Mark Reybrouck
"Musical Sense-Making and the Concept of Affordance: An Ecosemiotic and Experiential Approach"
(2012)
Music, in this view, is not merely a set of structures, but something that has inductive power and that involves mechanisms of sense-making and reactive behaviour that are grounded in our biology and our cognitive abilities (Reybrouck, 2005a, 2006a). As such, it challenges traditional approaches and paradigms which run through musicology as a discipline, with a major emphasis on historical research, music analysis and performance studies. The latter, however, have received as yet a lot of empirical support from cognitive sciences with a vast body of literature on the effects of music performance as a skilled activity that requires the simultaneous integration of multimodal sensory and motor information with multimodal sensory feedback mechanisms to monitor performance (Gaser and Schlaug, 2003). Several behavioural, neurophysiological and neuroimaging studies have explored the highly specialised sensorimotor, auditory, visual-spatial, auditory-spatial and memory skills of musicians while performing motor, auditory and somatosensory tasks.
Skilled performance, however, is not the most common way of dealing with music. It is restricted to a minor part of music users in general and can be mastered only after years of special training. It is arguable, therefore, to broaden the experiential approach and to conceive of dealing with music at a more general level of coping with the sounds. ‘Dealing with music’, then, is to be considered as a generic term that encompasses traditional musical behaviours—such as listening, performing, improvising and composing—, as well as more general ‘perceptual’ and ‘behavioural’ categories as exploring, selecting and focussing of attention on the perceptual side, and actions, interactions and transactions with the (sonic) world on the behavioural side. In order to encompass all these behaviours, it is desirable, further, not to speak of listeners, or performers—as these embrace only some of the possible ways of dealing with music—but of music users in general as a broad category of subjects that deal with music by means of one or more of these behaviours.
This paper could lend support to certain pet notions of mine, especially the idea that reception/listening may itself be(come) a "practice." But then there is this always-obligatory appeal to the Average Joe, the effort to justify such a project as a major part of something or other, whereas the study of skilled performance and special training necessarily comprises only a minor part .
Aside from the constant irony of the majoritarian impulse being cloaked so often in some very difficult academic verbiage, I think there are two important contradictions, or at least tensions, lurking beneath such statements as here. One is that it's not clear what exactly is urgent or necessary about understanding something that is, explicitly here, not special . Put another way, this majoritarian impulse demonstrates, apparently for decades worth of music-ish scholarship now, a constant affirmation and reaffirmation of its majoritarian-ness as the singular justification for the entire project, as if this were all some kind of exercise in democratic formalism. It is a justification which gets off the ground only by opposing itself to an existing major emphasis , refusing to accept quality as the basis for such "emphasis" and insisting instead on quantity. The question of how and why we got here is properly beyond the scope of a paper like this, but one wishes (for once!) to revisit it in light of the nonstory that Skilled performance is not the most common way of dealing with music .
The other tension is that the absence of special training hardly betokens the absence of learning or conditioning. It probably betokens the absence of conscious, willful cultivation, but even this is not assured. This seems to be precisely the point of much of what follows, and it is a point I am eager to embrace. The problem, though, for such projects as Reybrouck's here is that rather than resolving the old minoritarian dilemma we have merely reinscribed it in the study of non-specialists. It is thus a tad disingenuous to wear one's majoritarianism on one's sleeve while also attempting to borrow some of the minority's prestige, i.e. to show that what the majority does is also complex, also involves agency, also can be studied and codified and published on and about, etc. Either we are interested in cultivated skills and sensibilities (and therefore in a minority) or we are not; shifting the focus away from music makers and onto music users more broadly doesn't resolve this dilemma at all.
As unsightly as the old musicology can be to newer eyes, the fixation on all that is thought to be special and the willful ignorance of everything else is itself precisely a demonstration of affordance to rival any other presented here. What is unsightly is the culturally narrow orientation and the unearned privilege. But undertaking years of special training is as close to truly earning privilege as it gets. The point is not that this is ever assured; it certainly is not. But when interest is made a function of the sheer number of people doing something rather than the quality of what they are doing, this all but assures results which "tell us in bad English what we already know." Where else but there can dealing with music at a more general level of coping with the sounds really lead us?
...the central concept of affordance which was introduced by Gibson...who stated that animals perceive their environment in terms of what it affords to the consummation of their behaviour. Being defined as the perceived functional significance of an object, event or place for an individual, it points to an important quality of the world, namely that its features are meaningful for an active perceiver.
There is...a certain similarity between von Uexküll's concepts of Merkwelt—the world of sensing—and Wirkwelt—the world of acting—and Piaget's notion of the ‘sensorimotor level'. Both authors were profoundly influenced by Kant's insights that whatever we call knowledge is necessarily determined to a large extent by the knower's way of perceiving and conceiving... The fundamental analogy, however, lies in the concept of circularity. von Uexküll, e.g., has elaborated on the concept of sensorimotor integration which he labeled as functional cycle or functional circle (Funktionskreis) and which describes the basic structure of the interactions between the human and animal organisms and the objects of their surrounding worlds. These interactions consist principally of two acts:
“Figuratively speaking, every animal grasps its object with two arms of a forceps, receptor and effector. With the one it invests the object with a receptor cue or perceptual meaning , with the other, an effector cue or operational meaning . But since all of the traits of an object are structurally interconnected, the traits given operational meaning must affect those bearing perceptual meaning through the object, and so change the object itself.” (von Uexküll, 1957 [1934]: 10)This ‘circularity’ of stimulus and reaction is a central attribute of epistemic interactions with the world. It means that every stimulus presupposes a readiness to react, and that this readiness ‘selects’ as a stimulus a phenomenon of the environment which had been neutral up to that point. The stimulus, then, must realise the reaction, and the reflexive action can only be described as a circular event, in which a neutral phenomenon receives a property which it does not have independently from the reacting organ, and which it loses again after the completion of this action. Circularity of stimulus and reaction, therefore, has two meanings: (i), there can be no stimulus without the readiness to react and the stimulus ceases to be a stimulus with the cessation of the readiness to react , and (ii) without a stimulus there can be no reaction (T. von Uexküll, 1986: 122-123).
The concept of circularity, further, is closely related to the conceptual framework of cybernetics, which brings together concepts as different as the flow of information, control by feedback, adaptation, learning and self-organisation... As a unifying discipline, it provides a common language for the description of adaptive behaviour in general. Starting from the common concept of (epistemic) control system, it embraces the four major elements of adaptive control—perceptual input, effector output, central processing and feedback—, relying on perception, action and the mutual relations and coordinations between them as their functional counterparts. ...
Semiotic and pragmatic claims: the legacy of Peirce, Morris and James
The concept of circularity brings us to the pragmatic claims of Peirce who defined meaning in a rather retrospective way, from effect to causes .
This is, in a sense, the core of his pragmatism or pragmaticism which defines the meaning and truth of any idea to be the result of its practical outcome or “conceivable sensible effects”. In what has become known as one of his most famous definitions of pragmatics, he emphasises the role of the cogniser as an active participant in the process of semiosis:
"Consider what effect that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object." (Peirce, 1905: 481)...
In an original epistemology which he [William James] has coined as radical empiricism, he states that the significance of concepts consists always in their relation to perceptual particulars. What matters is the fullness of reality which we become aware of only in the perceptual flux. Conceptual knowledge is needed only in order to manage information in a more ‘economical’ way. As such, it is related to principles of cognitive economy:
“It is possible ... to join the rationalists in allowing conceptual knowledge to be self-sufficing, while at the same time one joins the empiricists in maintaining that the full value of such knowledge is got only by combining it with perceptual reality again.“ (James, 1911b: 237)...
