## 1. Background



Writers on aesthetics in the empiricist tradition such as Shaftsbury,
Hume, and Reid thought of their contributions as broadly empirical
(see Shelley 2006 [2020]), and among the very first experimental
investigations in psychology were studies of aesthetic preferences and
responses, for example Fechner's attempt to discover whether the
"golden section" is especially preferred to other ratios
(1871). The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were rich in
work of this kind, and there were more speculative studies of
"embodied" responses to architectural structures, a debate
that brought the term "empathy" to the English language
(Vischer 1873; Lipps 1903). But for most of the twentieth century
aesthetics was seen, by its proponents and its detractors, as an
"armchair" project. Wittgenstein, whose conception of
philosophy strongly influenced the field's direction in the
century's latter half, said



> 
> 
> There doesn't seem to be any connection between what
> psychologists do and any judgement about a work of art. (1967, 19; on
> Wittgenstein's own experimental work on the perception of rhythm
> see Guter 2020)
> 
> 
> 



To the extent that aesthetics in this period was influenced by
thinking about the mind it was more often prompted by ideas from
psychoanalysis (Wollheim 1993). The last thirty years have seen a
shift back towards empirical inquiry, assisted by a resurgence of
interest in the imagination, now often treated as a capacity with an
evolutionary and developmental history (Fuentes 2020; Harris 2000) and
as subject to selective damage (Currie 1996).



It has never been plausible to think of aesthetics as wholly *a
priori*. Even those who think its main business is the analysis of
widely shared folk concepts (Dickie 1962) will agree that a
philosopher of music should have a good deal of knowledge of the
history, art making practices and traditions of criticism of some
musical tradition. In this respect aesthetics is closer to the
philosophy of physics or economics than it is to metaphysics. There is
also a frequently acknowledged connection between aesthetics and the
study of perception. When Baumgarten (1750-58) first introduced
the term "aesthetics" he called it a "science of
perception" and according to Nanay (2014: 101)



> 
> 
> many, maybe even most traditional problems in aesthetics are in fact
> about philosophy of perception and can, as a result, be fruitfully
> addressed with the help of the conceptual apparatus of the philosophy
> of perception.
> 
> 
> 



This is a stronger claim than many would make (see Margolis 1960;
Sibley 1965; Schellekens 2006; and Robson 2018) but theses in
aesthetics do sometimes depend on claims, including scientifically
tractable claims, about the nature of perception. A notable example is
the debate about whether perception is cognitively penetrable; if it
is, the way a picture looks or a piece of music sounds may depend on
what the observer knows about contextual factors (for the rejection of
cognitive penetrability see Danto 2001; for criticism see Rose &
Nanay 2022).



Philosophical doubts about the relevance of empirical work to
aesthetics are of various kinds. Some authors merely suggest that
philosophers are apt to make hasty generalisations from slender
experimental evidence, give insufficient attention to their details
and limitations, and fail to acknowledge the existence of conflicting
expert opinion (Konecni 2013; Stock 2014). Philosophers,
aestheticians among them, can certainly overestimate their expertise
on occasion and it may well be that they are even more prone to do so
when it comes to empirical matters. None of this points to anything in
principle problematic about their enthusiasm for the empirical. Other
doubters emphasise what they see as more systemic dangers. Roger
Scruton (2014) suggests a tendency to try to assimilate aesthetic
phenomena to available scientific frameworks that turn out to be ill
fitting; he cites the attempt to use Chomskian linguistics to found a
generative theory of music which, he claims, fails to accommodate
either music's structure or purpose. Gordon Graham (2014),
contrasting Hume's aesthetic theory unfavourably with that of
Reid, says that the project of an "aesthetic science" must
ignore or deny the role of reason and judgement. Again, one may be
alive to both kinds of dangers while retaining an openness to
empirical work. In particular, Graham's challenge might be
responded to by noting that studies of the role actually played by
reasons in aesthetic judgement point to a sometimes striking
disconnect between what people think of as their reasons and the
factors that determine their preferences (Lopes 2014 and Irvin 2014;
see also below,
 Section 3);
 this can hardly be irrelevant to someone investigating the
rationality of aesthetic judgement. Further, work which aestheticians
have thought of as conceptual analysis in a broad sense has often
presumed answers to what are in fact empirical questions. Noel Carroll
says that



> 
> 
> The supposition that aesthetic properties are objective also explains
> better how we talk about them than does the projection theory.
> ...people involved in disputes about aesthetic properties
> ... speak as if one side of the disagreement is right and the
> other wrong. (Carroll 1999: 117)
> 
> 
> 



Studies in the new field of "experimental philosophy" (for
some overviews of this field, as applied to aesthetics, see Cova &
Rehault 2018 and Torregrossa 2020) challenge this view. One
study (Cova, Olivola, et al. 2019) gathered more than two thousand
responses across 19 countries to an imagined disagreement about
whether an object of aesthetic interest is beautiful. It found that in
all populations the *least* popular view was that
"someone is right and someone is wrong". The study itself
has come in for criticism (Zangwill 2018) but, regardless of its
success, it highlights the general point that we should not assume
without evidence that the philosopher's understanding of folk
concepts (or folk practice) matches that of the folk themselves:
something that should be of concern to those, such as Dickie, who
conceive of the work of aestheticians as largely involving the
elucidation of folk concepts.



The question discussed above and to which Carroll and the members of
the Cova team give such different answers is a higher order question,
concerning whether people think of aesthetic judgements as having
normative force. We can ask similar questions about lower level
judgements. Consider the claim that we shouldn't form aesthetic
judgements on the basis of testimony, a claim said to be supported by
our supposed practice of refraining from forming such judgements (Kant
1790 [2000: 9]; Nguyen 2020: 1127). Contrary to this, Robson (2014)
argues that this descriptive claim about our judgement forming
practice is mistaken--something which would, if true, undermine
one significant motivation for the normative claim.



From an entirely different perspective, there are those who think that
philosophers have very little role to play in answering key aesthetic
questions and that we should seek to replace, rather than merely
supplement, traditional philosophical methods with more scientific
approaches. Exemplifying this tendency, Semir Zeki says



> 
> 
> no theory of aesthetics that is not substantially based on the
> activity of the brain is ever likely to be complete, let alone
> profound,
> 
> 
> 



going on to say that painting is an inquiry into the laws of the brain
and that what pleases us is what pleases our brains (1999: 1-2).
While attitudes such as this may not constitute a complete dismissal
of philosophical aesthetics they show little awareness of its results,
or understanding of the limitations of neurological studies. Facts
about brain processes do not tell us--at least without some
substantive and controversial bridging premises--what objects are
art works, or what works have value (see Hyman 2010 for wide ranging
criticism of this approach). The relations between empirical work and
normative aesthetics will recur throughout this entry.


