In ethical philosophy, ethical egoism is the normative position that moral agentsought to act in their own self-interest. It differs from psychological egoism, which claims that people can only act in their self-interest. Ethical egoism also differs from rational egoism, which holds that it is rational to act in one's self-interest. Ethical egoism holds, therefore, that actions whose consequences will benefit the doer are ethical.
Ethical egoism contrasts with ethical altruism, which holds that moral agents have an obligation to help others. Egoism and altruism both contrast with ethical utilitarianism, which holds that a moral agent should treat one's self (also known as the subject)
with no higher regard than one has for others (as egoism does, by
elevating self-interests and "the self" to a status not granted to
others). But it also holds that one is not obligated to sacrifice one's
own interests (as altruism does) to help others' interests, so long as
one's own interests (i.e., one's own desires or well-being)
are substantially equivalent to the others' interests and well-being,
but they have the choice to do so. Egoism, utilitarianism, and altruism
are all forms of consequentialism, but egoism and altruism contrast with utilitarianism, in that egoism and altruism are both agent-focused forms of consequentialism (i.e., subject-focused or subjective). However, utilitarianism is held to be agent-neutral (i.e., objective and impartial):
it does not treat the subject's (i.e., the self's, i.e., the moral
"agent's") own interests as being more or less important than the
interests, desires, or well-being of others.
Ethical egoism does not, however, require moral agents to harm
the interests and well-being of others when making moral deliberation;
e.g., what is in an agent's self-interest may be incidentally
detrimental, beneficial, or neutral in its effect on others. Individualism
allows for others' interest and well-being to be disregarded or not, as
long as what is chosen is efficacious in satisfying the self-interest
of the agent. Nor does ethical egoism necessarily entail that, in
pursuing self-interest, one ought always to do what one wants to do;
e.g., in the long term, the fulfillment of short-term desires may prove
detrimental to the self. Fleeting pleasure, then, takes a back seat to protracted eudaimonia. In the words of James Rachels, "Ethical egoism ... endorses selfishness, but it doesn't endorse foolishness."
Ethical egoism is often used as the philosophical basis for support of right-libertarianism and individualist anarchism. These are political positions based partly on a belief that individuals
should not coercively prevent others from exercising freedom of action.
Forms
Ethical egoism can be broadly divided into three categories: individual, personal, and universal. An individual ethical egoist would hold that all people should do whatever benefits "my" (the individual's)self-interest; a personal ethical egoist would hold that they should act in their self-interest, but would make no claims about what anyone else ought to do; a universal ethical egoist would argue that everyone should act in ways that are in their self-interest.
History
Ethical egoism was introduced by the philosopher Henry Sidgwick in his book The Methods of Ethics, written in 1874. Sidgwick compared egoism to the philosophy of utilitarianism,
writing that whereas utilitarianism sought to maximize overall
pleasure, egoism focused only on maximizing individual pleasure.
Philosophers before Sidgwick have also retroactively been
identified as ethical egoists. One ancient example is the philosophy of Yang Zhu (4th century BC), Yangism, who views wei wo, or "everything for myself", as the only virtue necessary for self-cultivation. Ancient Greek philosophers like Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics were exponents of virtue ethics,
and "did not accept the formal principle that whatever the good is, we
should seek only our own good, or prefer it to the good of others." However, the beliefs of the Cyrenaics have been referred to as a "form of egoistic hedonism", and while some refer to Epicurus' hedonism as a form of virtue ethics, others argue his ethics are more properly described as ethical egoism.
Justifications
Philosopher James Rachels, in an essay that takes as its title the theory's name, outlines the three arguments most commonly touted in its favor:
"The first argument," writes Rachels, "has several variations, each suggesting the same general point:
"Each of us is intimately familiar with our own individual wants
and needs. Moreover, each of us is uniquely placed to pursue those
wants and needs effectively. At the same time, we know the desires and
needs of others only imperfectly, and we are not well situated to pursue
them. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe that if we set out to be
'our brother's keeper,' we would often bungle the job and end up doing
more mischief than good."
