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Announcement: Cognition in Context (CiC) 2014 Seminar-Workshop Series *Human Cognition and the Tracking of Artistic and Cultural Agents* Keynote speakers: Distinguished Professor Stephen Davies (University of Auckland, NZ), Distinguished Professor Jerrold Levinson (University of Maryland, USA), and Professor Bill Thompson (Macquarie University). Organisers: Dr Nicolas Bullot (Macquarie University), Mirko Farina (Macquarie University), Daniel Wilson (University of Auckland, NZ) Dear all, On Monday 16 June 2014, a workshop entitled “*Human Cognition and the Tracking of Artistic and Cultural Agents*” will take place at the Department of Cognitive Science, ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie University. In this last workshop of the “Cognition in Context” series, we will examine recent philosophical and interdisciplinary research on the interpretation of cultural and artistic behaviours – see, e.g., [1-11]. The workshop will focus on art understood as a paradigmatic case for interdisciplinary research on cultural cognition. Questions to be addressed include, but are not limited to: Does the appreciation and explanation of artistic/cultural behaviours engage knowledge of these behaviours’ original historical context? Does appreciation of an artwork require knowledge of the artist’s intentions? To what extent is cultural and historical cognition engaged in music production and appreciation? What are the explanatory advantages and limitations of evolutionary and psycho-historical theories of artistic/cultural cognition [12, 13]? The *keynotes *speakers at the workshop are (alphabetic order): - Distinguished Professor Stephen Davies (Philosophy, University of Auckland, https://artsfaculty.auckland.ac.nz/staff/?UPI=sdav056); - Distinguished Professor Jerrold Levinson (Philosophy, University of Maryland, http://www.philosophy.umd.edu/people/levinson); - Professor William Forde (Bill) Thompson (Psychology, Macquarie University, http://www.psy.mq.edu.au/me2/index.php/people/individual/bill_thompson). *Organisation of the Workshop:* The workshop will be organised in two parts, as follows: - Part I (2:30-4.15 pm) - Interpreting Art, Music, and Artworlds. Keynote speakers: Jerrold Levinson, Stephen Davies, and Bill Thompson - Part II (4.30-5.30 pm) - Work in Progress in the Psycho-historical Approach to Artistic and Cultural Cognition. Discussion of 4 to 6 papers circulated in advance. Confirmed contributors: Amee Baird, Nicolas Bullot, Mirko Farina, John Sutton, and Daniel Wilson. Attendance to Part I of the workshop is free and registration is not required. However, if you wish to receive the papers that will be discussed in Part II, please register no later than 3 June 2014 by sending an email to Mirko Farina ([email protected]). *Time and venue of the workshop:* Monday June 16th, 2014, from 2:30 PM until 5:30 PM. Venue: Room 3.610, Level 3, Australian Hearing Hub, 16 University Avenue, Macquarie University, NSW 2109. A map is available at this URL: http://www.mq.edu.au/on_campus/maps/campus_map/. Best Regards Nicolas Bullot, Mirko Farina, and Daniel Wilson PS: A number of the abstracts of the workshop papers presented or discussed at the workshop follow: *Abstracts of the talks (Part I):* *Speaker*: Dist. Prof Stephen Davies (Philosophy, University of Auckland) *Title*: Defining Art and Artworlds *Abstract:* Most art is made by people with a well-developed concept of art and who are familiar with its forms and genres as well as with the informal institutions of its presentation and reception. This is reflected in philosophers' proposed definitions. The earliest artworks were made by people who lacked the concept and in a context that does not resemble the artworlds of established societies, however. An adequate definition must accommodate their efforts. The result is a complex, hybrid definition: something is art (a) if it falls under an established, publicly recognized art genre or within an established art tradition, or (b) if it is intended by its maker/presenter to be art and its maker/presenter does what is necessary and appropriate to realizing that intention, or (c) if it shows excellence of skill and achievement in realizing significant aesthetic or artistic goals. Meanwhile, artworlds, which play a crucial but implicit role in (a) and (b), are to be characterized in terms of their origins. *Speaker*: Dist. Prof Jerrold Levinson (Philosophy, University of Maryland) *Title*: The Hypothetical-Intentionalist View of Artistic Interpretation *Abstract: *My objective here will be to explain and motivate this view (hypothetical intentionalism) of what interpretation of works of art [3], most prominently but not exclusively works of literature or film, centrally involves, and to defend the view as well as possible. The core idea is that the meaning of a work of art is given not by what its forms might signify in the abstract, nor by what its creator actually intended to convey, even when such intention is realized, but by a *best hypothesis or reconstruction *of what its creator intended to convey, given the work's perceivable forms, the artist's public identity, and the context in which the work is created and put forward for appreciation. Moreover, the notion of a best hypothesis or reconstruction has two dimensions, an *epistemic*one and an *aesthetic* one; that is to say, what one is after is a hypothesis or reconstruction of intended meaning or import that is epistemically most justified in light of the aforementioned factors, but also, to the extent compatible with that, one that is aesthetically most satisfying, that makes the work come off best from an appreciative point of view. And the reason that such a best hypothesis of work meaning