Abstract
While the view that we perceive aesthetic properties may seem intuitive, it has received little in the way of explicit defence. It also gives rise to a puzzle. The first strand of this puzzle is that we often cannot perceive aesthetic properties of artworks without training, yet much aesthetic training involves the acquisition of knowledge, such as when an artwork was made, and by whom. How, if at all, can this knowledge affect our perception of an artwork’s aesthetic properties? The second strand of the puzzle arises when we widen the scope of aesthetic experience. The very same aesthetic properties that seem to require training for their perception in artworks do not appear require training to perceive in objects of everyday aesthetic appreciation and natural phenomena. In this paper I argue that a prominent extant attempt to explain how training is compatible with aesthetic perception—cognitive permeation—is an inadequate solution. I also develop a positive view of aesthetic perception that provides a unified solution to both strands of the puzzle.
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Notes
Exactly what makes a property aesthetic is a vexed question (De Clercq, 2002), and beyond the scope of this paper. In what follows I simply rely on intuitions that the properties I discuss are aesthetic.
A stronger thesis would be that we represent all aesthetic properties in perceptual experience. I do not defend this thesis here because it would require a principled way of identifying all those properties that count as aesthetic. The more liberal the account of aesthetic properties, the harder such a thesis would be to defend.
Here I understand aesthetic judgments to be beliefs about what aesthetic properties an object possesses, and distinct from perceptual representations of aesthetic properties. The perceptual experience of aesthetic properties is one route by which we may arrive at aesthetic judgments, but we may also arrive via inference or testimony (see for example Ransom, 2019).
Dorsch (2013) takes the role of training to be a problem for all accounts that posit that we perceive learned high-level properties, beyond aesthetics, and so while here I focus on aesthetic properties, much of what follows is also applicable to other high-level properties.
Here I do not mean to claim that training is required to perceive all aesthetic properties in all artworks. There are plausibly lots of ‘untrained’ aesthetic experiences when we engage with artworks as well. The challenge from aesthetic training is rather to explain how training and perception are compatible in cases where the ascription of aesthetic properties seems to require expertise. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to clarify this point.
See also (Dutton, 1979). While he is skeptical of untrained aesthetic experiences in adults, he nevertheless grants that babies likely have some sort of aesthetic experience. This minimal concession is sufficient to motivate the second strand of the puzzle.
An anonymous reviewer for this journal suggests one might answer the challenge by holding that natural beauty and artefactual beauty are different aesthetic properties. While I don’t have the space here to fully consider this solution, the aesthetic perceptualist who adopts this would have to provide a principled argument for construing them as different properties, beyond simply pointing to their artefactual/natural status, or else risk the solution being ad hoc. Moreover, many everyday objects are also artefects, such as mugs and vases. If no training is required to perceive some aesthetic properties in these objects, then the challenge from aesthetic asymmetry remains.
Here I follow Becko Copenhaver (personal conversation) in using cognitive permeation to avoid gendering reason as masculine.
Readers may wonder why I don’t discuss the consequentialist account of cognitive permeation proposed by Dustin Stokes (2014), given that I focus on his view of aesthetic cognitive permeation in what follows. On the consequentialist view, for a cognitive-perceptual relation to count as cognitive permeation it must have consequences for the epistemic role of perception, modularity, or the theory-ladenness of perception. However this characterization is problematic, as the alternative to cognitive permeation I propose in Sect. 3 also has the same epistemic consequence as the one Stokes (2014, p. 13) outlines: people can gain more knowledge about artworks because they better perceive their aesthetic properties. Judged purely on consequences, my proposal would thereby be an instance of cognitive permeation. But there are good independent reasons to deny this—as I discuss further in Sect. 3, perceptual learning does not require background knowledge to occur, and so in such cases there can be no theoretically significant causal, internal influence of cognition on perception of the sort hypothesized on even consequentialist accounts of cognitive permeation. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this issue.
Stokes also considers a conservative view, where knowledge of artistic category alters our perceptual experience of aesthetic properties without the category itself being represented in perceptual experience. I take the liberal view to be closer to Walton’s original view.
It is not entirely clear that Stokes means attention to explain our perception of categories of art rather than the perception of aesthetic properties themselves. Here I have interpreted him as intending the former, because he is committed to the claim that through perceiving artworks in categories we come to perceive aesthetic properties, as I elaborate in the next section.
The psychological and normative theses do not appear to sit happily together (Laetz, 2010). On the one hand, attributing aesthetic properties is something that happens in perception. On the other, such (correct) attributions depend on art-historical knowledge. How can knowledge influence perception? In the face of this apparent tension Stokes proposes that the normative thesis relates to the psychological thesis via cognitive permeation (see also Lamarque, 2010).