To give charity to someone is to degrade them, implying as it does
that they are reliant on such munificence and quite unable to look out
for themselves. "That," reckons Rachels, "is why the recipients of
'charity' are so often resentful rather than appreciative."
Altruism, ultimately, denies an individual's value and is therefore
destructive both to society and its individual components, viewing life
merely as a thing to be sacrificed. Philosopher Ayn Rand
is quoted as writing that, "[i]f a man accepts the ethics of altruism,
his first concern is not how to live his life but how to sacrifice it." Moreover, "[t]he basic principle of altruism is that man has no right
to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only
justification for his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest
moral duty, virtue or value." Rather, she writes, "[t]he purpose of
morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself
and live."
All of our commonly accepted moral duties, from doing no harm unto
others to speaking always the truth to keeping promises, are rooted in
the one fundamental principle of self-interest.
It has been observed, however, that the very act of eating
(especially, when there are others starving in the world) is such an act
of self-interested discrimination. Ethical egoists such as Rand who
readily acknowledge the (conditional) value of others to an individual,
and who readily endorse empathy for others, have argued the exact
reverse from Rachels, that it is altruism which discriminates: "If the
sensation of eating a cake is a value, then why is it an immoral
indulgence in your stomach, but a moral goal for you to achieve in the
stomach of others?" It is therefore altruism which is an arbitrary position, according to Rand.
Criticism
It
has been argued that extreme ethical egoism is self-defeating. Faced
with a situation of limited resources, egoists would consume as much of
the resource as they could, making the overall situation worse for
everybody. Egoists may respond that if the situation becomes worse for
everybody, that would include the egoist, so it is not, in fact, in
their rational self-interest to take things to such extremes. However, the (unregulated) tragedy of the commons and the (one off) prisoner's dilemma are cases in which, on the one hand, it is rational for an individual to seek to take as much as possible even though
that makes things worse for everybody, and on the other hand, those
cases are not self-refuting since that behaviour remains rational even though
it is ultimately self-defeating, i.e. self-defeating does not imply
self-refuting. Egoists might respond that a tragedy of the commons,
however, assumes some degree of public land. That is, a commons
forbidding homesteading requires regulation. Thus, an argument against
the tragedy of the commons, in this belief system, is fundamentally an
argument for private property rights and the system that recognizes both
property rights and rational self-interest—capitalism. More generally, egoists might say that an increasing respect for
individual rights uniquely allows for increasing wealth creation and
increasing usable resources despite a fixed amount of raw materials
(e.g. the West pre-1776 versus post-1776, East versus West Germany, Hong
Kong versus mainland China, North versus South Korea, etc.).
It is not clear how to apply a private ownership model to many
examples of "commons", however. Examples include large fisheries, the
atmosphere and the ocean.
Some perhaps decisive problems with ethical egoism have been pointed out.
One is that an ethical egoist would not want ethical egoism to be
universalized: as it would be in the egoist's best self-interest if
others acted altruistically towards them, they wouldn't want them to act
egoistically; however, that is what they consider to be morally
binding. Their moral principles would demand of others not to follow
them, which can be considered self-defeating and leads to the question:
"How can ethical egoism be considered morally binding if its advocates
do not want it to be universally applied?"
Another objection (e.g. by James Rachels) states that the
distinction ethical egoism makes between "yourself" and "the rest" –
demanding to view the interests of "yourself" as more important – is
arbitrary, as no justification for it can be offered; considering that
the merits and desires of "the rest" are comparable to those of
"yourself" while lacking a justifiable distinction, Rachels concludes
that "the rest" should be given the same moral consideration as
"yourself".
Derek Parfit argues against ethical egoism in the book Reasons and Persons. Parfit argues that ethical egoism is collectively self-defeating due to
the prisoner's dilemma. Parfit also poses thought experiments such as
the teletransportation paradox, which challenge the idea of an objective future self and a continuous personal identity.