Pragmatism, which can be considered as radical empiricism's companion theory of truth ...
...
Up to now, musical semiotics has focussed mainly on syntactics and semantics. Music, however, has inductive power as well. Musical sense-making, therefore, should encompass also the effects music can have on music users. This is obviously the ‘pragmatic’ dimension of music, considered as a sign or a collection of signs as related to its interpreters. Musical semiotics, in this view, should be the science of musical signs with music users being considered as subjects that respond to ‘signs’ rather than to ‘causal stimuli’.
There is an undeniable attraction to this, since the very possibility of ascertaining the syntactics and semantics of music almost always depends on faulty pretenses. (Dad: "music has a syntax but not a semantics." And some music of course takes the denial even of syntax as one of its guiding principles.)
The supersession of stimuli by signs is less plainly attractive, at least to me, but I would venture that it does describe perfectly, in fact, the properly musical aspects of McLuhan's "implosion," most widely observable nowadays in the phenomenon of the iPhone Zombie shooting video of a performance.
I suppose this is precisely the type of issue which the project outlined above could be useful in approaching; useful, that is, only if we are not already committed to the interpretation that this behavior is so transparently stupid as to render superfluous the leveraging of heavy-duty semiotic theory and finely-tuned laboratory investigation. Without wasting our time on any of that, we can certainly say that iPhone Zombies are engaged in a "practice." There is no need to leverage sophisticated empirical or hermeneutic artillery to show that they are "active" rather than "passive" audiences in at least a nominal sense. We can see, also, with our own two eyes that age is not a perfect proxy for this techno-Zombiism, nor is it for many others. For once, mere observable behavior is sufficient to establish something important about reception, though of course it leaves much unanswered and unanswerable, as before. Perhaps a semiotic analysis can pick up where observable behavior leaves us off, but it cannot (or it damn well shouldn't) run inteference for things we can plainly see without any of its help. And what we see in the (admittedly extreme) example I have chosen is that the iPhone now literally comes between artist and audience.
I suspect this example is not fairly representative of the ground Reybrouck aspires to cover, but I find it worth dwelling upon anyway, for it also invites a pregnant comparison with McLuhan's "nonliterates," who "do not know how to fix their eyes, as Westerners do, a few feet in front of the movie screen, or some distance in front of a photo." "The result," he says, "is that they move their eyes over photo or screen as they might their hands." Whether or not he had all the gory details correct in such statements, and whether or not any given Zombie is fully "illiterate," it is hard not to think of the iPhone here as affording its user a sort of eye-hand synaesthesia which is, at the present moment of technological determination, practically irresistable to anyone who has not been explicitly conditioned against it. Hence trained musicians and musically sophisticated audiences continue to fix their ears in front of the stimuli du jour, while most everyone else detects the sign for spectacle, the same visual sign regardless of the sounds emanating from it, as long as there are some.
This is a major claim of semiotic functioning: it stresses the emancipation from mere causality and time-bound reactivity to ever wider realms of spatio-temporal freedom and epistemic autonomy (Cariani, 1998: 243). Signs, however, are rather general and abstract in representing sounding reality. Music, on the other hand, is a sounding art, with the sonorous articulation as its primary category. The problem, therefore, is a possible tension between a general description of music at an abstract-symbolic level and the idiosyncrasies and particularities of the music as it sounds.
Semiosis and the concept of interpretant: an operational approach
Music is a sound-time phenomenon. It has the potential of being structured by music users, with levels of processing that range from direct reactivity to more elaborate reactions to the sounds. It is possible, therefore, to conceive of musical sense-making in terms of epistemic interactions with the sounds. Starting from the music as it sounds, music users can delimit configurations and assign to them the status of signs .
Sure, they can do this. It sounds like a lot of work though. And if it's not a lot of work, I would think that either the notion of signs or the notion of music users has been emptied of any meaningful content.
The result is a semantical system with signs as basic elements that build relations between signifying ‘means’ —i.e. the material sign vehicles—and their signified ‘objects’.Seriously? Is this not merely a five-dollar restatement of the most specious, threadbare, sentimentalist cliché of them all?
I obviously need some more seasoning in this area in order to understand how saying w refers to x because w has caused x is saying anything at all.In building such a system one can proceed in a way analogous to the building of ‘syntactic systems’: defining elements with elementary meaning, putting them together in a basic set and formulating rule systems for defining signs and combining them to supersigns. Such a way of proceeding is classical in stating that meanings are static, discrete and objective. It is lacking, however, in not providing communicative interaction between the parties of a referential exchange. A transclassical model, therefore, defines the elements as subjective, process-like and non-discrete (Maser, 1977). As such, it is related to [Charles] Morris’ process of semiosis, which can be defined in operational terms:
"Semiosis (or sign process) is regarded as a five-term relation - v,w,x,y,z, - in which v sets up in w the disposition to react in a certain kind of way, x, to a certain kind of object, y (not then acting as a stimulus), under certain conditions, z. The v's, in the cases where this relation obtains, are signs, the w's are interpreters, the x's are interpretants, the y's are significations, and the z's are the contexts in which the sign occurs." (Morris, 1964: 2)This ‘pragmatic’ approach to sense-making brings us to Peirce’s notion of interpretant as an important operational tool in the actual description of the process of semiosis that goes beyond the dyadic Saussurian distinction between signifier and signified. Semiosis, in Peirce’s view, entails a ‘triadic’ relation between a sign (sign vehicle or representamen), an object and an interpretant, each of them being relationally interconnected...
...
This triadic sign function can be easily applied to music. Sounds, in this view, are not considered as objects (firstness) but as signs (secondness) that refer to something that has caused them and that can be interpreted by music users (thirdness).
But this buries the lead. Previously the author conspicuously omits other people from Gibson's term "affordance" ("the perceived functional significance of an object, event or place for an individual"). Yet Wiki sez:
Morris's development of a behavioral theory of signs—i.e., semiotics—is partly due to his desire to unify logical positivism with behavioral empiricism and pragmatism.[3] Morris's union of these three philosophical perspectives eventuated in his claim that symbols have three types of relations:
to objects,
to persons, and
to other symbols.
He later called these relations "semantics", "pragmatics", and "syntactics".
So,
what exactly
has caused
any given music?
Most likely it is
another person;
which is to say
that
the move from
sign
to
object
isn't really about
about
majoritrianism
nor is it about
epistemology.
Rather,
it merely shows,
again,
that
extroverts ruin everything
.
In other words,
if we give up on that
firstness
by which
sounds
are
considered as objects
we're not trading in elitism for populusm;
rather,
we're trading in universalism for particularism.
That is the whole problem.
As Gibson put it:
“An important fact about the affordances of the environment is that they are in a sense objective, real, and physical, unlike values and meanings, which are often supposed to be subjective, phenomenal, and mental. But, actually, an affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property: or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer.” (Gibson, 1979: 129)von Uexküll argued in similar lines when he considered the particular qualities or functional tones of objects. A tree, for example, has different qualities with respect to the respective ‘Umwelten’ or subjective universes of animal and human beings that confer qualities on it: the tree can be a shelter for the fox, a support for the owl, a thoroughfare for the squirrel, it can provide hunting grounds for the ant, or egg-laying facilities for the beetle, and can be a source of valuable raw material for the forester (von Uexküll, 1957 [1934]: 73- 79).
...