## 2. Bottom-up and Top-Down Approaches to Aesthetics



A good deal of empirical work on the aesthetic, while not deriving
from hostility to philosophical ideas, adopts a "bottom
up" approach, focusing on the immediate reactions of untutored
subjects to simple stimuli. We have seen that, by contrast,
philosophical aesthetics is much concerned with normative issues of
judgement and value, and with the claimed dependence of these things
on training, knowledge and what is sometimes called
"taste", But these empirical studies are not
philosophically irrelevant; we should not assume that the aesthetic
responses of experts are discontinuous with those of naive
subjects (though for a discussion of the burden of proof here see
Williamson 2011), nor that expert judgements are sensitive only to the
factors that experts themselves endorse. It is important to ask
whether there are baseline aesthetic responses, perhaps invariant
across cultures, from which the great variety of aesthetic traditions
emerge, and which may impose limits on those traditions and their
products (for a defence of this "bottom up" approach to
experiments in aesthetic see McManus 2011). Wolfflin, a founder
of modern art history, had an interest in questions framed in this
way: he claimed, for example, that there is a general tendency to
prefer a rightward placement of a significant object within an image
(1928). Subsequent research suggests a more complex picture, with
preference dependent on physical and cultural factors: handedness, and
whether one reads/writes left-to-right or right-to-left (see Palmer,
Gardner, & Wickens 2008 for references and discussion; Chahboun et
al. 2017 found some limited support for the idea that placement
preference depends on the subject's direction of
reading/writing). Other studies have shown robust preferences for
certain colours (Palmer & Schloss 2010), shapes, positioning of
objects within a frame (Palmer, Gardner, & Wickens 2008) and size
(Linsen, Leyssen, Sammartino, & Palmer 2011). These preferences
often turn out to be ecologically driven; for example, people tend to
like the colours of liked objects, with strong and culturally
invariant liking of saturated blue and invariant hostility to colours
associated with faeces and vomit. There are cultural variations; for
example Japanese subjects appear to be unusual in their lack of
enthusiasm for dark red (Palmer & Schloss 2010). Some colour
preferences are very culturally specific, as with the preferences of
college students for colours associated with their schools (Schloss,
Poggesi, & Palmer 2011).



Studies such as these may be thought valuable in their capacity to
explain persistent features of aesthetic artefact-making but are
unlikely to provide more than a general background against which
aesthetic preferences and judgements, debates and disagreements
concerning particular artefacts are played out. Saturated blue will be
the right colour in a certain context, while muddy brown will be right
in another. We cannot say that the presence of saturated blue in a
picture is in general a reason, even a *pro tanto* reason, for
admiring it or preferring it to a picture without that colour. When it
comes to aesthetic reasons and judgements rather than unreflective
preferences--when, that is, we consider top-down
effects--cognitive science so far offers little to help us. This
may to some extent be due to the nature of human cognition itself.
Aesthetic reasons, in so far as we have them at all, are highly
resistant to formulation in general terms (Sibley 1959), and once we
abandon the view that aesthetic qualities supervene on an
object's appearance narrowly described (colour, shape and size
in the case of visual art), there is no obvious way to limit the
factors that legitimately impact on such judgements. This suggests a
domain where, roughly speaking, everything is relevant to everything:
the isotropy that is crucial to Fodor's (1983) scepticism about
a cognitive science of thinking. One recent study does attempt a
unification of top-down and bottom-up approaches. Bullot and Reber
(2013) develop a "psycho-historical" process that begins
with a perceptual confrontation with the work, and culminates in
artistic understanding, mediated by the viewer's adoption of the
design stance which involves reconstructing the genealogy of the work.
This approach encounters two difficulties. First is their assumption
that progress between stages is able to be done largely by the
extraction of information from the perceptual signal. In fact the
work's appearance is often ambiguous or misleading as to its
history--as when a work is carefully constructed to look
haphazard in its construction (Levinson 2013; Ross 2013). The model
needs to recognise the importance of art-historical knowledge gained
from such sources as lectures and text books, knowledge which will
often precede and inform the first stage. The second objection
concerns the role of presumed essentialist assumptions in
people's approach to art works. Bullot and Reber argue that the
historical nature of appreciation is explained by our commitment to
psychological essentialism which makes us look beyond a things
appearance to investigate its essence (2013: 132). But an inclination
to look beyond appearances need not depend on essentialism; it might
be that the interest or value of a thing sometimes resides in its
relational and contingent properties (Korsgaard 1983). Valuing a work
on account of its history of making no more implies an essential
connection between the work and its history than valuing an object
because it was a gift from a loved one implies an essential connection
between the object and the giver.


## 3. Preference, Judgement and Reasons



As well as studies designed to elicit preferences, there are
empirically motivated theories that purport to explain them. Among the
earliest is Wundt's (1874) suggestion that we judge a form
pleasing to the extent that the eye finds it easy to follow the
contour. Recent work generalises this thought: there is said to be a
tendency for stimuli to be experienced positively when our perceptual
or cognitive grasp on them comes easily (Reber, Schwarz, &
Winkielman 2004). This idea of *processing fluency* is not
limited to the aesthetic domain; we generally find a proposition more
believable, apparently, if it is expressed in rhyme or in an easy to
read font and this is said to be because these things increase fluency
(Reber & Schwarz 1999; McGlone & Tofighbakhsh 2000). So
aesthetic and fluent phenomena are not coextensive, and no reduction
of the one to the other is possible. The most that can be said (and
this is not insignificant) is that certain kinds of fluency underpin
experiences of aesthetic pleasure and displeasure, symmetry offering a
plausible example; for comments on the significance of such research
into underlying mechanisms see
 Section 4
 below.



One concern about an approach to the aesthetic by way of fluency is
that fluency apparently encourages a less careful examination of the
stimulus (Song & Schwarz 2008), a suggestion at odds with the
aesthetic ideal of a finely discriminating attitude to art. Another is
that fluency-based likings for stimuli seem to have very limited
application in aesthetics beyond the domain of simple shape
preferences. Pictures which are visually complex are often widely
admired and not merely by the art-world elite (see for example
Frith's busy genre paintings). It is said that the pleasure
derived from fluency is relative to expectation: pleasure taken in a
Bach fugue depends on it being more fluent than one expects (Reber
2012: 228, citing Hansen, Dechene, & Wanke 2008). But
why must lovers of Bach have unrealistic expectations about the
fluency of his music? Finally (a theme we will return to) citing
fluency would not be a reason for admiring the picture or fugue in
question; this approach seems to focus on pleasure and leave notions
of reason and judgement out of account. (For criticism of the fluency
program in aesthetics see Cochrane 2021a, Section 2.3.)