Daniel Kolak argues that the entire concepts of the "self" and the "ego" are incoherent. In his book I am You, Kolak uses the terms "closed individualism", "empty individualism", and "open individualism" to describe three contrasting philosophical views of the self. Kolak argues that closed individualism, the idea that one's personal
identity consist of a line persisting from moment to moment, is
incoherent, and there is no basis for the belief that one is the "same"
person from moment to moment. Empty individualism is the idea that
personal identity exists, but one's identity only exists as a "time
slice" existing for an infinitesimally small amount of time. Open
individualism is the view advocated by Kolak, in which the self in
reality does not actually exist at all, similar to anattā
in Buddhist philosophy. Thus, according to open individualism, it could
be argued that ethical egoism is incoherent, since the ego in its
entirety is an illusion.
Notable proponents
The term ethical egoism has been applied retroactively to philosophers such as Bernard de Mandeville and to many other materialists
of his generation, although none of them declared themselves to be
egoists. Note that materialism does not necessarily imply egoism, as
indicated by Karl Marx, and the many other materialists who espoused forms of collectivism. It has been argued that ethical egoism can lend itself to individualist anarchism such as that of Benjamin Tucker, or the combined anarcho-communism and egoism of Emma Goldman, both of whom were proponents of many egoist ideas put forward by Max Stirner.
In this context, egoism is another way of describing the sense that the
common good should be enjoyed by all. However, most notable anarchists
in history have been less radical, retaining altruism and a sense of the
importance of the individual that is appreciable but does not go as far
as egoism. Recent trends to greater appreciation of egoism within anarchism tend to come from less classical directions such as post-left anarchy or Situationism (e.g. Raoul Vaneigem). Egoism has also been referenced by anarcho-capitalists, such as Murray Rothbard.
Philosopher Max Stirner, in his book The Ego and Its Own,
was the first philosopher to call himself an egoist, though his writing
makes clear that he desired not a new idea of morality (ethical
egoism), but rather a rejection of morality (amoralism), as a nonexistent and limiting "spook"; for this, Stirner has been described as the first individualist anarchist. Other philosophers, such as Thomas Hobbes and David Gauthier,
have argued that the conflicts which arise when people each pursue
their own ends can be resolved for the best of each individual only if
they all voluntarily forgo some of their aims—that is, one's
self-interest is often best pursued by allowing others to pursue their
self-interest as well so that liberty is equal among individuals.
Sacrificing one's short-term self-interest to maximize one's long-term
self-interest is one form of "rational self-interest"
which is the idea behind most philosophers' advocacy of ethical egoism.
Egoists have also argued that one's actual interests are not
immediately obvious, and that the pursuit of self-interest involves more
than merely the acquisition of some good, but the maximizing of one's chances of survival and/or happiness.
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche suggested that egoistic or "life-affirming" behavior stimulates jealousy or "ressentiment" in others, and that this is the psychological motive for the altruism in Christianity. Sociologist Helmut Schoeck similarly considered envy
the motive of collective efforts by society to reduce the
disproportionate gains of successful individuals through moral or legal
constraints, with altruism being primary among these. In addition, Nietzsche (in Beyond Good and Evil) and Alasdair MacIntyre (in After Virtue) have pointed out that the ancient Greeks did not associate morality with altruism in the way that post-Christian Western civilization has done.
Aristotle's view is that we have duties to ourselves as well as to other people (e.g. friends) and to the polis as a whole. The same is true for Thomas Aquinas, Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant,
who claim that there are duties to ourselves as Aristotle did, although
it has been argued that, for Aristotle, the duty to one's self is
primary.