It is a major claim of Gibson’s ecological psychology which has been stressed also by Michotte who stated that objects are experienced ultimately in terms of their functional significance for possible activities. As such, it is not fruitful to study perception in itself. Perception, on the contrary, must be treated as a phase of action in relation to the motor and intellectual activity of individuals. An object only affects behaviour in so far as it has meaning, and this only arises from its functional relations to the other objects, be they spatial or temporal relations, or relations of causality or purposiveness.
...
There seem to be three major [404] possibilities [i.e. "musical affordances"], which are all related to the activity signature of musical sounds: (i) the production of musical instruments out of sounding material, (ii) the development of playing techniques in order to produce musical sounds, and (iii) the shaping of the sound by using modulatory techniques.
...
All these examples refer to the productive aspects of musical affordances. They take as a starting point the raw material and what it affords for musical sound production. It is possible, however, to go beyond this productive level and to conceive of affordances also at the receptive level of experience. Affordances, in this extended view, embrace perceptual qualities, mood induction qualities and socio-communicative qualities, invoking aspects of sense-making, emotional experience, aeshetic experience, entrainment and judgments of value (Krueger, 2009, 2011; Windsor, 2004).
And here we meet the question: are these things really afforded the music-user if that user only thinks they are afforded them? Or do we need evidence of these things actually being afforded? And can we even nail down well enough for “science” what that would even mean?
The more urgent research, perhaps, would try to find evidence that, say, socio-communicative qualities (whatever tf those are…) are in fact afforded (whatever tf it would mean to afford the user such things). Is this testable? What we already have are plenty of natural experiments demonstrating the contrary, e.g. we have (I am told) a Cancel Culture case against Lassus Trombone, a case built on reminding people of associations which the instrumental music no longer has for them. Clearly the socio-qualities of that music are lost quite easily in the surface, for if not then it would be unnecessary to reraise awareness of them.
It is possible, finally, to bring together productive and experiential aspects of musical affordances as exemplified in the huge body of action and perception studies (see Gabrielsson, 1987; Repp & Miller, 2003). Music, in this view, is something that induces a kind of (ideo)motor resonance that prompts the listener to experience the sounds as if he/she is involved in their production (Reybrouck, 2001b). This is a claim which is somewhat analogous to the central version of the motor theory of perception, which means that motor ‘intention’ rather than manifest motor behaviour, is thought to be a largely endogenous phenomenon which is localised in the ‘central’ nervous system. As such, it has been shown that there is a motor aspect in perception and that the same areas in the brain are activated during imagined and executed actions
Well, how many music cognition researchers does it take to point out that formal musical training changes the brain? All of them, of course! So while I would think the above tenable, the split between initiates and non-initiates is if anything more objective and pronounced here than most anywhere else: “involve[ment]” here is wildly different for each listener…and at that point any convergence toward essential or communicative experience seems thoroughly dashed.
Conclusions and Perspectives
Conceiving of musical sense-making in ecological terms has a lot of operational power.
Is there anything at all to be made of the appeal to
operational power
where "explanatory power" might better serve?
It’s easy to
operate
when you don’t have to
explain
.
Emilio Ribes-Iñesta
WHAT IS DEFINED IN OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS? THE CASE OF OPERANT PSYCHOLOGY
(2003)
quoting
Houts (1994), "Operational analysis, behavior analysis, and epistemology in science and technology studies"
...[112] Bridgman developed operational analysis as his means to cope with the specific context of the conceptual revolutions brought about in physics at the turn of the century and into the first quarter century of modern physics. The major shift of thinking that Bridgman perceived and attempted to illustrate by repeated examples of analysis was a shift from taking concepts to refer to properties of objects to taking concepts to refer to activities of the physicist . In this sense, concepts such as length and velocity were achievements of humans acting on the world rather than signifiers of properties of the world.
[113] Operational analysis stressed that the meaning of scientific terms had to do with the ways in which scientists used them, that is, with the operations, physical and linguistic, carried out during its applications. Bridgman (1927/1953) stated that:
In general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations. If the concept is physical, as of length, the operations are actual physical operations, namely, those by which length is measured; or if the concept is mental, as of mathematical continuity, the operations are mental operations, namely, those by which we determine whether a given aggregate of magnitudes is continuous. . . . We must demand that the set of operations equivalent to any concept be a unique set, for otherwise there are possibilities of ambiguity in practical applications which we cannot admit....
On the other hand, S.S. Stevens (1935) advocated what he called operationism as a philosophy of science. Stevens adhered to a conception of truth by agreement. ...
[114] According to Stevens, a procedure was required to define and validate concepts. Such a procedure consisted in appealing to the concrete operations that determined the concept. An operation was defined by denotation of the gross physical behavior performed in determining how a concept will be applied. Additionally, the definition should include an observable outcome of the operation. ...
For Stevens (1951):It is generally accepted that semantic rules should be in the nature of operational definitions. . . .Terms have applicability to objects or events when the semantic rules governing their use satisfy operational criteria. The sentences or formulas created by combining these semantically significant terms into propositions are empirically significant (have truth value) when their assertions are confirmable by means of concrete operations. (p. 3)
...
[115] Operational analysis for Bridgman was a matter of pragmatics, that is, of how words are used in the context of a theory or a research practice. In contrast, for Stevens, operational analysis was related to the denotation of objects and events, using definitions as criteria for the semantic correspondence between words and objects. While Bridgman thought of operational analysis in terms of pragmatics, Stevens conceived operationism as a matter of semantics.
Operational definitions and the operational analysis of concepts are two different things. Operational definitions consist of the specification of procedures and expected outcomes (procedures used for producing and measuring a phenomenon) as the necessary criteria for establishing that the terms defined are empirically meaningful. In contrast, the operational analysis of concepts involves
[116]
the a posteriori identification of the physical and/or verbal actions involved in formulating or applying a concept. Thus, operational analysis deals directly with the arguments, rationale, and criteria used in the construction and application of scientific concepts. Concepts are defined according to their use and to the circumstances in which they are applied, including concepts about procedures and operations. Because of this, and in order to avoid confusion regarding the use of the term “operational,” operational analysis should be better called a “functional analysis of concepts.”
...
Skinner’s early reading of Bacon seemed to shape in him a strong technological attitude towards knowledge. Smith (1992) ["On prediction and control. B.F. Skinner and the technological ideal of science"] examined this influence of Bacon on Skinner:
Bacon’s (1620/1960) epochal declaration that “human knowledge and human power meet in one” (p. 39)—one of the Baconian principles that Skinner (1983) said governed his own life—is not a mere claim that contemplative knowledge can be put to human uses; rather it is the declaration of a different kind of knowing, in which the power of producing effects is not simply the by-product of knowledge , but rather the criterion of its soundness. With this declaration, the[117]age-old distinction of fact and artifact is broken down, and the artificial assumes, in a sense, more value than the natural. . .artifacts are preferred as being specially revealing of nature’s ways. (p. 217)
...
[124]Concluding Remark
Operant theory and radical behaviorism imply ontological assumptions about behavior as the construct that best represents the properties and nature of psychological phenomena. However, these assumptions (whatever they are) cannot tacitly be founded on or expressed only in the form of operational definitions. Operant concepts have been used as if they had multiple logical functions: they are used as terms denoting operations (procedures), events, processes, and outcomes (e.g., the terms “reinforcement and/or reinforcer,” “discrimination and/or discriminative”). Although categories denoting operations are necessary in any science, they do not seem to be enough to deal with the classification, explanation, and prediction of behavior. Operational categories should be considered only as descriptions of procedures and criteria being used in experimental or observational interventions—but science seems to be something more than a self-description of the scientist’s activities. ...