Another aspect of fluency is said to be the mere exposure effect: our
tendency to find a statement more believable if we have heard it
often, repeated hearings leading to progressively more fluent
processing (Begg, Anas, & Farinacci 1992). Cutting (2003)
investigated an aesthetic variant of the idea: liking for a picture is
increased by repeated exposure to it. This, it is suggested, may
explain the stability of the artistic canon: works canonical at
*t* are more available to be seen, and the mere exposure effect
raises the likelihood of their being canonical at *t* + 1.
Cutting does not claim that exposure is the only factor contributing
to aesthetic judgement, so accepting this view does not make one an
error theorist about aesthetic value. It does, however suggest that
the critical robustness of canonical judgements has been
overestimated, since one's exposure to a picture is not a reason
for thinking it good. However, Meskin, Phelan, and colleagues (2013)
compared the effect of mere exposure to (what critics have widely
judged to be) good and bad art, finding that there was increased
liking for good art but decreased liking for bad art, the implication
being that increased exposure makes observers more aware of the
objective qualities of the work (see also Delplanque et al. 2015). In
that case significant exposure to a work, while not a reason why it is
good or bad, is a reason why one's judgement of it is reliable
and so may be said to belong to the space of aesthetic reasons.
Cutting (2017), while offering some methodological reservations,
expresses broad agreement with the Meskin et al. study.



Recently the link between aesthetic effects and pervasive features of
perception and cognition has been highlighted again by the theory of
*predictive processing*: the idea that the fundamental activity
of the brain is to make predictions and test and revise them against
incoming information from the senses, the goal being the reduction in
predictive errors or what is also called reduction in uncertainty (for
a survey of philosophical applications of this idea see Hohwy . It is
suggested that positive affect is the product of such reductions,
while negative affect results when uncertainty is increased. Works of
art are said to provide the brain with exercises, sometimes
challenging ones, in error reduction (van de Cruys & Wagemans
2011). But why should we seek more exercises in prediction error
reduction than the many that the world throws at us continually? What
is to say that the eventual reduction in error outweighs the initial
increase posed by a work of art?



We see, then, that there are a number of suggestions for how empirical
work may shed light on our aesthetic preferences and their aetiology,
while doubts remain about the capacity of this work to illuminate the
normative structure of aesthetic judgement, which is said to be
reason-focused and involve Kantian features such as disinterestedness
(though see Meskin, Phelan, et al. 2013: 140-1). A second and
familiar objection is the Wittgensteinian thought that merely
explaining the origins of a phenomenon doesn't give us the kind
of explanation which philosophers are concerned with (Vrahimis 2020).
However, the idea of reasons in aesthetics itself deserves critical
interrogation, given the evidence that the reasons people give seem
often to be confabulations and that focusing on reasons while making a
judgement can make you a worse judge rather than a better one (see
Irvin 2014 and Lopes 2014, mentioned above,
 Section 1).
 Nor is the problem here confined to the aesthetic domain: Hugo
Mercier and Dan Sperber (2017) argue that, quite generally, reasoning
works well as an instrument of public debate but poorly as a guide to
personal judgement and decision.


## 4. Art, Empathy and Neuroaesthetics



German aesthetics of the late nineteenth century was particularly
focused on explaining human attraction to form in picturing, sculpture
and building. Not always easy to interpret in detail, the broader
themes of this work include the ways that our bodily and ecological
situation determine the aesthetic preferences we have for such things
as symmetry (Wolfflin 1886), how architectural form is
appreciated in terms of its capacity to facilitate movement through
space (Schmarsow 1894, and how a sense of beauty arises from our
projecting the feelings provoked by an external object into that
object (Lipps 1903, see Currie 2011 for discussion). After a long
period of neglect, these and related topics have reappeared under the
banner "embodied cognition." Freedberg and Gallese (2007)
have drawn attention to the ways our bodies tend to reproduce the
posture of a statue, to produce implicit or simulated movements that
mirror those that seems to have produced a brush stroke or chisel
mark, to resonate sympathetically with the pain of a represented
figure. These, they say, are intrinsic aspects of aesthetic experience
neglected by theorists who emphasise an intellectualist approach to
art. They also claim that evidence for these effects based on
introspective reports can now be supplemented by an empirically
verified theory of brain processing that appeals to mirror and
canonical neurons. Critics have alleged that this approach neglects
the aesthetic impact of top-down factors (Kesner &
Horacek 2017) and that motor responses are absent in many
encounters with art (Casati & Pignocchi 2007: 410). Arguably
though, Freedberg and Gallese seek only to identify an aesthetic
factor of some significance and need not claim either exclusiveness or
universality for it. Formalists in art might object even to this
restricted claim, arguing that what Freedberg and Gallese have
identified are obstructions to the sort of "purely
optical" attention to pictures that Greenberg (1960) advocated
(on which see Steinberg 1965; Currie 2007). But here again aesthetic
prescription cannot afford to ignore empirical work: standards of
aesthetic attention that no one has ever lived up to are not to be
taken seriously.



Attempting to illuminate aesthetic phenomena by appeal to mirror
neurons and other neurological processes is now so common that we have
a substantial genre of *neuroaesthetic* writings (see
Chatterjee 2013 for the field's growth over 30 years). What
remains controversial, though, is the significance (if any) this
research into brain structures and processes has for aesthetics. We
have already seen that--despite the bold claims sometimes made by
neuro-aestheticians--some critics are inclined to dismiss this
kind of work as irrelevant to evaluating the kinds of claim which
aestheticians are concerned with. Gallese and Freedberg, responding to
critics, say that



> 
> 
> no esthetic judgment is possible without [...] mirroring
> mechanisms in the forms of simulated embodiment and empathetic
> engagement that follow upon visual observation. (2007: 411)
> 
> 
> 



But to understand the aesthetic significance of facts about such
mechanisms we need to distinguish between two claims:


* Evidential claim: facts about mechanisms may provide evidence to
support or undermine a claim about what is involved in aesthetic
experience or judgement.
* Constitutive claim: facts about mechanisms may be constitutive
parts of the story we tell about what is involved in aesthetic
experience or judgement.



The evidential claim is more plausible than the constitutive claim.
Consider first the evidential relevance of cognitive and neurological
mechanisms for aesthetics. We have just now referred to a dispute
about how much of our experience of visual art depends on a
work's tendency to encourage bodily empathy with what is
depicted. While people sometimes report experiences of these kinds it
may be that they vary in accessibility, with some unnoticed without
high levels of attention, though still making a contribution to our
overall liking for/valuing of the work. Studies of brain activity
across a range of artistic stimuli might suggest that these empathic
responses are very common indeed--or that they are relatively
unusual--because (let us suppose) empathy has an identifiable
neurological signature. Such studies would be useful as evidence for
the claim that something needs to be factored in to an account of
aesthetic experience. But the relevant something would be the empathic
response, not the brain process (See Carroll, Moore, & Seeley
2012: 54 where studies of this kind are described as
"data" for aesthetic theories).



