Harry Drummond

Recent, more liberal approaches to the extended mind have proposed that cognition can extend socially, in particular by way of cognitive institutions. Cognitive institutions are pools of resources, generated through agents interacting, to which other agents ‘offload’ part of their cognitive work, enabling new, specialised forms of problem-solving, judging, deciding, and acting. These specialised forms of cognition are constitutively enabled by these institutions such that, if one took away the institution, one would take away the ability to perform that cognitive process. Here, I show that this understanding of cognition’s extension can be used to defend Robert Stecker’s position within the aesthetic-artistic value debate by shifting focus onto the cognitive processes that lead to aesthetic and artistic value judgements rather than the values themselves. According to the defence I offer, the distinction between aesthetic and artistic value judgements is one of the degree of extendedness of the judging process, where agents are extending their cognition through a cognitive institution of art. This understanding supports, and generates new explanatory benefits for, Stecker’s approach.

This chapter argues that artificial intelligence systems cannot have aesthetic experiences of the kind humans do because they are not, and could not be, embodied in the sense that human subjects are. By explaining how aesthetic experience relies on determinants external to the brain, my contribution is intended to be three-fold. First, to clarify the aesthetic-cognitive capabilities of artificial intelligence systems as we currently know them. Second, to further our understanding of the kinds of aesthetic experience considered here. Third, and in turn, to put pressure on a philosophical aesthetics that (even implicitly) rests upon a traditional, brain-bound approach to (aesthetic) cognition, subsequently motivating a shift to embracing embodied-enactive developments in contemporary cognitive science.

We can look at paintings, listen to music, dance, play instruments, and watch movies, on our own almost anytime, anywhere. That is, we have effortless, on-demand access to an abundance of private aesthetic experiences. Why, then, do we seek out aesthetic experiences together? Indeed, it is not controversial to claim that listening to music, dancing, and watching films are activities that we do together more so than we do on our own. While the significance of interpersonal aesthetic experiences, and what explains that significance, is not uncharted territory, I claim that more precision regarding the kinds of relations and interactions that modulate and enable different kinds of interpersonal aesthetic experiences is warranted than is offered in extant literature. As such, an enactive approach that not only foregrounds embodiment and intersubjectivity in cognition, but duly explains how variations in them cause variations in cognition, is paramount to my explanation. Here, then, I marshal three ‘varieties’ of interpersonal aesthetic experience that I term aggregative, synchronised, and shared aesthetic experiences. In doing so, I explain what makes them particularly worthwhile, while introducing terminological and explanatory clarity to the literature as a unifying base from which future research can unfold.

Aesthetics and social cognition are two disciplines rarely merged, despite the penetration of artworks into social, moral, and political concerns. In particular, participatory artworks involve direct social interaction and perception, and are more often than not motivated by, and aim towards, ethico-political ends. In the following, I fuse considerations aesthetic with considerations intersubjective, arguing that participatory artworks engage and exploit empathy’s biased character towards a recalibration of our social relationships, namely inclusion and exclusion. Although critics of empathy suggest that its biased, manipulable, and narrow characteristics are detrimental to its moral promise, I argue that participatory artworks are successful intervention methods just insofar as they use these characteristics for their ethico-political gain. This is stimulated by their facilitation of affective, primary intersubjectivity, something I argue is unique to participatory art. After detailing these operations, I suggest that works that seek to address exclusion, rather than those that facilitate inclusion, have a greater potency in addressing and recalibrating empathy, in part owing to their provocation of empathy-related emotions and forms of fellow-feeling such as shame and compassion.

This paper seeks to refute the claim that architectural value is one and the same value as the artistic value of architecture. As few scholars explicitly endorse this claim, instead tacitly holding it, I term it the implicit claim. Three potential motivations for the implicit claim are offered before it is shown that, contrary to supporting the claim, they set the foundations for considering architectural value and the artistic value of architecture to be distinct. After refuting the potential motivations and offering some counterexamples to the claim, I provide some comments upon the interaction(s) between aesthetic, artistic, and architectural values, which are benefitted and supported by Louise Hanson’s discussion of attributive value in the artistic domain.