in fact *constitutes* work meaning is that works of art are fundamentally historically and contextually situated *utterances*, whose central meaning is thus *utterance meaning*--what their constituent perceivable forms, whether sentences, patches of color, rhythmic figures, cinematic sequences, etcetera, convey in context to suitably informed and backgrounded audiences--and not *utterer meaning*, or what their creators actually intended to convey by so presenting such forms in such contexts, where intentions are understood as psychologically real states of creator's minds or brains. *Speaker*: Prof Bill Thompson (Philosophy, Macquarie University) *Title*: A Psycho-historical Perspective on Tonality *Abstract*: Research on tonality has provided a rich understanding of the mental representations that arise following repeated exposure to music. However, musical artworks are produced with specific intentions in unique historical contexts, and perceivers often incorporate an understanding of these contexts into their appreciation of music. In this talk, I outline a psycho-historical approach [10, 13] to the study of music and describe research that supports this approach. The framework assumes that aesthetic and emotional responses to music arise not only from basic exposure to a work, but also from a cognitive process of inferring causal, autobiographical, and / or historical information related to that work, referred to as the artistic design stance. According to this framework, artworks often engage a set of previously unexplored cognitive processes that bring to mind historical details that influence aesthetic and emotional experience through top-down pathways. Drawing on existing findings as well as ongoing research, I describe how the psycho-historical framework can be extended to research on tonality, and I argue that tonal tension may provide an important bridge between the perception of tonality and historical appreciation. *Some abstracts of the works in progress (Part II)* *Author*: Daniel Wilson *Title*: Revolutionary Art and Evolutionary Art: The Implications of Transgressive Regard for Levinson’s Intentional-historical Definition *Abstract*: Jerrold Levinson rightly notes that an artefact cannot be completely different from all prior artefacts of the same kind or else it would have no claim to be the same class of thing. Yet he also claims that revolutionary art, for example Dada, involves a regard that is ‘completely distinct’ from pre-existing art-regards. But if art-regard is the essential respect in which objects attain art status then, ostensibly, we are faced with a contradiction. In the first part of this paper I critically examine Levinson’s two suggestions for accommodating revolutionary art. In the second section, I argue for an account of transgressive art-regard that explains the confounding effect of revolutionary art like Dada while simultaneously maintaining that a significant overlap of pre-existing art regard obtains. In part three, I argue that the accommodation of transgressive art-regard in conjunction with some recent theories of the development of human behavioural modernity may likely result in an undesirable regress that equates *ur*-art with the very first actual artefact in the historical lineage of artefacts from which modern-day art descends. *Works cited* 1. Levinson, J., *Defining art historically.* British Journal of Aesthetics, 1979. *19*: p. 232-250. 2. Levinson, J., *The irreducible historicality of the concept of art.* British Journal of Aesthetics, 2002. *42*(4): p. 367-379. 3. Levinson, J., *Defending hypothetical intentionalism.* The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2010. *50*(2): p. 139-150. 4. Davies, S., *Definitions of Art*. 1991, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 5. Davies, S., *Authors' intentions, literary interpretation, and literary value.* The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2006. *46*(3): p. 223-247. 6. Stecker, R. and S. Davies, *The hypothetical intentionalist's dilemma: A reply to Levinson.* The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2010. *50*(3): p. 307-312. 7. Thompson, W.F., *Music, Thought, and Feeling: Understanding the Psychology of Music*. 2009, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 8. Thompson, W.F. and L. Quinto, *Music and emotion: Psychological considerations*, in *The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology*, E. Schellekens and P. Goldie, Editors. 2011, Oxford University Press: Oxford. p. 357-375. 9. Balkwill, L.-L. and W.F. Thompson, *A cross-cultural investigation of the perception of emotion in music: Psychophysical and cultural cues.* Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 1999. *17*(1): p. 43-64. 10. Bullot, N.J. and R. Reber, *The artful mind meets art history: Toward a psycho-historical framework for the science of art appreciation.*Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2013. *36*(02): p. 123-137. 11. Bullot, N.J., *Agent tracking: a psycho-historical theory of the identification of living and social agents.* Biology & Philosophy, 2014: p. 1-24 [online first]. 12. Davies, S., *The Artful Species: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution*. 2012, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 13. Bullot, N.J. and R. Reber, *A psycho-historical research program for the integrative science of art.* Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2013. *36*(2): p. 163-180. -- Mirko Farina http://mirkofarina.weebly.com/index.html PhD Candidate Department of Cognitive Science ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CCD) Australian Hearing Hub 16 University Avenue Macquarie University, NSW 2109 AUSTRALIA ᐧ
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