The difference between aesthetic effects and the mechanisms that
realise them is an important one. Take the shimmering quality we find
in impressionist art. It is said that this depends on the fact that
the visual system involves two separate processing streams and that
certain colour combinations are processed exclusively by one of them
(Livingstone 2002). Should this fact, if it is one, be regarded as an
aesthetic fact? Arguably no. What matters aesthetically is the
experienced shimmering quality; a world in which just that shimmering
quality was produced by some other mechanism of perceptual processing
would not be aesthetically different from our world, at least in this
respect. The same applies to scientific studies of the stimuli
themselves; chemical analysis of an ancient pigment might show that it
was a hard medium to work in, and that would be relevant to
understanding the works of art produced by its means. But what matters
is the difficulty of the medium; discovering its chemical formula
simply provides evidence for that.


## 5. Authenticity



A Kant-inspired view of long standing is that aesthetics is concerned
not with how things are but with how they appear (e.g., Urmson 1957),
a view sometimes called *aesthetic empiricism* (Currie 1989) On
this view aesthetics takes no cognisance of authenticity, which
depends on history and not on appearance; a fake Vermeer does not
become authentic by being visually indistinguishable from a genuine
one. Is an object's history really aesthetically irrelevant?
Those with an interest in art, craft and the design of artefacts
generally are much concerned with the object's history, and
there are arguments to support the view that the application of at
least some aesthetic properties depends on assumptions about that
history. Consider two such attributions from Sibley's (1959)
extensive list of aesthetic properties: *being delicate* and
*being dynamic*. A line that is seen as delicate when thought
to be drawn by hand may not seem so when revealed as the product of a
machine, and Walton (1970) argued that, of two works which are
visually indistinguishable, one may be fairly described as dynamic and
the other not, depending on differences in their category membership
(for defences of aesthetic empiricism concerning visual art see
Zanwill and, on music, Dodd; for the aesthetic relevance of
genuineness or authenticity see Korsmeyer 2019). The suggestion of at
least the first of these examples (*being delicate*) is that
the aesthetic properties of a thing, and the aesthetic values that
possession of these properties entails, depend on the kind of
achievement that the fashioning of the work represents. What may be a
considerable achievement for one person at one time may be a greater,
lesser or at least a different achievement for someone else, working
with different materials or in a distinct artistic culture (Dutton
1979; Currie 1989; Huddleston 2012; Levinson 2016); James Grant (2020)
suggests that we do better to think in terms of a work's
capacity to exhibit the skills of its maker rathen than in terms of
its constituting an achievement of the maker (see also Currie
2018).



Both formulations imply a close connection between valuing the work
and valuing the maker, helping thereby to explain how an interest in
the authenticity of a work can belong to the space of aesthetic
reasons. It also suggests a connection with our desire to preserve and
possess otherwise unremarkable objects because of their relation to
some person or event that interests us (JFK's sweater). Some
psychologists have thought to bring art works and other valued
artefacts together under the heading of contagion, the idea that



> 
> 
> a person's immaterial qualities or 'essence' can be
> transferred to an object through physical contact; (Newman,
> Diesendruck, & Bloom 2011)
> 
> 
> 



an idea that goes back to early anthropological work by Frazer (1890
[1994]) and others. As the examples just given indicate, the idea that
a person's essence is transferable to an object does not depend
on the object's aesthetic merits, and this severely limits the
usefulness of this idea in explaining the role of authenticity in the
arts (see, however, Korsmeyer 2019 where it is argued that genuineness
is itself an aesthetic property). Bloom and colleagues stress the role
of physical contact in the contagion process: "An original
Picasso may be valuable because Picasso actually touched it"
(Newman & Bloom 2012: 3). But Picasso may have got no closer than
a brush length from *Guernica*, a picture likely to command
higher art-world respect (and higher prices) than a restaurant napkin
sketch he then wiped his hands on. However, a more general and perhaps
rather vague sense of "closeness" to the artist and their
act of making does seem to be explanatory of some art-world practices,
such as a preference for lower numbered (and hence earlier) prints
even where there is no decline in quality across later ones (Smith,
Newman, & Dhar 2016).



Bloom and colleagues offer another explanation for our interest in
authentic items, this one closer in spirit to the suggestion above
that aesthetic judgements are sensitive to achievement or the
manifestation of ability:



> 
> 
> [A]n original is different from a forgery because it is the end point
> of a different sort of performance . The original is a creative work
> while the forgery is not. (Newman & Bloom 2012: 559)
> 
> 
> 



Guernica, very likely, is a more creative work than the napkin sketch
and plausibly valued more for that reason. A question which arises is
this: how do people make judgements of the quality of, say, a
painting, if not solely on the basis of how it looks? For a few highly
trained experts the answer may be: through deep immersion in the
cultural and artistic context of the work. The rest of us, where we
make a judgement at all, may be dependent on short cuts such as the
"effort heuristic", which treats evidence of effort as
evidence of quality. In an experiment, people asked to judge the
relative merits of pictures *A* and *B* tended to judge
*A* as better than *B* when told *A* took longer
to paint, while the group who were told that *B* took longer
preferred *B*. This effect was found equally among experts and
among laypersons, though the experts were "self-described"
(Kruger et al. 2004).


## 6. Pictures, Imagination and Perception



Wollheim (1980) said that what is distinctive about pictorial
representation is its capacity to generate a certain kind of
experience: the experience of "seeing the subject in the
picture". For many this has seemed to capture something deeply
important about the nature of depictive representation, though
Wollheim's specific claims about it are disputed. What exactly
is seeing-in? One subsequent suggestion has been that we see
something, *X*, in a picture when we experience a resemblance
between the outline shape visible in the picture and the outline shape
that would be presented from that same perspective by *X*
(Hopkins 1998; for a related proposal see Peacocke 1987). Another
proposal is that we see *X* in a picture when we are prompted
by it to imagine, of our act of seeing the picture, that it is a
seeing of *X* (Walton 1992). Is cognitive science able to help
us adjudicate between rival theories in this area? It does look as if
these ostensibly philosophical theories are committing themselves, if
somewhat vaguely, on empirical issues. Surely, we cannot settle from
the armchair whether the perception of pictures draws on imaginative
capacities. Scientists have gone a long way towards locating areas of
the brain implicated in certain kinds of functions, emotion and the
forms of perception being good examples. But we are not similarly able
to localise imaginative activity and there may be an in-principle
barrier to our doing so; there is some reason to suppose that there
are not dedicated mechanisms of imaginative activity, but that
imagining involves the reuse of systems designed for other purposes.
This issue has been a central contention in the debate over how we
understand the minds of other people, a debate originally drawn in
terms of two opposing outlooks, theory-theory and simulation theory,
though other approaches have come into view (Gallagher & Hutto
2008). Theory-theory attributes to us a (perhaps tacit) theory of the
mental states of others, their connection to action and so forth, from
which we derive predictions and explanations of behaviour (Fodor 1992;
Carruthers 1996). Simulationism, by contrast, argues that we have a
capacity to use our own mental systems of inferring and deciding to
model or simulate the thoughts and decisions of others (Gordon 1986).
While Heal has emphasised what she takes to be the *a priori*
principle that when we examine the thinking of another person we have
to reproduce in our own minds the contents of and the logical
relations between the propositions thought (1986), others have
developed an empirically oriented version, postulating causal
mechanisms by which practical and theoretical reasoning can be taken
"off-line", or disconnected from experiential inputs and
behavioural outputs (A. I. Goldman 1989). It has been suggested that
the simulation approach, understood largely in this empirically
oriented way, enables us to explain a good deal about our interest in
and responses to fiction (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002). Questions
about causally effective mental architecture have played a role in
other aesthetic debates such as the explanation of our capacity to
become immersed in a narrative (Schellenberg 2013) and of the contrary
tendency to "resist" imaginative involvement with stories
we perceive as morally or in other ways problematic (Weinberg &
Meskin 2006; Miyazono & Liao 2016).



