Malcolm Turvey

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy remains an influential and powerful source of resistance to natural-scientific explanations of cultural phenomena such as film. For example, in advancing his position of extreme autonomism, which excludes the natural sciences from the study of film and the arts as “cultural practices,” film theorist David Rodowick leans heavily on the notion of the “autonomy of humanistic understanding” proposed by leading Wittgenstein authority P. M. S. Hacker, which Hacker extrapolates from Wittgenstein’s later writings. The moderate autonomism I argue for in this book acknowledges that the sciences, both natural and social, have a significant role to play in the study of film and other humanistic phenomena. It is therefore imperative that I first show that, whether one agrees with it or not, Wittgenstein’s later philosophy does not in fact legitimize the rejection of the natural sciences from the investigation of cultural phenomena like film and art. I do so by examining Wittgenstein’s remarks on a “science of aesthetics” in section one and conceptual change occasioned by science in section two. I also criticize Rodowick’s assertion that natural-scientific explanations of film offered by film theorists Noël Carroll and David Bordwell are “positivist” in section three.

I consider some recent neuroscientific work on mirror neurons, film, and art as another example of the over-confidence in natural science that motivates my serious pessimism. In the first section, I elucidate what mirror neurons are, what aspects of human behavior they are thought to explain, and some of the many criticisms of mirror neuron research found within neuroscience and the philosophy of mind. As in the case of evolutionary psychology examined in the previous chapter, film scholars who appeal to the mirror neuron paradigm don’t substantially engage with these criticisms of it. Hence, they do not consider the potential pitfalls of applying mirror neuron research to explain cinematic and artistic phenomena such as affective empathy, some of which I point to in the second section in the work of film theorist Murray Smith and others. In the third section, I address the collaboration of Vittorio Gallese, one of the neuroscientists who discovered mirror neurons, and Michel Guerra, a film theorist. I show, using examples from the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and others, that the work of Gallese and Guerra involves a considerable over-extension of the mirror neuron paradigm.

I outline and defend my position of moderate autonomism regarding natural-scientific explanations of film and the other arts, and criticize its principal rivals, film theorist David Rodowick’s extreme autonomism and film theorist Murray Smith’s anti-autonomism. In the first section, I illustrate moderate autonomism in action by examining the example of the startle response, which is our natural tendency to jump at a loud noise or abrupt and unanticipated change in our visual field and which is often exploited by horror and action films. In the second section, I challenge Rodowick’s extreme autonomism by demonstrating that natural science can and has revealed important facts not only about lower-level features of our engagement with film, such as the “illusion” of motion imparted by cinema, but also the higher-level features that Rodowick is concerned with, principally the meaning and value of films. In the third section, I challenge Smith’s anti-autonomism by contesting his assertion that natural science is always required to fully explain our engagement with cinema. In general, I criticize Smith’s notion of a “thick” or “full” explanation, arguing that explanations should be judged “complete” relative to the research question we are asking.

After summarizing the arguments and findings of the previous seven chapters, I draw some lessons from my excursions into the application of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience to film and art about how best to proceed in pursuing natural-scientific explanations of film and the other arts. I propose some commonsense, minimal methodological recommendations that are intended to help us avoid the problems with some natural-scientific explanations of film highlighted in chapters six and seven, especially the lack of critical reflection and the overconfidence in the explanatory powers of natural science on display in those explanations. These recommendations, however, are by no means exhaustive or infallible, and my hope is that others might refine and build upon them in the future. I also reiterate my defence of humanistic explanation and my critique of the hermeneutic misconception of the humanistic scholarship initiated in the preface.

I introduce the book's defence of humanistic explanation by contrasting the explanatory goals of many humanities scholars with the “hermeneutic” misconception of humanistic research currently dominant in north America and elsewhere. I trace the origins and perpetuation of this hermeneutic misconception, according to which humanists seek primarily to interpret and evaluate discrete cultural phenomena rather than to explain them, to Dilthey's famous distinction between “understanding” and “explanation” as well as Windelband's equally well-known contrast between the supposedly “idiographic” ambitions of the humanities and the “nomothetic” ones of the natural sciences. I argue that, contrary to the hermeneutic misconception of the humanities, many humanistic scholars seek to explain general patterns in (art-)historical data rather than interpret and evaluate discrete cultural phenomena, and they do so using historical explanation, theoretical definitions of categories, and other humanistic methods. I claim that the humanities are far more defensible when correctly recognized as contributing to the production of knowledge through offering explanations of the phenomena they study. The book's emphasis on methodological pluralism is introduced in criticizing the narrow, impoverished conception of the humanities as primarily hermeneutic in orientation.