Ayn Rand
argued that there is a positive harmony of interests among free,
rational humans, such that no moral agent can rationally coerce another
person consistently with their own long-term self-interest. Rand argued
that other people are an enormous value to an individual's well-being
(through education, trade and affection), but also that this value could
be fully realized only under conditions of political and economic
freedom. According to Rand, voluntary trade alone can assure that human
interaction is mutually beneficial. Rand's student, Leonard Peikoff
has argued that the identification of one's interests itself is
impossible absent the use of principles, and that self-interest cannot
be consistently pursued absent a consistent adherence to certain ethical
principles. Recently, Rand's position has also been defended by such writers as Tara Smith, Tibor Machan, Allan Gotthelf, David Kelley, Douglas Rasmussen, Nathaniel Branden, Harry Binswanger, Andrew Bernstein, and Craig Biddle.
Philosopher David L. Norton
identified himself as an "ethical individualist", and, like Rand, saw a
harmony between an individual's fidelity to their own
self-actualization, or "personal destiny", and the achievement of
society's well-being.
Cognitive semantics is part of the cognitive linguistics movement. Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. Cognitive semantics holds that language is part of a more general human cognitive ability, and can therefore only describe the world as people conceive of it. It is implicit that different linguistic communities conceive of simple
things and processes in the world differently (different cultures), not
necessarily some difference between a person's conceptual world and the
real world (wrong beliefs).
The main tenets of cognitive semantics are:
That grammar manifests a conception of the world held in a culture;
That knowledge of language is acquired and contextual;
That the ability to use language draws upon general cognitive resources and not a special language module.
Cognitive semantics has introduced innovations like prototype theory, conceptual metaphors, and frame semantics, and it is the linguistic paradigm/framework that since the 1980s has generated the most studies in lexical semantics. As part of the field of cognitive linguistics, the cognitive semantics approach rejects the traditional separation of linguistics into phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, etc. Instead, it divides semantics into meaning-construction and knowledge representation. Therefore, cognitive semantics studies much of the area traditionally devoted to pragmatics as well as semantics.
The techniques native to cognitive semantics are typically used in lexical studies such as those put forth by Leonard Talmy, George Lakoff and Dirk Geeraerts. Some cognitive semantic frameworks, such as that developed by Talmy, take into account syntactic structures as well.
Points of contrast
As a field, semantics is interested in three big questions: what does it mean for units of language, called lexemes,
to have "meaning"? What does it mean for sentences to have meaning?
Finally, how is it that meaningful units fit together to compose
complete sentences? These are the main points of inquiry behind studies
into lexical semantics, structural semantics, and theories of compositionality
(respectively). In each category, traditional theories seem to be at
odds with those accounts provided by cognitive semanticists.
Classic theories in semantics (in the tradition of Alfred Tarski and Donald Davidson) have tended to explain the meaning of parts in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, sentences in terms of truth-conditions, and composition in terms of propositional functions.
Each of these positions is tightly related to the others. According to
these traditional theories, the meaning of a particular sentence may be
understood as the conditions under which the proposition conveyed by the
sentence hold true. For instance, the expression "snow is white" is
true if and only if snow is, in fact, white. Lexical units can be
understood as holding meaning either by virtue of set of things they may apply to (called the "extension" of the word), or in terms of the common properties that hold between these things (called its "intension"). The intension provides an interlocutor
with the necessary and sufficient conditions that let a thing qualify
as a member of some lexical unit's extension. Roughly, propositional
functions are those abstract instructions that guide the interpreter in
taking the free variables in an open sentence and filling them in, resulting in a correct understanding of the sentence as a whole.
Meanwhile, cognitive semantic theories are typically built on the
argument that lexical meaning is conceptual. That is, meaning is not
necessarily reference to the entity or relation in some real or possible
world. Instead, meaning corresponds with a concept held in the mind
based on personal understanding. As a result, semantic facts like "All
bachelors are unmarried males" are not treated as special facts about
our language practices; rather, these facts are not distinct from
encyclopaedic knowledge. In treating linguistic knowledge as being a
piece with everyday knowledge, the question is raised: how can cognitive
semantics explain paradigmatically semantic phenomena, like category
structure? Set to the challenge, researchers have drawn upon theories
from related fields, like cognitive psychology and cognitive anthropology. One proposal is to treat in order to explain category structure in terms of nodes in a knowledge network. One example of a theory from cognitive science that has made its way into the cognitive semantic mainstream is the theory of prototypes, which cognitive semanticists generally argue is the cause of polysemy.