While some of these ideas come with a detailed "boxology"
that describes the cognitive implementation of the proposal, they are
generally the product of work at the more philosophical and
speculative end of inquiry into the architecture of mind where
evidence is at best very indirect. An exception is the suggestion that
there is empirical confirmation for Wollheim's (1998) notion of
twofoldness in picture perception, according to which spectators are
simultaneously aware of both the surface qualities of the picture and
the depicted content. In particular, it has been argued that



> 
> 
> the twofold experience of pictures Wollheim talks about corresponds to
> the dichotomy between our dorsal visual processing of the surface of
> the picture and our ventral visual processing of the depicted scene.
> (Nanay 2011: 464)
> 
> 
> 



Support for this idea comes from evidence that people with damage to
their ventral processing often have difficulty deciphering the content
of a picture without corresponding difficulty in perceiving the
ordinary properties of the surface of the picture (Turnbull, Driver,
& McCarthy 2004). This illustrates another way that the
investigation of mechanisms may further aesthetic inquiry. An
aesthetic phenomenon--in this case twofoldness--is
postulated and the question arises as to whether there is a plausible
story about how this is implemented. If no such story were available,
doubt would be thrown on the claim.


## 7. Emotion



A good deal of aesthetic thinking has been taken up with arguing about
the limits to its capacity to appeal to the emotions. Two issues are
particularly notable, one descriptive and the other, in part,
normative. What, first of all, are the facts about our (apparently)
emotional responses to fictions? Do we really admire, despise or pity
people we know do not exist? This sounds like an empirical question,
perhaps one to be resolved by studies of the brains of people engaged
by fictional work. But the prospects for this approach are poor, and
not only because of practical difficulties in data gathering (see Cova
& Teroni 2016). Those who deny that we pity Anna Karenina do no
deny that readers may display all the physiological signs that go with
that emotion. What they claim is that genuine fear has a cognitive
component lacking in this case: belief in the object of one's
fear. Suppose we could show empirically that readers of Tolstoy do
experience all the pity-relevant physiological states while failing to
believe in the existence of Anna Karenina, having instead cognitive
states such as "imagining that Anna exists". The
philosophical problem would remain: are people with that psychological
profile genuinely in a state of pitying, or is their state merely one
of what Walton (1978) calls "quasi-pity", which involves
the typical physiological and psychological reactions of pity but
which falls short of being full-fledged pity because it does not go
with belief in its objects, or with the typical corresponding
dispositions to action? We might at this point wonder whether what
looked like a substantive question about fear and pity has been shown
to be merely one about labelling. However, there are empirical
considerations that bear indirectly on the issue. Gendler and
Kovackovick suggest that plausible assumptions about the evolutionary
proper function of the emotions tells against the idea that fear
requires belief. It is likely on Darwinian grounds that our emotions
were shaped not merely by their capacity to have us avoid present
dangers, but also to have us avoid merely possible ones. Imagining a
dangerous creature lurking in the forest may be enough to send me by a
safer route, raising my chances of surviving and passing on my genes.
If imagined dangers are part of the reason fear has been selected for
and retained why insist that responses to the imagined creatures and
events of fiction are, as Walton (1978) claims, merely quasi-fears?
For other connections between aesthetics and evolutionary thinking see
below,
 Section 9.



A similar problem arises when we consider our responses to music. We
sometimes talk of sad music making us sad, though the music does not
provide us with any reason for thinking that something sad has
happened (sad music sometimes reminds us of a sad event, but this is
not a general feature of cases where sad music affects us). Here
appeal to the imagination seems less helpful; unlike fictional
narratives, emotionally affecting music does not usually provide us
with the materials for imagining some sad event. Kivy has argued that
sadness on the part of those who listen to sad music is, where it
occurs, irrelevant to musical appreciation and will indeed not occur
in episodes of listening which instantiate his preferred model of
musical listening, one which requires exclusive attention to the
structural, phenomenological, and expressive properties of the music
(1990: ch. 8). Kivy does not deny however that musical listening can
and indeed should be a deeply emotional experience; we may be
overwhelmed by the compositional and performance qualities the work
represents. Some attempt has been made to challenge Kivy on empirical
grounds by presenting evidence that music does reliable engender the
emotions or moods it expresses (Sizer 2007). But Kivy denied this
possibility only for the case of canonical music listening, and says
that there is no reason to think that subjects in the relevant
experiments were listening in that canonical way (2007). Certainly it
would not be easy to control experimental conditions so as to rule-out
listening which is non-canonical in Kivy's sense (see also Kivy
2006; Carroll 2003; Carroll & Moore 2007). However, if
experimental tests do consistently provide evidence of
emotion-generation concordant with the emotions expressed by the
music, it will not do simply to say that we have not yet tested the
right listeners. The friend of Kivy will have to find robust instances
of the sort of listening he approves of, and not depend merely on the
personal testimony of those who favour his theory. We take it, after
all, that Kivy's ideal mode of listening is presented as a
practically achievable goal. Zangwill 2004 represents a formalism that
is less willing to accommodate the emotions; for a more limited
defence of the formalist position see Cochrane 2021b.