[125] At best, nowadays operant theory fulfills the role of a conceptual scheme organizing technological operations, although the achievement of control does not seem to be correlated with the parallel achievement of prediction and theoretical understanding.
Hasok Chang
"Operationalism"
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 Edition)
Operationalism is based on the intuition that we do not know the meaning of a concept unless we have a method of measurement for it.
...
Bridgman was invited to address this conference [the 5th International Congress for the Unity of Science in 1939], and chose to give a talk entitled “Science: Public or Private?”.[4] At this point it became clear that his enterprise was fundamentally at odds with the logical positivist project, despite the surface kinship:
The process that I want to call scientific is a process that involves the continual apprehension of meaning, the constant appraisal of significance, accompanied by a running act of checking to be sure that I am doing what I want to do, and of judging correctness or incorrectness. This checking and judging and accepting that together constitute understanding are done by me, and can be done for me by no one else. They are as private as my toothache, and without them science is dead. (Bridgman 1955, 56)Positivists and behaviorists had embraced operationalism for precisely the opposite reason: they thought operations were public, objective and verifiable, unlike private experience. But Bridgman was insistent that operations were a matter for private experience. He could see no warrant in simply taking someone else’s testimony as true or reliable, or in regarding the report of an operation performed by someone else as the same kind of thing as an operation performed and experienced by himself. In a later paper called “New Vistas for Intelligence” he declared: “Science is not truly objective unless it recognizes its own subjective or individual aspects” (Bridgman 1955, 556).
Bridgman’s individualistic bent, both in epistemology and social life, was in stark contrast to the logical positivist vision of knowledge and society...
As Holton (1995a; 2005) reports from his first-hand observations, the privacy of operations (and the consequent privacy of science) was not an idle philosophical doctrine for Bridgman. In the lab he carried out as much of the work as possible with his own hands, using few assistants and crafting most of his instruments himself. ... In academic life Bridgman (1955, 44) openly lamented the “intellectual fashion … of emphasizing that all our activities are fundamentally social in nature” . As for his social and political writings, they were often agonizing attempts to clarify, for himself, the place of the “intelligent individual” in society. He was unabashedly elitist, both on behalf of the gifted individual and of scientists as a group, and argued that giving appropriate special treatment to scientists would in the end benefit society (that is, all the individuals in society).
Well, the only benefit the Normies are interested in is for everything to be fundamentally social in nature , because that makes them the real experts in everything . In this the plebes and the navel-gazers are, for once, in alignment. The intelligent individual is shit out of luck.
Maila Walter observes (1990, 192–193): “Within the community of scientists and scientific philosophers, Bridgman had become the lone spokesman for a radical existential subjectivism”, more akin to Rheinhold Niebuhr’s existentialist theology than to any commonly recognized philosophy of science.
...
What Bridgman started up but never quite accomplished in a systematic and complete way was a philosophical analysis of science in terms of activities. Operations provide the philosopher (and the historian) of science with a very useful unit of analysis: actions or events, as opposed to objects, statements, beliefs, theories, paradigms, research programs, etc.
...
To the casual reader, much of Bridgman’s writing will seem like a series of radical complaints about the meaninglessness of various concepts and statements. But he was not interested in skeptical critique as an idle and indiscriminate philosophical exercise. He got most worried when a concept was being extended to new situations where the familiar operations defining the concept ceased to be applicable. His arguments often had an iconoclastic flavor because he was exceptionally good at recognizing where a concept had been extended to new domains unthinkingly and most people were not even aware that the extension had been made.
ULJANA FEEST
"OPERATIONISM IN PSYCHOLOGY: WHAT THE DEBATE IS ABOUT, WHAT THE DEBATE SHOULD BE ABOUT"
[133]
TWO NOTIONS OF “OPERATIONISM” Roughly, we can distinguish between two theses that are frequently attributed to operationism, an epistemological thesis and a semantic thesis. According to the epistemological thesis, all knowledge claims have to be reducible to actual or potential observations (see Salmon, 1985). According to the semantic thesis, the meaning of a concept can be exhaustively defined by stating particular operations and their observational results. Both of these theses are commonly associated with the philosophy of logical positivism. Therefore, I will dub this construal of operationism the “positivist” reading of operationism. In this section, I contrast this reading with my own “methodological” reading of operationism
Operationism: The Methodological Reading
The thesis of this section is that psychological operationism was never intended as a theory of meaning or a theory of knowledge in the philosophical sense. By this, I mean that psychologists did not intend to say, generally, what constitutes the meaning of a scientific term. Nor did they intend to provide a general account of justification for scientific knowledge. This does not mean that semantic and epistemological questions were of no concern. Thus, I believe that in offering operational definitions, scientists were partially and temporarily specifying their usage of certain concepts by saying which kinds of empirical indicators they took to be indicative of the referents of the concepts. ...
[134] I will argue in the next section that these types of “definitions” did not have the status that philosophers usually associate with the term—i.e., they did not have the status of a priori knowledge or analytical truths. Rather, they were either temporary assumptions about typical empirical indicators of a given subject matter, which allowed researchers to get empirical investigations “off the ground”, or they were presentations of the outcomes of experiments, which were assumed to individuate a given phenomenon particularly well. Thus, on my construal, they had a methodological function. Regarding the question of whether operationism was intended as an empiricist epistemology, it may be helpful to distinguish between two notions of epistemology. According to the first notion, the aim of epistemology is to provide a theory of what it would take to justify existing systems of knowledge. According to the second, the aim of epistemology is to formulate guidelines for the acquisition of new knowledge . This latter notion of epistemology may also be referred to as “methodology” (I take this distinction from Dingler, 1936/1988). While philosophers are traditionally interested in the former, it is a contention of this article that early psychological operationists, as practicing experimental scientists, were interested in the latter.
...
Operationism: The Positivist Reading
As is well known, the epistemological and semantic tenets of positivism were, for related reasons, soon recognized as problematic, and were subject to gradual changes and refinements until the 1960s... In a nutshell, it was recognized that (a) there are statements, which scientists take to be justified, even though it is impossible to exhaustively rephrase them in terms of observation sentences, and (b) there are statements about objects, which we intuitively recognize as meaningful, despite the fact that the concepts that occur in those statements cannot be exhaustively defined in terms of operations and resulting observations. The epistemological recognition led to the insight that a theoretical sentence cannot be verified, but at best confirmed, by observations. This implies that the meanings of such statements cannot be reduced to methods of verification.
...
[136] “to experience is, for the purpose of science, to react discriminately”... Did he [S.S. Stevens] mean by this that the expression experience has the same meaning as discriminative behavior? Did he mean that the presence of discriminative behavior is always a necessary and sufficient condition for the correct application of the term experience? Based on his research, I think that this is clearly not what he has in mind. Rather, Stevens presupposed that experience of tonal volume or density is phenomenal (and thereby, presumably, that the phenomenal aspect is an integral part of the meaning of the term). The question, for him, is how to “get at” particular kinds of phenomenal experience in an experimental context. His assertion is that this can only be done via the behavior of the organism—i.e., that in an experiment, discriminative behavior is a necessary condition for attributing conscious experience to an organism. Having devised an experiment that elicits such behavior in a regular fashion, he concluded, “[w]e are justified in saying that volume is a phenomenal dimension of tones” (1934a, p. 406).