Cognitive semanticists argue that truth-conditional semantics
is unduly limited in its account of full sentence meaning. While they
are not on the whole hostile to truth-conditional semantics, they point
out that it has limited explanatory power. That is to say, it is limited
to indicative sentences, and does not seem to offer any straightforward
or intuitive way of treating (say) commands or expressions. By
contrast, cognitive semantics seeks to capture the full range of grammatical moods by also making use of the notions of framing and mental spaces.
Another trait of cognitive semantics is the recognition that meaning is not fixed but a matter of construal
and conventionalization. The processes of linguistic construal, it is
argued, are the same psychological processes involved in the processing
of encyclopaedic knowledge and in perception. This view has implications
for the problem of compositionality. An account in cognitive semantics
called the dynamic construal theory
makes the claim that words themselves are without meaning: they have,
at best, "default construals," which are really just ways of using
words. Along these lines, cognitive semantics argues that
compositionality can only be intelligible if pragmatic elements like context and intention are taken into consideration.
The structure of concepts
Cognitive
semantics has sought to challenge traditional theories in two ways:
first, by providing an account of the meaning of sentences by going
beyond truth-conditional accounts; and second, by attempting to go
beyond accounts of word meaning that appeal to necessary and sufficient
conditions. It accomplishes both by examining the structure of concepts.
Frame semantics, developed by Charles J. Fillmore, attempts to explain meaning in terms of their relation to general understanding,
not just in the terms laid out by truth-conditional semantics. Fillmore
explains meaning in general (including the meaning of lexemes) in terms
of "frames". By "frame" is meant any concept that can only be understood if a larger system of concepts is also understood.
Fillmore: framing
Many
pieces of linguistic evidence motivate the frame-semantic project.
First, it has been noted that word meaning is an extension of our bodily
and cultural experiences. For example, the notion of restaurant is associated with a series of concepts, like food, service, waiters, tables, and eating. These rich-but-contingent associations cannot be captured by an
analysis in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, yet they still
seem to be intimately related to our understanding of "restaurant".
Second, and more seriously, these conditions are not enough to
account for asymmetries in the ways that words are used. According to a
semantic feature analysis, there is nothing more to the meanings of
"boy" and "girl" than:
BOY [+MALE], [+YOUNG]
GIRL [+FEMALE], [+YOUNG]
And there is surely some truth to this proposal. Indeed, cognitive
semanticists understand the instances of the concept held by a given
certain word may be said to exist in a schematic relation with the concept itself. And this is regarded as a legitimate approach to semantic analysis, so far as it goes.
However, linguists have found that language users regularly apply
the terms "boy" and "girl" in ways that go beyond mere semantic
features. That is, for instance, people tend to be more likely to
consider a young female a "girl" (as opposed to "woman"), than they are
to consider a borderline-young male a "boy" (as opposed to "man"). This fact suggests that there is a latent frame, made up of cultural
attitudes, expectations, and background assumptions, which is part of
word meaning. These background assumptions go up and beyond those
necessary and sufficient conditions that correspond to a semantic
feature account. Frame semantics, then, seeks to account for these
puzzling features of lexical items in some systematic way.
Third, cognitive semanticists argue that truth-conditional
semantics is incapable of dealing adequately with some aspects of the
meanings at the level of the sentence. Take the following:
You didn't spare me a day at the seaside; you deprived me of one.
In this case, the truth-conditions of the claim expressed by the
antecedent in the sentence are not being denied by the proposition
expressed after the clause. Instead, what is being denied is the way
that the antecedent is framed.