Another aesthetically important question about the emotions is this:
why are we attracted to representations and other devices that
generate negative emotions such as sorrow and fear? It is not a
satisfactory answer to this question to make the suggestion referred
to above that we do not really fear Dracula and other creatures of
fiction but merely quasi-fear them, because fear and quasi-fear are
supposed to be qualitatively the same, so if fear is unpleasant
quasi-fear is also. The question can be asked about both narrative
works and about music; recall that even Kivy grants that
(non-canonical) musical listening may generate sadness. However,
fiction has been the greater part of this discussion, and will be here
also. On this issue philosophers have tended to take one of three
positions (but see Smuts 2009 for a wider range of options):


* Compensation: audiences tolerate the negative emotions of tragedy,
horror and other genres because they recognise compensatory benefits
(Carroll 1990; Feagin 1983)
* Conversion: emotions which would otherwise be experienced as
unpleasant are experienced as positive in artistic contexts (Hume 1757
[1987]).
* Neutrality: it is wrong to think that the so called
"negative emotions" provoked by tragedy or horror are
intrinsically unpleasant and hence in need of compensation or
conversion. They are not intrinsically valenced and may be experienced
negatively in some situations and positively in others (Gaut 1993;
Walton 1990: 255-8)



Neutrality is a general claim about the emotions and relevant here as
one way to argue in favour of conversion. But a conversion theorists
need not be committed to Neutrality. We focus here on the contrast
between Compensation and Conversion. Compensation, unlike Conversion,
appeals to a type of psychological process that is hardly
controversial; we accept many kinds of unpleasant experiences because
avoiding them will have even less desirable consequences. Conversion
sounds more problematic: how can an emotion "flip" its
hedonic value and still be the same emotion? Psychologists interested
in negative emotions in art have cited research which purports to
reveal hedonic flip for pain: subjects who expected an intense pain
but experienced only a moderately painful stimulus described the
experience as "pleasant", while subjects expecting
nonpainful warmth described the same stimulus as unpleasant (Leknes et
al. 2013). This doesn't by itself show that the same thing can
happen in the case of tragedy or horror, but it suggests that the
conversion claim is less outlandish than it might initially seem.



While compensation may appeal to a familiar kind of trade off, it
needs to tell us what specific compensatory benefits are to be had
from the negative emotions provoked by art. Philosophers have long
cited epistemic benefits: the distressing events of tragedy are a
source of moral and psychological learning, sometimes about ourselves
(Collingwood 1938; Schier 1983). Empirical scientists have added to
the list: painful emotions generate strong pro-social feelings that
help to unite us with both characters and authors (Bastian, Pe, &
Kuppens 2017; Egloff 2017).



While philosophers have long offered theories to resolve this
"paradox of tragedy," only one substantial study of it
claims to be grounded in empirical research. Menninghaus and
colleagues propose what they call the "the Distancing-Embracing
model" (Menninghaus, Wagner, Hanich, et al. 2017) according to
which an aesthetic context, as with watching a play or film, distances
us from the situation represented and allows the positive effects of
tragic emotions, notably their capacity to focus attention, to sustain
them. While a large and relevant body of empirical work is called on
in support of the idea, its theoretical commitments are unclear. In
some of their formulations the function of distancing seems to be the
reduction in unpleasantness of negative emotions to the point where
they are "not inevitably incompatible with art-specific
expectations of hedonic reward" (2017: 6); this leaves them open
to the charge made against compensation theories that the work's
being apt to generate negative emotions seems to be a major factor in
attracting people to the work, rather than something negative we can
be persuaded to live with. In other formulations they speak of the
factors "involved in making negative emotions enjoyable"
(2017: 3), which suggests the conversion theory. Yet they claim that
their theory is a version of neither of these approaches (2017: 15;
see S. Davies 1997). (For more on the relationship between fiction and
emotion see the supplement to Liao & Gendler 2018 [2020]). See
below,
 Section 7
 for further remarks on fiction and emotion.



To conclude the discussion of fiction, we note another direct appeal
to work at the empirical level. Derek Matravers (2014) argues that it
has been a mistake of recent theorising about fiction to appeal to the
imagination. Matravers claims that work on mental models does a good
job of explaining our processing and comprehension of, and responses
to, both fictional and nonfictional narratives without any need to
distinguish fictional cases by their connection with the
imagination.


## 8. The Aesthetics of Literature and Literary Language



Through the latter part of the twentieth century, theoretical and
interpretive studies of literature have been somewhat hostile to both
cognitive and aesthetic inquiry, often thought of as irrelevant to
serious interpretive work and a distraction from favoured political
agendas. Cognitive studies of literature have developed somewhat in
the last twenty years but remain a minority enterprise (Hartner 2017).
One question of long standing that has concerned scholars in
psychology, literary studies and aesthetics is the idea that we learn
from literature about the world beyond the text, an idea treated with
some suspicion by those influenced by deconstructive or post-modern
theorising, who argue that such ambitions depend on failing to realise
that characters of fiction are not, and are not like, real people
(Cixous 1974). Others argue that such cognitive benefits, if they
exist, are not aesthetically relevant (Lamarque & Olsen 1994: ch.
17; for criticism see Gaut 2007: ch. 7; Currie 2020: SS9.6). There
is, however, a strong tendency to suppose that the artistic merit of,
say, a Shakespearean drama depends in part on our sense that it is
revelatory of deep insights into the human condition. Similar claims
are made for other arts; contemplating van Gogh's lithograph
*Sorrow* Kendall Walton notes responding imaginatively to the
woman in ways that "gain for me an understanding of what a
particular sorrow is like" (2008: 78).



Recently efforts have been made to test the idea that literature does,
on occasion, provide cognitive benefits. It has been claimed that
exposure to fiction--even single episodes of
reading--measurably improves empathy and theory of mind (Kidd
& Castano 2013); the effects, if real, seem to be small and the
claimed results have been hard to replicate (Panero et al. 2016; Kidd
& Castano 2019). Other work in this growing field also does not
point in a single direction. Some studies suggest that fiction has a
capacity to improve aspects of social cognition (Calarco et al. 2017;
Mar 2018a,b) while others find no such effect (e.g., Wimmer et al.
2021a, b; see Currie 2020; chs 9-11 for general discussion).
Humanistic scholars who claim educative effects for fiction may
respond that these effects are slow and cumulative, and unlikely to be
visible in studies of single episodes of reading; testing such claims
will be difficult. But their claims are, nonetheless, empirical.



Among other examples of the cognitive study of literature are
investigations of emotional responses. While aestheticians have tended
to focus on the apparently "paradoxical" aspects of our
emotional responses to fictions (for example why we are emotionally
affected by the non-existent, see above
 Section 7),
 researchers in the cognitive sciences has begun a broader attempt to
understand the role of emotions of all kinds in generating and
maintaining interest in narrative and poetry (Menninghaus, Wagner,
Wassiliwizky, et al. 2017); Jenefer Robinson's (2005) is an
example of work from within aesthetics that takes up this broader
ambition while being strongly informed by empirical work. More
recently, Kukkonen (2020) attempts an alignment between the
expectations of a reader sometimes surprised by plot development and
the predictive processing approach to perception and cognition (see
above
 Section 3).
 It is an open question whether the predictive processing account
sheds aesthetically relevant light on the reader's experience
rather than simply providing an account of the mechanisms involved
(see above
 Section 4).