While Stokes holds that natural appreciators will still acquire art-historical knowledge in their training, given that this knowledge will not overtly direct their attention it is not clear how cognitive permeation is supposed to occur in these instances.
The first is a quote from Madisyn W (12/22/20) and the second from Seth B (1/18/21). Accessed October 26, 2021: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_100/s02/reviews?type=user
There are more options here, such as a priori intuition. I leave it to others to explore whether these options are plausible.
While Walton holds that we can only perceive properties such as in-the-style-of Impressionism, or apparent etchings here I take the stronger stance that we can represent properties such as Impressionist painting or etching so long as the category possesses distinctive perceptual features. The potential existence of fakes or stylistic copycats should be no more troubling than that of barn facades or decoy ducks.
The perceptual learning process of unitization is another way of grouping feature detectors together. It presumes that the starting point is a bunch of separate feature detectors, which are then unified.
While a full discussion of the metaphysics of aesthetic properties is beyond the scope of this paper, I take it that an objective account of beauty is compatible with the view I set out in this paper. Positive affect may merely be what allows us to detect, and so represent in perception, the property of beauty.
In what follows, my analysis diverges slightly from Reber et al. (2004), as they discuss objective vs. subjective properties of objects rather than trained vs. untrained.
For an examination of this principle at work in judgments of Cubist paintings, see (Nicki et al., 1981).
An anonymous reviewer for this journal questions whether we must learn the pattern qua pattern in order to come to perceive aesthetic properties, suggesting that studies on the mere exposure effect support the view that we do not. The findings of these studies are that merely being exposed to a given object increases our liking of it (Zajonc, 1968), though the story may be complicated when it comes to art (Meskin et al., 2013). However, candidate hypotheses to explain the mere exposure effect tend to invoke processing fluency (Bornstein & D’Agostino, 1994; Newell & Bright, 2001) or the learning of underlying stimulus structure, as hypothesized to occur in perceptual learning (Gordon & Holyoak, 1983). So at least some plausible explanations for the mere exposure effect are consistent with the account on offer here.
Whether or not this affective influence amounts to ‘cognitive’ permeation is beyond the scope of this paper. See (Matey 2016) for reason to think it might.
One might object here that the person is simply perceiving the work in the wrong category, and that given the preponderance of blue period exemplars their learned category is not ‘Picasso paintings’ but rather ‘Picasso blue period paintings’. This would make the issue here identical to the issue Walton was trying to address of how to determine the correct category. While I accept that some examples might be accommodated this way, I think that there will also be cases where one’s category is biased but correct. However, I acknowledge there are substantive issues concerning how to determine the correct category of art (Laetz, 2010) and some people might see my project in the next section as trying to solve the same issue as Walton. If so, then I would note that my proposed solution adds to on Walton’s account. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this objection.
In the canonical version of the story, the ducks realize their mistake when the ‘ugly duckling’ grows up into a beautiful swan. We might understand this by positing that the ducks do have a perceptual category for full-grown swans, or that adult swans possess enough beauty-making properties that don’t depend on training so that even those who have never seen a swan before can find them beautiful.
This is distinct from the requirement that the prototype track all the statistically relevant features of a population—miniscule spots on the underside of a dog may be highly diagnostic of belonging to a certain breed, but a prototype need not track this feature. Rather, the requirement applies only to those features or relations between features that are in fact used to diagnose membership.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this journal, who points out that history will likely play a role in perceptual bias as well. My position is that it does, but only indirectly by altering a person’s environment (and not, say, via cognitive permeation). For example, official or unofficial racial segregation, as well as racial bias in advertising, will affect a person’s exposure to people of other races. In both cases, perceptual learning will be biased due to this uneven exposure to exemplars and so their aesthetic perceptual experience will be distorted.
This account also goes beyond Walton’s by providing a more precise framework for the notion of graded standard properties. While Walton notes that there will be graded membership in categories of art (1970, p. 342 fn. 10), here the idea is that some standard properties will count more or less for category membership, depending on their attentional weights. The idea that something is a better or worse example of a given category is central to theories of prototypes.
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Acknowledgements
My gratitude to Dominic McIver Lopes for many helpful comments and discussions on numerous iterations of this paper (would that all grad students have a supervisor with such patience and wisdom), as well as to Murat Aydede, Chris Mole, Evan Thompson, Elisabeth Schellenkens, Kendall Walton, and the audience of the 2018 annual meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics (ASA) in Toronto. Special thanks to the anonymous reviewers for this journal, whose constructive and insightful comments helped me vastly improve the paper.
Funding
This work was funded in part by a SSHRC Bombardier Doctoral Scholarship and an ASA Dissertation Fellowship. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the ASA.
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Ransom, M. Aesthetic perception and the puzzle of training. Synthese 200, 127 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03555-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03555-8