I address a set of questions that, I believe, natural science cannot answer, at least directly. These questions are normative ones to do with the norms that govern our artistic practices. The view that natural science cannot answer such questions has been most systematically defended recently by the philosopher of art David Davies in formulating a position Davies calls “moderate pessimism” about the contribution of the psychological sciences to the philosophy of art. Since it has been criticized and misunderstood, I spend some time in sections one and two clarifying and defending Davies’s position which, if right, lends further support to my position of moderate autonomism. I then offer in section three what I believe to be a legitimate criticism of Davies’s theory and its endorsement of revisionism by turning to the work of philosopher of art Peter Lamarque, while drawing out some of the implications of Lamarque’s view for the study of film and art, especially his distinction between internal and external perspectives on our practices with art. In doing so, I consider the implications for continuity editing of the recent discovery in perceptual psychology of “change blindness.” I also examine examples like quality television and early cinema.

Following philosopher of art David Davies, I argue that our “inquiry concerning the arts should be informed by our best understandings in those sciences that bear upon the cognitive and perceptual capacities exercised in the generation and reception of artworks.” Unlike Davies, I claim it is often difficult to discern the best science. I give several reasons for this, chief among them being that scholars of the arts pursuing natural-scientific explanations often fail to take into consideration the critical discourses about these explanations within the branches of science they are drawing upon. This is due, I suspect, to the overconfidence in science that Wittgenstein diagnosed. I illustrate this by critically examining the application of evolutionary psychology to film. In the first section, I introduce the main tenets of evolutionary psychology and point to problems that can bedevil this natural-scientific paradigm. After demonstrating in section two that many evolutionary explanations of cinema are implementation accounts that reveal little about our engagement with film, in section three I show how the problems with evolutionary explanations addressed in section one arise in the work of film theorists Torben Grodal and Rikke Schubart on horror and other genres.

I introduce the two positions I defend in this book regarding the role of natural science in explaining film and the other arts: moderate autonomism (the subject of chapters three through five) and serious pessimism (which I address in chapters six and seven). Moderate autonomism maintains that the humanities enjoy a partial or moderate form of explanatory autonomy from the natural sciences. While the natural sciences can account for much about the arts, there is much about them that only humanistic methods can explain. I present this position by provisionally contrasting it with the “extreme autonomism” of film theorist David Rodowick and the “anti-autonomism” of film theorist Murray Smith. I clarify how I am defining “natural science” before then introducing the second position I defend in the book, which I call serious pessimism and which builds on the moderate variety recently proposed by the philosopher of art David Davies about the capacity of the psychological sciences to answer certain questions about the arts. As a serious pessimist, I think there are additional reasons beyond Davies's to be pessimistic about the contribution of the natural sciences to the study of cinema and the other arts, which I introduce here.

There is currently a vigorous debate in film studies and related disciplines about the extent to which scientific paradigms like evolutionary psychology and neuroscience can explain the cinema and other artforms. This debate tends to devolve into extreme positions, with many film scholars and other humanists insisting that science has little or no role to play in the study of the arts, while a minority contends that it is always needed to fully account for cultural phenomena like film. Malcolm Turvey advocates for a more moderate position. He argues that, while the sciences can explain much about film and the other arts, there is much about these phenomena that only humanistic methods can account for. He thereby mounts a trenchant defence of the purpose and value of humanistic explanation, one that nevertheless acknowledges and welcomes the legitimate contribution of the sciences to the study of the arts.

The robust connections between philosophy and avant-garde cinema are investigated, and four strong senses in which avant-garde films can be “philosophical” are clarified: as illustrating philosophy, as originating philosophy, as enacting philosophy, and as occasioning philosophical reflection. While avant-garde cinema may only rarely, if ever, be able to create innovative philosophy, it excels at producing rich, philosophically informed perceptual experiences for viewers. Moreover, unlike works of verbal philosophy, which are evaluated in terms of their truth value and whose significance is primarily epistemic, avant-garde films like other avant-garde artworks are admired mainly for their artistic inventions, and the chapter highlights through a range of examples how avant-garde filmmakers have employed imaginative and often novel techniques to communicate philosophical meaning and generate philosophical ideas.

In his article “Notes on the Sight Gag” from 1991, the philosopher Noël Carroll proposed a taxonomy of sight gags that recur throughout the genre of comedian comedy in cinema. This article revisits and augments Carroll’s taxonomy by analyzing the sight gags found in the films of Jacques Tati (1907-1982). Tati worked in a very different context than that of the silent Hollywood filmmakers from whose comic films Carroll largely derives his categories. He began making films in the sound era, and five of his six feature films were made in color. As a French filmmaker, he also sought to adapt the genre of comedian comedy in cinema to his culturally specific concerns. This article shows that he drew on at least three of the types of sight gag identified by Carroll. But he modified some of them and innovated several other kinds.