A striking example of an area long thought of as resistant to theory
from outside the domain of art and the aesthetic is that of literary
language. Insight into the kind of language we think of as distinctive
of poetry, drama and the novel has traditionally been sought from
those whose expertise is literature itself rather than from those
developing general theories of communication, a view endorsed by Peter
Lamarque, who regards the idea that there is value in seeing literary
works as akin to quotidian genres of utterance such as letter-writing
or political speech making as "utterly misconceived"
(Lamarque 2007: 34). But advocates of *relevance theory*, a
naturalistically inclined development of Gricean pragmatics, reject
the idea that there is anything fundamentally special or autonomous
about literary language, claiming that



> 
> 
> stylistic and poetic effects traditionally associated with figurative
> utterances arise naturally in the pursuit of relevance, and call for
> no special treatment not required for the interpretation of ordinary
> literal utterances. (D. Wilson 2018: 191)
> 
> 
> 



(for work that seeks empirical confirmation for relevance theory see,
e.g., Happe 1993; Sperber & Wilson 2002; van der Henst, Carles,
& Sperber 2002; Noveck & Posada 2003; and van der Henst &
Sperber 2004).



One ambition of relevance theory is to encourage us to see
"poetic uses" of language, where an idea is very
indirectly suggested by the words used, as less marginal than we would
if we thought of the paradigm of communication as the case where an
agent utters a sentence that means exactly what the speaker wishes to
communicate. Relevance theorists say that such cases of literal
meaning are rare or non-existent and do not constitute any kind of
communicative ideal. They point to the widespread phenomenon of
"weak implicature": audiences draw a range of conclusions
from an utterance, some of them obviously intended but others harder
to identify as intended (Sperber & Wilson 1995: 197-9). On
this view the totality of what is meant, even in mundane cases, is
never more than vaguely specifiable and would, if we bothered to
investigate, be subject to the same unresolvable disputes as we find
in poetic criticism. It need not be concluded that poetic discourse is
entirely of a piece with over-the-garden-wall conversation; the
relevance theorist's point is that the differences are ones of
degree and not of kind.


## 9. Aesthetics and Evolution



Theories of human evolution over the last two million years are
severely limited by the very incomplete fossil record and the fact
that soft tissue disappears quickly. Given these constraints it is
surprising the extent to which cognitive theorising has reached into
the very distant past, though its claims are agreed on all hands to be
highly provisional. A vital resource has been the study of stone
artefacts going back two million years or more, artefacts which
preserve very well and which are available in great quantities. We are
able to reconstruct a good deal about the methods of their
construction and to speculate in a reasonably informed way on the
cognitive capacities they require. Based on these speculations
innovations in stone tool manufacture have been linked to the
development of language (Higuchi et. al. 2009).



Any topic on which aesthetic and evolutionary methods converge is
likely to be approached with two questions in mind.


1. Is the emergence and development of art-making and related
activities explainable wholly or very largely in cultural terms, or is
there a substantial biological component?
2. Is art-making an adaptation or a non-adaptive consequence of
developments which may themselves have adaptive advantages (or
something else)?



It might be thought that the second question arises only if one
answers the first in a way that gives an important explanatory role to
biology. But culturally determined "phenotypes" can also
be adaptive, maladaptive or neutral. Cooking, certainly a cultural
innovation, is highly adaptive and has led to significant change in
gut size and perhaps in brain size as well (Godfrey-Smith 2013; for
scepticism concerning the relation to brain size see Cornelio
et al. 2016). Human biological and cultural evolution are closely
connected.



On the question whether there is a role for biological explanation
when it comes to human aesthetic activity, there is a constituency of
scholars hostile to this idea; they argue that "art" and
"aesthetic" are notions of recent and essentially western
invention, the application of which to other and older cultures is
mistaken (Gell 1998: 97). Opponents of this view readily grant the
huge cultural variability of aesthetic activity. They argue that there
are enough commonalities between the ways very different cultures
invest in the shaping and decoration of objects, in music, dance and
in story-telling to make it plausible that biology provides both the
initial impetus to and a set of constraints on these activities
(Dutton 2009; Currie 2012). If we thought, as we once did, that these
activities could be traced no further back than the cave depictions of
the European Upper Paleolithic it would be likely that the aesthetic
is too late-emerging to have a biological basis. Very recent
discoveries have now suggested a somewhat earlier origin; depictions
in Indonesia have been given dates prior to 45,000 years ago (Brumm et
al. 2021). More dramatically, though, the temporal depth of aesthetic
activity is vastly increased if we turn our attention to the stone
tools mentioned above, many of which show a notable symmetry of
construction. Hand axes from the Acheulean industry which arose about
1.7 million years ago are sometimes too large, small or sharply
pointed to be practical implements and strongly suggest an interest in
the display of skilful making that we commonly recognise in, say, the
art of the European renaissance (see Currie & Zhu 2021 and Gowlett
2021, both of which in different ways emphasise the importance of
seeing aesthetic practices emerging in a social context). Some have
seen these elaborated instruments as products of sexual selection, as
peacock's tails are said to be: reliable indicators of the
maker's qualities as a mate (Kohn & Mithen 1999). Another
view has it that they were indicators of trustworthiness, and hence of
one's value as a co-operator (Spikins 2012); for criticism of
both views see Hiscock 2014.



Hand axes are unlike a peacock's tail in being detached from the
body and so may be passed from one person to another--one reason
to doubt their reliability as signals of any particular agent's
suitability as a mate. Where symmetry of the body itself is at issue
that objection does not apply, and bodily and especially facial
symmetry has been offered as an example of something evolution has
tuned our sensibilities to because it is an indicator of health in a
reproductive partner. However, robust evidence has been hard to find.
One recent study did "not support the idea that facial symmetry
acts as a reliable cue to physiological health" (Pound et al.
2014; see also Kalick et al. 1998), another that there is
"little evidence that female appearance predicted health"
(Foo et al. 2017; this study did support a connection between male
facial appearance and fertility). For ethical arguments, supported by
empirical findings, that we should rethink our standard approach to
the aesthetics of human appearances, see Irvin 2017.



It should be noted that even a very early dating of the emergence of
aesthetic interests does not establish that they have a biological
origin; the Acheulean period seems to have been marked by high levels
of planning and organisation that suggest strong social relations
(Hiscock 2014). In this sense aesthetic activity may be a culturally
derived "technology", as writing is, rather than an
adaptation, as language may be (S. Davies 2012: ch. 10). Could we
account, on that hypothesis, for the seeming ease with which young
children take to forms of aesthetic activity such as drawing and
singing? By contrast, learning to write is effortful and requires
great investment in pedagogy. Recent work (Heyes 2021) seeks to
reshape our assumptions about what is learned, arguing that such an
early and reliably developing ability as interpersonal understanding
is really a socially acquired "gadget" (Heyes & Frith
2014). To add to a complex menu of options we also note that what
begins as a gadget or technology might, under certain circumstances
fall under complete or partial genetic control. This so-called
"Baldwin effect", once despised in evolutionary thinking,
has attracted interest more recently (Weber & Depew 2003). It
proposes a mechanism by which acquired characteristics can become
biologically heritable, without giving any ground to the Lamarkian
idea that changes that accrue in an organism's lifetime can be
passed directly to the next generation. For example, if advantages
flow from learning a skill, there may be selective pressure to ease
the burden and uncertainty of learning by making the skill, or some of
its components, innate (Papineau 2005). Given the multiply crossing
paths between cultural and biological evolution there is little
definite to be said about the origins of aesthetic interests other
than that we see evidence for it in human populations more than half a
million years ago.



