----- Original Message ---- From: Mike Mallory <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thu, June 2, 2011 12:40:53 PM Subject: Re: Pictorial Realism as Verity
> Verity comes first and produces conventions? First the verity of art > as an abstraction and later the convention of abstract art? > kate Sullivan I'm going to fall back on my favorite approach to causality: the Buddhist notion of dependant co-arising, and say that verity and conventions should probably be viewed as developing together in a unified system. Two examples: COMMENT: You don't need to turn to Buddhism. You don't need to turn to evolutionary psychology. You have current neurobiology to support your comments. Indeed, the human brain has an unusually large area devoted to facial recognition. But human brains are less well equipped to hear and smell as well as other animals, like dogs, for instance. Our better abilities at facial recognition have evolved to aid us in distinguishing friend from foe, of course, but also aid in very subtle ways in 'reading' the emotions and intents of others. The recent discovery of 'mirror neurons' also enable us to mentally mimic the actions of others, or allow us to pretend to be something else entirely, like a bird, or a wave. 1) When painting a portrait of a person the prevailing approach (convention) is to include the face as the primary or substantial focus. But, the palm of our hands are as distinct as a face. Ask any palm reader! It could be the case that portraits featured palms. Here I believe that convention followed verity. I suspect that evolutionary psychology could show that people have a highly developed ability to distinguish faces, perhaps because they are usually more visible than palms, and have a lesser ability to distinguish palm. The portrait convention followed the psychological truth of how people go about distinguishing each other. 2) Given a shape in a painting known to represent water, the additional marks in the shape of a sine wave are recognizable as a representation of "waves" of water. This is more arbitrary. For instance the wave charts from Micronesia are bent wood creations which represent the vector of the waves rather then their amplitude. The fact that a squiggly line as a representation of waves of water becomes memetically contagious to become established as a convention is, I believe, explainable based on the cognitive ease by which a person introduced to this convention can make the mental substitution required by the representation. So, in this case I would say that the viability of the convention is tied to the relationship between the verity (perception of waves of water) and the convention (squiggly lines). The developmental model is less about a formal logical sequence between the two and more about the evolution within a single cognitive system. COMMENT: Again, recent research in neurobiology is showing how the brain produces 'patterns' in multiple layers that anticipate experience. When you look at a chair, for example, your brain has already primed your mind (that's an aspect of brain) with patterns of chairness by the time you become fully aware of the chair in visual cognition. When I said, "reliable experience produces conventions", I was speaking, somewhat cryptically, about the contagiousness of the meme. If a convention is reliable, then it will take on the same verity as that which it represents. COMMENT: I would see it as a feedback looping whereby 'verity' and conventions continually inform each other and link to emotions, associations, memories. I recommend Antonio Damasio's quite recent book, Self Comes to Mind. Mike Mallory wc ----- Original Message ----- From: <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2011 5:00 AM Subject: Re: Pictorial Realism as Verity > Verity comes first and produces conventions? First the verity of art > as an abstraction and later the convention of abstract art? > kate Sullivan > > -----Original Message----- > From: Mike Mallory <[email protected]> > To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> > Sent: Mon, May 30, 2011 11:48 pm > Subject: Re: Pictorial Realism as Verity > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "William Conger" <[email protected]> > To: <[email protected]> > Sent: Saturday, May 21, 2011 4:37 PM > Subject: Re: Pictorial Realism as Verity > > >> Thus conventions produce verity. What produces the conventions? >> > > _______________________________________________________ > > Pragmatic concerns. When an idea, perspective or mental construction > works > to explain or describe, conventions are adopted as a way of > institutionalizing our collective experience. > > Thus, reliable experience produces conventions. > > Mike Mallory