Now, what about the “definitions” of tonal density and volume that Stevens offered as a result of his empirical investigation? While Stevens seemed to think that the criteria offered in his definition of tonal volume were sufficient conditions for the applicability of the term, I don’t believe that he took them to be necessary conditions. This point is related to the question of whether he was an antirealist about the referent of the concept. I believe that the fact that he conducted research on the neurophysiological basis of the experience of tones (see Stevens & Davis, 1936, 1938) shows that he believed the concept of tonal volume to be physically realized. This suggests that (a) he took the term consciousness to be more than a logical construct or a useful fiction (i.e., that he was not an antirealist about its referent) and (b) he would have been open to the possibility that it might in principle be detectable in more than one way (i.e., that the operational definition he offered was not intended to state necessary conditions for the applicability of the term). The status of his “definition,” I would like to suggest, was that of an empirical finding that was taken to confirm the existence of a phenomenon. This leads us to our last question—i.e., whether Stevens took either of those two types of “definitions” to be a priori true or unrevisable. The answer, I believe, is quite explicit in his own writings. He thought of definitions as factual statements that can be changed.
PAUL MARSHALL
"SOME RECENT CONCEPTIONS OF OPERATIONALISM AND OPERATIONALIZING"
(1979)
[50] three of the important questions which operationalism has raised. One is the question as to what conditions have to be fulfilled in order to make sure that the application of different methods does not alter the object under investigation . Secondly, on what basis do we assert that we are dealing with the same object when we are using different methods to investigate it ? This is a particularly important question in the social sciences. Finally, operationalism poses the problem of the extent to which an object of empirical study is dependent on the instruments used to investigate it .
...
Well, is there not much which the social sciences take as their subject matter of which we have no naive experience ? i.e. The non-transferable naive experience of our research subjects themselves, the voters, the consumers, (and yes) the listeners?[60] Shiveley suggests that a measure be correlated with another measure which one is „certain” is strongly related to the concept. This, however, merely shifts the question, for how is one „certain” that this other measure does correspond to the theoretical item? The mathematical techniques of validity will not do the job. Using further criterion validity checks will merely shift the problem still further. We are still left with the question of why we think this indicator corresponds to this concept, the question of face validity.
The only way in which one can say if two things are related to one another in this way is if we have some idea of what they both are. To
[61]
do this we must have some conception of what the theoretical terms refer to. ... [e.g. an intelligence test] Various forms of validity checks can be used to determine whether the various parts of the test all point to the same phenomenon. Nevertheless, we use or discard intelligence tests according the whether their results appear to correspond to that human trait, or perhaps set of traits, which we call intelligence. ... We would conclude, I hope, that a most technically sophisticated, highly intercorrelated test which consistently gives chimpanzees higher scores than philosophers may have got of something very interesting, but that it was not measuring intelligence.
Similarly if we are concerned with a measure, or any indicator, of such a phenomenon as conservatism we accept it because the particular features of the measue correspond which what we regard as the features of conservatism in a person. In fact we have to know what set of traits conservatism refers to in order to set up a measure of it in the first place. Otherwise we literally do not know what we are talking about. As Karl Deutsch pointed out, „counting is repeated recognition,” „nothing can be counted that has not been recognized first.” Similarly if we are vague about what our theoretical terms refer to, then we can only be vague as to wether [sic] our indicators indicate them. To quote Deutsch again..., „simulation at best cannot be much better than our understanding of that it is we are simulating.
All this points to the fact that theoretical terms must refer to something in our experience, or must be related to other theoretical terms which have reference in our experience. As Bridgman himself pointed out, we must relate an operational formulation to „an intuitive knowledge of the language or ordinary experience. The theoretical terms must point to something we can recognize and distinguish from other things, and not solely via the use of operational indicators.
(b) This viewpoint finds support when some further features of a theory/empirical distinction are considered. Despite the fact that such a distinction played a large part in his own view of the logical structure of scientific work, Carl Hempel ultimately expressed the view that such a distinction could probably no longer be maintained. This doubt has
[62]
since become radical for many other authors... Some authors have maintained that whilst a theoretical/empirical distinction may be necessary in areas of physics, because we have no naive experience of such things as electrons, it is nevertheless of doubtful coherence or use in the social sciences.
Indeed, in considering the model of scientific work taken from nuclear physics which has had some vogue in the social sciences in North America, May Brodbeck was moved to ask, „Why should they hunger after the complexity of the invisible?” ...
Consequently, it must be concluded that a radical distinction of the type offered by operationalism, between theoretical concepts and empirical terms, is, in fact, impossible to maintain.
...
[63] If one dit [sic] not know what sorts of phenomena to classify or not to classify under the rubric of „authoritarianism” then it is difficult to see how any theory would be or could be formulated in the first place. If one merely held that „authoritarianism” was a „non-observable” theoretical concept then one could do little to refine or specify the term other than to make sure it conformed to the criteria of a particular theory. If specification were attempted by means of an operation, such as an „authoritarianism” scale, then, if the term authoritarianism is left undefined by other means, the scale will be an indicator of something we know little about. If this is true it is difficult to see how one could assert that the scale is in fact an indicator of it.
Okay, we have travelled awfully far afield here, but this part does seem crucial to keep in mind vis-a-vis properly musico-logical, musico-sociological, and musico-psychological scholarship. In those areas, I think, it's not very sporting to hold on to the claim of radical uncertainty that I have occasionally succumbed to over the years. Still, I can't shake the impression that in music we frequently do not even agree as to what we are observing, let alone how to specify it theoretically; also that such disagreement breaks down along predictable lines of experience, i.e. distanced/pure scholars versus musicians-in-the-trenches (I wonder if purely psychoacoustic, non-"musical" or a-"musical" laboratory work is not blissfully free of such divergences because it has already withdrawn itself from the pragmatic level? which sounds useless, but actually it is a thousand times more useful to working musicians than semiotics!!); and also, in the most elementary way, that even armed with an agreed-upon descriptive-theoretical vocabulary, the ultimate divergence can only resurface in the choice of research topics, i.e. in triaging the questions-in-search-of-answers from the answers-in-search-of-questions.
It's possible that I'm just howling at the moon these days in positing this sort of "divergence," doubly so in caring one pube about it given that roughly 0.00000001 of the nearly 8 billion people on the planet care even that much. But I would indeed hold on, to the bitter end, to the blind stab that something non-observable must be, somewhere inside of us, churning away, and that persistent "divergences" in mere preliminaries as described above by Marshall is one small meta-empirical indicator in favor of this ultimate limitation on the pragmatist enterprise as represented here by Reybrouck.
That is to say that we have no more naive experience of being in anyone else's head but our own than we have of such things as electrons . It could be further argued, again at the risk of courting a merely obstinate radicalism, that we truly know very little, or nothing at all. I would like to think that there would be, even given such an ultimate material nihilism, some useful work waiting to be done on the level of pragmatic social fictions; which is to say that I for one am willing to entertain all of this ecosemiotic mumbo jumbo on that level, that is, its own explcitly stated level, "limited" as it may be. I still am unsure of which urgent question it is the answer to.
In any case, perhaps Stephenson had something of the same inkling in holding that
The [R] methodlogy suffers,and that
however,
from the limitation
that
all measurement in it
is
relative
to
the samples,
it is [therefore] difficult,
if not impossible,
to
find any beginning point
or
absolute zero
from which to begin
to make measurements...
What I have done
in Q-methodology
is
to discard
these
differential
and
parent person-population
methods...
in favor of
a comparative one
based on
the single case.
...
A parent population of persons is postulated, in the large-sample doctrine, as involving "chaotic elements"; people are so complex that it is considered better to start with the assumption that for anything one can consider about human beings and their behavior the law of error will apply. Thus,...the endeavor is to reduce error to a minimum by using large numbers of cases...