Finally, with the frame-semantic paradigm's analytical tools, the
linguist is able to explain a wider range of semantic phenomena than
they would be able to with only necessary and sufficient conditions.
Some words have the same definitions or intensions, and the same
extensions, but have subtly different domains. For example, the lexemes land and ground are synonyms, yet they naturally contrast with different things—sea and air, respectively.
As we have seen, the frame semantic account is by no means
limited to the study of lexemes—with it, researchers may examine
expressions at more complex levels, including the level of the sentence
(or, more precisely, the utterance). The notion of framing is regarded
as being of the same cast as the pragmatic notion of background assumptions. Philosopher of language John Searle
explains the latter by asking readers to consider sentences like "The
cat is on the mat". For such a sentence to make any sense, the
interpreter makes a series of assumptions: i.e., that there is gravity,
the cat is parallel to the mat, and the two touch. For the sentence to
be intelligible, the speaker supposes that the interpreter has an
idealized or default frame in mind.
Langacker: profile and base
An alternate strain of Fillmore's analysis can be found in the work of Ronald Langacker, who makes a distinction between the notions of profile and base.
The profile is the concept symbolized by the word itself, while the
base is the encyclopedic knowledge that the concept presupposes. For
example, let the definition of "radius" be "a line segment that joins
the center of a circle with any point on its circumference". If all we
know of the concept radius is its profile, then we simply know
that it is a line segment that is attached to something called the
"circumference" in some greater whole called the "circle". That is to
say, our understanding is fragmentary until the base concept of circle is firmly grasped.
When a single base supports a number of different profiles, then it can be called a "domain". For instance, the concept profiles of arc, center, and circumference are all in the domain of circle, because each uses the concept of circle
as a base. We are then in a position to characterize the notion of a
frame as being either the base of the concept profile, or (more
generally) the domain that the profile is a part of.
A major divide in the approaches to cognitive semantics lies in the
puzzle surrounding the nature of category structure. As mentioned in the
previous section, semantic feature analyses fall short of accounting
for the frames that categories may have. An alternative proposal would
have to go beyond the minimalistic models given by classical accounts,
and explain the richness of detail in meaning that language speakers
attribute to categories.
Prototype theories, investigated by Eleanor Rosch,
have given some reason to suppose that many natural lexical category
structures are graded, i.e., they have prototypical members that are
considered to "better fit" the category than other examples. For
instance, robins are generally viewed as better examples of the category "bird" than, say, penguins.
If this view of category structure is the case, then categories can be
understood to have central and peripheral members, and not just be
evaluated in terms of members and non-members.
In a related vein, George Lakoff, following the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, noted that some categories are only connected to one another by way of family resemblances.
While some classical categories may exist, i.e., which are structured
by necessary and sufficient conditions, there are at least two other
kinds: generative and radial.
Generative categories can be formed by taking central
cases and applying certain principles to designate category membership.
The principle of similarity is one example of a rule that might generate
a broader category from given prototypes.
Radial categories are categories where instances may share
only a few or even a single aspect(s) of the qualities associated with
the category as a whole. The concept of "mother", for example, may be
explained in terms of a variety of conditions that may or may not be
sufficient. Those conditions may include: being married, has always been
female, gave birth to the child, supplied half the child's genes, is a
caregiver, is married to the genetic father, is one generation older
than the child, and is the legal guardian. Any one of the above conditions might not be met: for instance, a
"single mother" does not need to be married, and a "surrogate mother"
does not necessarily provide nurturance. When these aspects collectively
cluster together, they form a prototypical case of what it means to be a
mother, but nevertheless they fail to outline the category crisply.
Variations upon the central meaning are established by convention by the
community of language users, and the resulting set of instances, many
connected to the center by a single shared trait, are reminiscent of a
wheel with a hub and spokes.