We turn now to our second question: Is art-making an adaptation or a
non-adaptive consequence of developments which may themselves have
adaptive advantages? Or something else entirely? Strong and contrary
views have been expressed on this question; some have argued that the
development of depiction, story-telling and music have been crucial
for social bonding (Dissanayake 1992, 2000, 2017) or mate-choice
(Miller 2000; Dutton 2009; for criticism see, e.g., C. Wilson 2016),
others say that the creation of aesthetic artefacts offers no adaptive
advantage but that they gained their hold on us because they provide
rewards to sensory and other mechanisms in the mind that arose for
quite other purposes (Pinker 1997). From a somewhat different
perspective it is suggested that we do best by seeing human aesthetic
activity as simply the continuation of ubiquitous practices of
signalling and manipulation in the world of plants and animals. An
interesting feature of this idea is that it replaces the traditional
distinction between the aesthetics of artefacts and the aesthetics of
nature with a distinction between, on the one hand artefacts
*and* natural entities such as animal calls and flower
colouring, and on the other natural objects such as rocks, sunsets and
the night sky which "do not coevolve with sensory evaluations of
them" (Prum 2013: 821; see also De Tiege, Verpooten,
& Braeckman 2021). It is not clear whether we currently know
enough to decide between the available alternatives (S. Davies 2012:
ch. 12; for the case of fiction, Currie 2020; SS7.4). But would
deciding whether art-making is adaptive advance the cause of aesthetic
inquiry? That is doubtful. The question whether art is an adaptation
concerns whether the reason we have art now is that it contributed to
the fitness of our species. That could be true without it also being
true that art now enriches our lives in any of the ways commonly
claimed--giving pleasure, educating our emotions, instructing us
about morality. And it is possible that art does now have all those
advantages while having been an evolutionary irrelevance. It is also
true that even if art was not originally adaptive, it might have
become adaptive (an "exaptation") at some stage and might
be adaptive now. Different answers may apply to different art forms.
It is said that the novel is a particularly appropriate means by which
to exercise our capacities for empathy and mind reading (Nussbaum
1990, 1995; Mar and Oatley 2008); perhaps these advantages did not
appear until the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. While questions
about art posed in evolutionary terms are certainly of scientific
interest, what matters to the aesthetician is more likely to be the
values that art currently and historically exemplifies and the ways
those values are currently and historically responded to by us.


## 10. The Aesthetics of the Environment



We have referred rather briefly to the aesthetics of the natural and
humanly constructed environment and we conclude with a brief selection
of aesthetically and cognitively relevant work in this area. Much of
this discussion continues the evolutionary theme. Note that some of
this work relies for its evidence on people's responses to
pictures of environments rather than to the environments themselves,
leaving it uncertain how much of the response is to the environment
and how much to its representation.



The empirical study of environmental preferences has long been of
interest to planners, and largely represents the bottom-up mode of
inquiry referred to above (see
 Section 2),
 as the aim is to discover what people in general like rather than to
assess their likings against the normative constraints of connoisseurs
and philosophers. Topics explored include the differences in
preference across age groups, ethnicity, education and income (e.g.,
Kaplan & Talbot 1988). One conclusion often drawn is that there is
a widespread, perhaps universal, human preference for savanna
landscapes, even among communities whose own historically stable
habitat is very different, and that this preference is reflected in
the design of parks and gardens (Falk & Balling 2010). It is
further asserted that this is the product of our evolutionary
development in an East African context (E. O. Wilson 1975 is an early
source of this idea); for detailed discussion, references, and some
reservations see S. Davies 2012: ch. 6.



The non-prescriptive nature of much empirical research into responses
to the environment contrasts with a view influential in philosophical
aesthetics according to which there are quite demanding cognitive
requirements for a correct aesthetic appreciation of nature. The
question mirrors one we have already discussed for the arts: what
factors, other than the sensory appearance of an object, are relevant
to enjoying, appreciating and judging it aesthetically? In the case of
the arts we saw that one answer is to consider the work's
category--the (artistic) kind of thing it is (Walton 1970; see
above
 Section 5).
 Allen Carlson (2000) extends this idea to the aesthetics of nature,
arguing that a scene or object must be understood as belonging to a
natural kind, and as having the causal history characteristic of that
kind; that is the right way to perceive it and aesthetic judgements
about it are correct only if they are tied to that category. This
implies that much human aesthetic experience of nature has been
radically incorrect, being uninformed by the relevant scientific facts
and often infused with notions of supernatural creation. Some will
find this an acceptable consequence; we are used to thinking that many
long-standing human ethical judgements have been radically mistaken,
and aesthetic judgements might go the same way. Others however,
question whether the aesthetic delight one takes in, say, a bird in
flight depends for its acceptability on understanding the natural
history of the creature (Budd 2001).



A different and perhaps more accommodating approach to identifying
what is distinctive in aesthetic appreciation of the environment
connects an older way of thinking with recent work on cognition. The
eighteenth century focused attention on notions of the sublime
(notably Burke [1757], but in a line of thought from Longinus) and the
picturesque (Gilpin 1782, with roots in the older concept of
*pittoresco*). These, particularly the former, have generated
controversies about their relations to beauty--are they
subspecies of beauty or categories distinct from it?--and about
their extensions--is it only nature that can be sublime? The
question also arises as to whether terms like "the
sublime" pick out a class of objects to which there is actually
a common aesthetic response. This sounds like something on which we
could get help from the cognitive sciences, and work by Keltner and
Haight (2003), drawing on a range of empirical and reflective sources,
has been particularly noticed. Their work was on the concept of awe
rather than the sublime but they note obvious connections, given the
thought that the sublime involves a response to things physically or
conceptually vast. They suggest that awe involves the recognition of
the apparent vastness of the object or scene attended to and the
inability of the subject to assimilate it to their existing mental
schemas. Other research suggests a strongly pan-cultural component in
nonverbal expressions of this emotion (Keltner et al. 2019), and its
association with a diminished sense of self (Piff et al. 2015; Tom
Cochrane (2012) has argued that the sublime is characterised by a
feeling of self-negation). It is suggested therefore that the
experience of the sublime is an aesthetic form of awe wherein the
object is attended to for its own sake (Clewis 2019; Arcangeli et al.
2020), an idea elaborated by Shapsay (2021) who suggests that the
sublime sometimes takes a cognitively elaborated form involving
reflection of the challenge posed to existing schemata by the scene or
object one confronts.