Gerald C. Cupchik
"The Evolution of Psychical Distance as an Aesthetic Concept"
(2002)
[178]
Synthesis
The two dominant approaches to aesthetic distance describe external and internal models. The Enlightenment and Empiricist traditions emphasized realism and the ways that an artist or playwright’s carefully constructed representations of the world could externally modulate experiences of pleasure and excitement. This external model is based on the mundane premise that people spontaneously engage in acts of cognition to recognize familiar objects and universal themes from everyday life, and generally experience feelings of pain or pleasure associated with them. The evocative potency of the work diminishes psychical distance in part because of the immediacy of this effect and the fact that the locus of emotion is perceived as ‘out there’ in the aesthetic artifact or event that caused the experience in the first place. According to this model, attachment (i.e. close psychological distance) should be to works that evoke positive feelings or excitement in accordance with the recipient’s affective needs.
This concept of a work as an ‘aesthetic object’ applies best when it is approached in the context of action. The context of action is inherently purposive in nature and involves a pragmatic attitude on the part of the person. Approaching a work as an aesthetic object within a context of action can imply different things. It may be seen as a commodity with a certain monetary value to be collected or to be given to a museum because of its tax-deduction value. Similarly, an artist can produce artworks repeatedly in a particular style because there is a market for them. A work can be viewed systemically in the context of action if only some of its qualities are relevant, as in the case of a decorative piece that fits into a particular setting. Aesthetic distance in the context of action
[179]
would then be based on the approach or avoidance value attached to the object.
Scholars in the Romantic tradition, on the other hand, focused on the role of the recipient in constructing an interpretation of the meaning of a work. Acts of imagination provide an internal way to synthesize sensory and symbolic qualities of the multilayered aesthetic artifact or event into a coherent whole. Treating the aesthetic work as if it were real requires a willing suspension of disbelief (that the work is not absolutely faithful to the literal world) and an effort at finding meaning in the piece. This applies to artist/authors and recipients alike, who, at the higher levels of appreciation, engage in both ‘doing’ and ‘undergoing’. These Gestalt-like acts of closure also depend on the perspective (i.e. understanding, vision both literally and metaphorically) that artists/authors and recipients bring to creative works. It is here that context (i.e. knowledge, personal and social relevance) shapes perspective, which in turn determines what is real for the creative person and the recipient. Thus the internal experience of the person provides a ground for the aesthetic episode and is the locus of the unfolding meaning and emotion. When the structure of a work is personally, intellectually or emotionally meaningful to the artist/author/recipient, distance is reduced between them and an attachment is formed.
A common framework is needed a priori in order to synthesize these two approaches. Objects and the artifacts that denote them have both material sensory qualities that define them perceptually and symbolic meaning that identifies them linguistically. In everyday cognition, there is a bias in favor of identifying useful objects, and sensory qualities are automatically discarded on route to object recognition. However, aesthetic episodes are unique because both material sensory and symbolic qualities are attended to and merge in a unified experience. In fact, artists and authors intentionally manipulate sensory qualities to make them salient and reawaken our sensibilities, thereby making us aware of the process of perception itself. It is this process of de-automatizing perception from the cognitive bias of everyday life that constitutes a first step in aesthetic education.
The integration of these qualitatively different material sensory and symbolic qualities into a coherent whole provides a cross-modal challenge for both the artist and the audience. The aesthetic attitude provides an opportunity for integrating sensory and symbolic information, structure and sign, style and subject matter, into a coherent experience without concern for its functional value. The more representational a work, the more the sensory qualities are subsumed within
[180]
the symbolic ones to maximize verisimilitude. The less representational a work, the more the sensory qualities take on a life of their own in the form of a style, and the more difficult it is to ‘read’ the work unless the underlying code of order is known. This balance between symbolic and sensory qualities, usually referred to as subject matter and style, affects the relative distance between the person and the work.
The context of experience focuses on the whole encounter with a work and is valued intrinsically. Approaching a work in the context of experience has interesting implications in terms of treating it as an object or as a system. Artists, particularly during modern times, have sought to affirm the surface of an artwork as a thing that occupies space. One reason for doing this was to eliminate views of artworks as mirrors of, or windows onto, reality. In modern art this was accomplished by affirming the two-dimensionality of a piece and reducing illusionary depth of space. Therefore, it is possible to experience a work of art in its thingness or sensory materiality. Qualities like impasto (i.e. thickness of surface paint) can make viewers feel like reaching out to touch the salient surface. Thus, implied tactile qualities of a work as an object can reduce aesthetic distance.
However, it is in a systemic view of artworks that the context of experience plays a more significant role. Experience can be shaped by relational meaning within the sensory qualities of the work. The overall compositional structure of a work in and of itself shapes experience unbeknownst to the viewer (though manipulated intentionally by the artist). This does not merely refer to the placement of objects in a rendered scene for the purpose of creating balance or tension. The very selection and juxtaposition of colors according to principles of complementarity and contrast can create the illusion of space or even of motion. Once subject matter is thrown into the mix, experience extends to all domains of symbolic meaning, both social and personal.
As many scholars have noted, digressions into the self through evoked associations serve to distance the person from the work. However, this is avoided to the extent that the viewer works to integrate the physical/sensory and symbolic levels of meanings in the search for coherence. Resonance between these two seemingly disparate domains engages the viewer because structure in the sensory domain serves as a metaphor for the symbolic. Thus, the theme of isolation can be effectively communicated by appropriately situating a solitary figure, but it is experienced more fully, and metaphorically, though the creation of a highly enclosed space.
The work loses its object quality in the context of experience, where it
[181]
possesses both structure and indeterminacy. Thus, there is some kind of order involving subject matter and/or style but, because the levels have some autonomy, there are many different ways to perceive and interpret it. The interaction with the artist/author is governed by an attempt to bring coherence (unity amidst diversity) to relations between the manipulated medium and its effects in the unfolding work, while preserving maximum uncertainty in the synthesis. A successful painting is one in which an attempt to make a visual statement is appreciated by cognoscenti who can work backward to uncover the evolution of the piece from the perspective of the artist. The audience, too, tries to bring coherence to the unfolding interpretation and accompanying experience. But the audience members start with the whole and must analyze the structure embedded within, and only the most experienced can readily do so. The greater the number of dimensions or levels of the work that the audience members can discern and appreciate, the richer their experience. The more they engage the work interpretively, the greater will be their pleasure.
Absorption defines a condition wherein the boundaries between the person and the aesthetic work, understood as open systems, are minimized. It would be highest when: (1) the symbolic meaning or perceived subject matter of the work elicits clear personal associations in the recipient, and (2) the sensory experiences elicited by the work give experiential form to the symbolic meaning. Since the locus of construction is within the recipient, the boundaries between the work and the recipient are minimized and the experienced connection is heightened. A trade-off between subject matter and style becomes relevant here if negative affect is elicited. Under these circumstances, an intellectualized attention to style reduces excessive affect and moves the recipient to a more comfortable position relative to the work.
It is also important to address communal absorption in aesthetic works that are incorporated into social or religious rituals. While artifacts from small-scale societies are ‘aesthetic objects’ and considered collector’s items by people from large industrialized states, they are systemic virtual objects for members of the source society. Each virtual object conveys important information about the social structure and beliefs of the society, while embodying dynamic and expressive qualities as well. Together they give the work an ‘aura’, an evocative quality that arouses intensified consciousness of shared meanings, while providing the soothing feelings that result from collective experiences or ‘happenings’. Absorption thereby becomes an intersubjective cognitive and emotional event. Scheff’s (1979)
[182]
treatment of ritual emphasizes the role that it plays in catharsis, the spilling of pent-up emotions in a safe collective context. Popular culture can be seen in a similar light as providing collective emotional associations for people raised in a particular historical era. In essence, it makes it possible to express pent-up emotions in a subculture, and provides an affective marker for the feelings of a generation. Stories can also be seen as raising consciousness and moral valuation. Chassidic story-telling, for example, has used simple but engaging language to increase people’s awareness of moral and spiritual aspects of daily life.