For Lakoff, prototype effects can be explained in large part due to the effects of idealized cognitive models.
That is, domains are organized with an ideal notion of the world that
may or may not fit reality. For example, the word "bachelor" is commonly
defined as "unmarried adult male". However, this concept has been
created with a particular ideal of what a bachelor is like: an adult,
non-celibate, independent, socialized, and promiscuous. Reality might
either strain the expectations of the concept, or create false
positives. That is, people typically want to widen the meaning of
"bachelor" to include exceptions like "a sexually active
seventeen-year-old who lives alone and owns his own firm" (not
technically an adult but seemingly still a bachelor), and this can be
considered a kind of straining of the definition. Moreover, speakers
would tend to want to exclude from the concept of bachelor
certain false positives, such as those adult unmarried males that don't
bear much resemblance to the ideal: i.e., the Pope, or Tarzan. Prototype effects may also be explained as a function of either basic-level categorization and typicality, closeness to an ideal, or stereotyping.
So viewed, prototype theory seems to give an account of category
structure. However, there are a number of criticisms of this
interpretation of the data. Indeed, Rosch and Lakoff, themselves chief
advocates of prototype theory, have emphasized in their later works that
the findings of prototype theory do not necessarily tell us anything
about category structure. Some theorists in the cognitive semantics
tradition have challenged both classical and prototype accounts of
category structure by proposing the dynamic construal account, where
category structure is always created "on-line"—and so, that categories
have no structure outside of the context of use.
Propositional attitudes in Fodor's presentation of truth-conditional semantics
In traditional semantics, the meaning of a sentence is the situation
it represents, and the situation can be described in terms of the
possible world that it would be true of. Moreover, sentence meanings may
be dependent upon propositional attitudes:
those features that are relative to someone's beliefs, desires, and
mental states. The role of propositional attitudes in truth-conditional
semantics is controversial. However, by at least one line of argument, truth-conditional semantics
seems to be able to capture the meaning of belief-sentences like "Frank
believes that the Red Sox
will win the next game" by appealing to propositional attitudes. The
meaning of the overall proposition is described as a set of abstract
conditions, wherein Frank holds a certain propositional attitude, and
the attitude is itself a relationship between Frank and a particular
proposition; and this proposition is the possible world where the Red
Sox win the next game.
Still, many theorists have grown dissatisfied with the inelegance
and dubious ontology behind possible-worlds semantics. An alternative
can be found in the work of Gilles Fauconnier.
For Fauconnier, the meaning of a sentence can be derived from "mental
spaces". Mental spaces are cognitive structures entirely in the minds of
interlocutors. In his account, there are two kinds of mental space. The
base space is used to describe reality (as it is understood by both interlocutors). Space builders (or built space)
are those mental spaces that go beyond reality by addressing possible
worlds, along with temporal expressions, fictional constructs, games,
and so on. Additionally, Fauconnier semantics distinguishes between roles and values.
A semantic role is understood to be description of a category, while
values are the instances that make up the category. (In this sense, the
role-value distinction is a special case of the type-token distinction.)
Fauconnier argues that curious semantic constructions can be
explained handily by the above apparatus. Take the following sentence:
In 1929, the lady with white hair was blonde.
The semanticist must construct an explanation for the obvious fact
that the above sentence is not contradictory. Fauconnier constructs his
analysis by observing that there are two mental spaces (the
present-space and the 1929-space). His access principle supposes
that "a value in one space can be described by the role its counterpart
in another space has, even if that role is invalid for the value in the
first space". So, to use the example above, the value in 1929-space is the blonde, while she is being described with the role of the lady with white hair in present-day space.
As we have seen, cognitive semantics gives a treatment of issues in
the construction of meaning both at the level of the sentence and the
level of the lexeme in terms of the structure of concepts. However, it
is not entirely clear what cognitive processes are at work in these
accounts. Moreover, it is not clear how we might go about explaining the
ways that concepts are actively employed in conversation. It appears to
be the case that, if our project is to look at how linguistic strings convey different semantic content, we must first catalogue what cognitive processes are being used to do it. Researchers can satisfy both requirements by attending to the construal operations involved in language processing—that is to say, by investigating the ways that people structure their experiences through language.
