86:4 October 2003
Art and the Mind 

Advisory Editors: N. J. Bullot and P. Ludwig, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris

Works of art are cognitive devices aimed at the production of rich cognitive effects. Thus it can be argued, in the light of what is known about human cognition, that aesthetic experience is a by-product of the exercise of more fundamental cognitive faculties such as perception and imagination. Works of art, on this view, are never grasped directly. Rather, in an aesthetic experience, a subject directly perceives a certain object or event (a canvas, a display of pixels, a series of sounds), and this perception gives rise to a cognitive activity of a special, aesthetic type. Theories of art should thus address questions about the interplay of the cognitive faculties. Papers are invited on all aspects of the relation between perception, imagination, the emotions, and aesthetic experience, and on the way in which findings in cognitive science can shed new light on art, its appreciation, and its evaluation.

Table of Contents:

Noël Carroll

Art and Mood: Preliminary Notes and Conjectures

Greg Currie and Jon Jureidini 

Art and delusion

Mark DeBellis 

Schenkerian Analysis and the Intelligent Listener

Mark Rollins

The Mind in Pictures: Perceptual Strategies and the Interpretation of Visual Art

Dominic McIver Lopes 

Pictures and the Representational Mind

Robert Hopkins 

Pictures, Phenomenology and Cognitive Science

John Hyman 

Subjectivism in the Theory of Pictorial Art