Detachment refers to a situation in which the context of action outweighs in importance the context of experience. At an individual level, it might involve the purchase of an ‘aesthetic object’ based on some criterion external to it, such as value based on market parameters (i.e., notoriety of the artist, availability of his/her works, and so on). Detachment can also occur even when a work is treated systemically. Someone might experience sympathy (as opposed to empathy) for the circumstances of situated characters depicted in paintings, dramas, and so on, but ‘not want to get involved’, so to speak. One could not accuse the person of failing to attend to the play, but it simply does not have an affectively evocative quality. This might reflect the topical nature of the subject matter, which is alien to individual members of an audience who are unfamiliar with the issues.
Communal detachment is a phenomenon of large-scale societies and can be attributed in part to the effects of mass media. Television and the internet, while providing speedy and unparalleled access to information, also provide a large-scale frame around both good and bad events taking place in the world. This creates a sense of detachment as one observes possible horrors at a safe and sometimes voyeuristic distance. Thus, while media can bring us knowledge about problems in far-away lands or even in our back yards, they also affirm our separation from them. At the same time, one cannot put the blame on a medium in and of itself. As a complex system it functions simultaneously at many levels. While writers, cinematographers, costume designers and others might work collectively to create aesthetic programs, they are potentially constrained by the forces of globalization and corporate power. The shaping of programs might work downward from the hierarchy of power, favoring particular themes, and desiring to produce agreeable feelings that favorably dispose people toward the products linked with them. While new larger and more detailed formats of films are becoming available, they temporarily
[183]
serve to attract perceptual attention. But once the novelty wears off, the same problem prevails.
Conclusions
The two streams from which modern aesthetic theory flows are based on different ontologies. The Empiricist view is fundamentally mechanistic and assumes a kind of realism according to which the structure of objects and events in the physical world do two things. First, they operate through the equivalent of affordances or constraints that determine the image experienced by viewers according to the criteria of everyday perception and cognition. Second, the Empiricists assume that these objects and events manipulate emotion along a dimension of pain versus pleasure, and leave memories that serve as markers for them. Not surprisingly, the ideas of the taste theorists were formulated in relation to representational paintings, which provide the clearest examples of mimesis, an attempt to copy the physical world. Aesthetic distance reflects an awareness of the work as a cultural artifact and is aided by the stylistic manipulation of a medium that makes the materiality of the work salient.
The Romantic tradition is more vitalistic in its approach and is sensitive to the organic development of the experience as encounters with cultural artifacts unfold in time. It also emphasizes the constructive efforts of individuals and audiences in the search for meaning. Given that meaning is indeterminate, it is impossible to use truth as a criterion of aesthetic appreciation. Rather, the contexts associated with an aesthetic episode will shape the interpretive process. Theoretical developments occurred in relation to drama and the problem of distinguishing reality from unreality. While the real is part of an intersubjectively shared world, the unreal is wrapped up with hope and fantasy, both individual and collective. Since both themes are present in dramatic works, the audience must ‘willingly suspend disbelief’ and go along with the imitation or simulation of events in the dramatic world that re-creates social episodes.
Aesthetic distance helps situate the person with reference to an aesthetic event. It involves an awareness of the event as such, be it a painting or a performance, as different from, though meaningfully related to, the everyday world. It preserves the aesthetic viewpoint, one in which sensory and stylistic qualities are given a standing of equal importance with symbolic subject matter. A ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ is essential if the person or audience is to set aside the everyday criterion of singular referential meaning. The combination of
[184]
both sensory and symbolic meaning provides the artist/author with an opportunity to create new stylistic codes or meanings. The viewer or listener also becomes engaged in a process of synthesizing meaning, and this affords the experience of both challenge and pleasure in the interpretive process. Grounding the aesthetic experience in culturally shared knowledge and becoming aware of the interpretive process itself are important aspect of aesthetic episodes. Rather than juxtaposing realist and constructivist ontologies, they should be viewed as complementary with the framework of ‘constructivist realism’ (Cupchik, 2001).
[many, many italics and several citations omitted]
Jean-Luc Jucker and Justin L. Barrett
Cognitive Constraints on the Visual Arts: An Empirical Study of the Role of Perceived Intentions in Appreciation Judgements
(2011)
[115]"From infancy babies automatically represent artefacts partly in relation to how they might be manipulated, apparently as a way to conceptualize their possible use or function. Similarly, adults assess artefacts partly according to their function. This springboard from manipulability to functional utility is absent from most works of art however, as it is for printed text or signs. Typically, works of art
[116]
cannot be readily manipulated, and are neither created nor used to achieve purely practical goals,... In other words, although perceived as intentionally created by human agents, the purpose of works of art is not clear, and cries out for an explanation."
Methinks the hot-war of "explanation" itself "cries out" for a ceasefire.
Here is a worthy "extrinsic" mandate for art and artists: to teach adult "babies" not to "cr[y] out" at the first whiff of something or someone they cannot "manipulate."
"To clarify, let us contrast a tool with a work of art. A tool will be recognized as such if it carries out a specific function; and if this tool carries out this function, we directly infer that its maker intended it to do so. This tool, then, may be assessed without speculation regarding the maker’s intention; recognizing its function is sufficient to categorize it and use it. For a work of art, the contrary is true: as it carries out no obvious precise function, it cannot be assessed without speculation about the artist’s intention. In other words, a work of art would be assumed to communicate something, which would have to be inferred from the artist’s intention."
...
[117]"On the basis of an art theory (Levinson, 1979, 1993), Bloom (1996)...proposed a new theory of artefact categorization, in which the decisive factor is claimed to be the intention of the artefact’s maker. According to this theory, an artefact actually is categorized as belonging to a kind X if, and only if, its maker intended it to belong to that kind (or, more precisely, if it is recognized that its maker intended it to belong to that kind). This does not mean, of course, that considerations of form and function play no role in artefact categorization; most of the time, form and function actually constitute good indicators of what the intention of the artefact’s maker was... More simply, it means that taking into account the intention of the artefact’s maker allows one to avoid some problems with classic approaches to artefact categorization. ...similarity of form and function are not sufficient for artefact categorization, because two objects may be dissimilar in form, but belong to the same kind, and two objects may be similar in potential function, but belong to different kinds. If one considers the intention of the artefact’s maker, categorization appears to be less problematic: two things may be dissimilar in form, but made with the same intention (and therefore considered as belonging to the same kind), and two things may be similar in function, but made with different intentions (and therefore considered as belonging to different kinds).
"...experimental studies that support the idea that intention plays an important role in artefact categorization and appreciation. ...children were asked to draw objects similar in form, such as a balloon and a lollipop; after another task, they had to name their drawings. Given the age of the participants (3–4-year-old), the drawings were very simple, and so similar that it was impossible to distinguish them on the only basis of form. However, a
[118]
significant percentage of the participants named the drawings correctly, suggesting that children distinguished their creations by reference to what they intended to represent."
...
"Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory of CommunicationBloom’s (1996) theory of artefact categorization suggests that intention plays an important role in intuitive judgements about artefacts, especially when their form, function, or mode of production is ambiguous. From this point of view, works of art that our approach targets typically are ambiguous. Being human-made objects, works of art activate intuitive cognition for artefacts, but at the same time frustrate functional expectations associated with artefacts; the creator’s intended function for his or her creation cannot be simply “read off” of the work of art. How, then, are works of art represented by
[119]
human minds? We suggest that they are considered as acts of non-verbal symbolic communication, in which case Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/1995) Relevance Theory might be a useful theoretical framework to approach them.
...
"According to Relevance Theory, to communicate is to make explicit an intention (the intention to communicate, and the intention to communicate something in particular), and successful communication occurs when this intention is correctly inferred from the evidence, that is, from the utterance or behaviour in question. However, as most of the time a number of different inferences may be drawn from the evidence, communication is also constrained by the Principle of Relevance. According to the Principle of Relevance, communicating goes along with an expectation of relevance: people pay attention only to information which may have an effect in a given context or, in cognitive terms, to information which is “worth processing”. Furthermore, according to Sperber and Wilson, there are degrees of relevance, and these may be described in terms of a cost-benefit relationship: the most relevant propositions in a given discourse are those that (1) have the greatest cognitive impact in the context and (2) are the easiest to process. In Sperber and Wilson’s words, relevance is geared to “the processing of information which is likely to bring about the greatest contribution to the mind’s general cognitive goals at the smallest processing cost” (1995: 48).
"We propose to apply Relevance Theory to art appreciation. First of all, we suggest that works of art, much like utterances, are intuitively assessed as acts of symbolic communication: these particular artefacts, being intentionally created through human agency, but lacking ordinary functionality, would be thought to “mean something”. According to Relevance Theory, human communication carries an expectation of relevance; in our domain of interest, that would mean that works of art are expected to communicate something that is relevant or, in other words, worth processing. Furthermore, according to Relevance Theory, successful communication occurs when the speaker’s intention is correctly inferred from the utterance. Understanding the artist’s intention would, thus, be a crucial factor in assessing the relevance of a work of art."
There's no elegant way to phrase this, but it has to be asked:
Why on Earth
would we think
that
"the artist's intention"
was
to "communicate"
their intention?
We seem ensnared here in a notably fraught commission of Rank's fallacy of "arguing back:"
æsthetic, by its nature, can only deal with the effect of a work of art, and it takes account of its creation by an artist only by arguing theoretically back from the contemplator to the creator. But this conclusion, apart from its indirect nature, is a fallacy; for as we (or at least as I, myself) have been convinced by a study of the productive personality, there is between that and the unproductive type not only a quantitative but a qualitative difference.
(AnA, p. 22)
i.e.
I am taking the Romantic and Modern construals of "the artist's intention" to be open-ended, at least from the artist's own standpoint. Conversely, the construal of "intention" that the audience or critic constructs around their reception of the work, conscientious and rigorous as that reception may be, is bounded. What is UN-bounded on the reception side is "interpretation," which is a closer analog to the artists' own act of inspiration simply because it itself is "inspired," usually to a fault; contemplator thus becomes creator, it is true, but merely the creator of a new intention rather than an astute diagnostician of the original one.
By "open-ended," I don't mean "infinite." What I mean is that so-called Conceptual Art and its laser-focused intentions of effect arrived on the scene as a self-conscious movement only in the mid-twentieth century. Like any such tendency, it must have existed from the beginning as a mere tendency, but the time was not yet ripe for a heroic phase of public acclaim, artist self-advocacy, and scholarly beard-scratching. Once that began to happen, we suddenly get much more explicit statements of tightly-bounded "intention" being made not just after- but also before-the-fact. By now this has been absorbed into the postmodern grab-bag, alongside the "open-ended" intention of certain Moderns and the non-intention of certain Experimentalists. But the above account (this is a strength, its ONLY strength that I can thus so far detect) seems to begin with the audience in a state of TOTAL ignorance as to the artist's "intention," up to and including what they are even supposed to do with themselves in the presence of the work. This is because "a work of art...carries out no obvious precise function." Ideally, yes! But even to a misanthrope like me, rendering the apprehension of intention thusly as an "ecological" rather than "aesthetic" question is...pretty weird. So, in that respect, I guess I've found the limits of my absolutism. But in another respect this "ecological" view is actually quite far from aesthetic absolutism, as we see in the next part: that such a work "cannot be assessed without speculation about the artist’s intention."
...
[120]"Human products that appear to have required a lot of effort and skill to produce seem to be naturally admired by people. In the visual arts, it makes a difference to know that a painting was not achieved in one day, but that it required several months of hard work."
[footnote to above:]
"Kruger et al. (2001, p. 91) argued that “[perceived] effort is used as a heuristic for quality”. In one study, two abstract paintings were considered better when they were thought to have required more time when created (Kruger et al., 2004, Experiment 2)."
It's easy to imagine this, in another context, being labeled as a cognitive bias. Is this what "pragmatism" has come down to? Taking all of this as it comes? Accepting it as inevitable, evolutionarily hardwired, etc., and seeking to work "pragmatically" within these bounds? That is quite dispiriting.
This seems as good an example as any of a question of "art appreciation" which can be answered either in Elitist or in Populist terms depending on your already-held ideology: while it's simple enough to pull the pin on these Darwinist grenades and drop them everywhere, it's usually safe to assume, even with the most "universal" traits, that a small number of people don't conform to them. And so that's where you'll find your aesthetic "elite," i.e. those who are not merely imprisoned by their own implicit/revealed preferences but, rather, contrive ways of becoming aware of them and are willing to be skeptical of them. Actually, I suspect that ceasing to use "effort...as a heuristic for quality" is neither complicated nor onerous, not even for casuals. Upon being gently made aware, almost anyone can see that this serves all concerned very poorly. (Once again, Stone Age traits can be highly maladaptive in the postindustrial West.) The thing is, though, some people don't need to be told; meanwhile there are others who you can't tell them anything.
[121]"From our point of view, the effort and skill that went into a work of art do not only trigger respect and admiration. More importantly, they constitute indicators and clarifiers of intentionality."
Hard to argue with that on the broader level. On the more granular level it seems possible to problematize this version of "intentionality." Artists themselves, I think, would call this a question of "control," not one of intention. But sure, good looking people do better at job interviews than homely people; consumers will haggle over $1 when buying a potato but ignore $100 difference between cars; and audiences will find that Pollack and Rothko lack "intention."
[122]"Method
...
[123]
"Measures
...
[124]
"A few pilot raters reported “embarrassment” with assessing the effort and skill that went into a work of art, and during the actual survey this was a general trend among visual arts specialists."
This suggests that they actually learned something from their "train[ing]"!
[132]"Conclusion
...
[133]
... intentionalism in art appreciation – or the idea that considering the artist’s intention is necessary to understand and judge a work of art – has been criticized by art theorists (e.g., Wimsatt and Beardsley, 1946/1999). We think however that understanding the artist’s intention is at the core of art appreciation, as far as one does not misread what we mean by this. For example, we do not pretend that all art is meaningful (what is the “meaning” of a Rothko’s multiform painting?), and many contemporary artists would deny that their works convey a precise “message” that would need to be “understood”. All we say is that works of art, because they cannot be approached in terms of practical use or function, will be automatically assessed as acts of symbolic communication and, therefore, will trigger speculations about the artist’s intention (“Why did he or she make that?”) – whether speculating about the artist’s intention is justified or not, and whether the artist actually intended to communicate something or not."
[see "mixed results for replications of kruger et al", online]
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