examination of how thought is derived from perceptual experience.

https://www.amazon.com/Perception-Cognition-Aesthetics-Contemporary-Philosophy/dp/1138615935

D. Shottenkirk. Global Grammar. Phenomenology in Relation to the Challenges of Contemporary Art, The Polish Journal of Aesthetics, Institute of Philosophy Issue 49

Abstract

I argue that art is a kind of epistemology. It is a way we know the world. But it is not knowing the world in the way that old correspondence theory of empiricism claimed, nor what the rationalists wanted to believe: we cannot simply look at the world or have it conceptually come to us, unbidden, unedited, clear and distinct. There is no a priori “given.” Instead, the “world” comes at us with a plethora of data: massive bits of information, some of which is attentional and noticed consciously, some unconsciously, and much not noticed at all. We edit, we select. We do both as a result of being previously told what to notice (e.g., the usual designation of public objects), and as a result of selecting what pragmatically matters to each of us as individuals.

My view gives credence to the epistemic role played by art; I argue that the act of understanding art is an act that allows the viewer to enter the phenomenal experience of the individual artist—through the phenomenal experience’s symbolism encapsulated in the artwork—and allows that phenomenal experience to enter the domain of social facts. It is a transfer of knowledge, from a first-person account of being in the world to a third- person account. In this, individually experienced qualia (e.g., the artist’ experience) become socially constructed concepts (in the process of audience viewing and acceptance), and the non-linguistic experience of the artist is converted into the linguistic practice of the group. We are at a point in history where that is evident. That art is a kind of epistemic experience is evident in contemporary art because we have not only traveled past modernism, with its epistemic notions of progress and objective truth, but past post- modernism and its notions of relativism, and have arrived at a moment in history where the meaning in an artwork is not derived from the movement with which the art has aligned itself, but from the point of the individual artist. It is an experience that has at its fingertips the general rules, the general grammar, of post-modernism’s theories and modernism’s styles.