Language is full of conventions that allow for subtle and nuanced
conveyances of experience. To use an example that is readily at hand,
framing is all-pervasive, and it may extend across the full breadth of
linguistic data, extending from the most complex utterances, to tone, to
word choice, to expressions derived from the composition of morphemes. Another example is image-schemata, which are ways that we structure and understand the elements of our experience driven by any given sense.
According to linguists William Croft and D. Alan Cruse, there are four broad cognitive abilities that play an active part in the construction of construals. They are: attention/salience, judgment/comparison, situatedness, and constitution/gestalt. Each general category contains a number of subprocesses, each of which
helps to explain the ways we encode experience into language in some
unique way.
Researchers are looking to neuroscience for answers behind why the human brain finds artistic works like DaVinci's Mona Lisa so alluring.
Neuroesthetics (orneuroaesthetics) is a recent sub-discipline of applied aesthetics. Empirical aesthetics takes a scientific approach to the study of aesthetic experience of art, music, or any object that can give rise to aesthetic judgments. Neuroesthetics is a term coined by Semir Zeki in 1999 and received its formal definition in 2002 as the scientific study of the neural bases for the contemplation and creation of a work of art. Anthropologists and evolutionary biologists alike have accumulated
evidence suggesting that human interest in, and creation of, art evolved
as an evolutionarily necessary mechanism for survival across cultures
and throughout history. Neuroesthetics uses neuroscience to explain and understand the aesthetic experiences at the neurological level. The topic attracts scholars from many disciplines including neuroscientists, art historians, artists, art therapists and psychologists.
Overview
Neuroaesthetics
is a field of experimental science that aims to combine
(neuro-)psychological research with aesthetics by investigating the
"perception, production, and response to art, as well as interactions
with objects and scenes that evoke an intense feeling, often of
pleasure." The recently developed field seeks among other things the neural correlates of aesthetic judgment and creativity, and how these help humans communicate and connect. It is argued that visual aesthetics, namely the capacity of assigning
different degrees of beauty to certain forms, colors, or movements, is a
human trait acquired after the divergence of human and other ape
lineages, rendering the experience of beauty a defining characteristic of humankind.
One core question for the field is whether art or aesthetic
preferences are guided by a set of scientific laws or principles.
Additionally, the evolutionary rationale for the formation and
characteristics of these principles are sought. It is believed that
identification of the brain circuitry involved in aesthetic judgments
(e.g., by using through the use of brain imaging) can help pinpoint the origin of these responses. Many scholars, including neuroscientists, remain skeptical of the reductive approach adopted by neuroaesthetics.
The subfield of Computational Neuroaesthetics
has aimed to utilize machine learning algorithms in conjunction with
neuroimaging data to predict what humans would find most aesthetically
pleasing. This field was pioneered by Fechner and Birkhoff in 1933;
however it was years later that technology caught up enough to test, and
prove, their hypotheses that aesthetics could be measured in a
mathematical way Real world applications of these models include recommending products
via online advertisement. However, modeling serves the broader purpose
of building scientific understanding and understanding the mechanisms
guiding decision making and other cognitive processes by simulating the
involved neural architecture.
Approaches of study
Researchers who have been prominent in the field combine principles from perceptual psychology, evolutionary biology,
neurological deficits, and functional brain anatomy in order to address
the evolutionary meaning of beauty that may be the essence of art. Involvement from both the rewards center of the brain and the Default
Mode Network, once believed to only play a part in daydreaming, have
been implicated in why humans derive pleasure from viewing and creating
art. It is felt that neuroscience is a very promising path for the search for the quantified evaluation of art. With the aim of discovering general rules about aesthetics, one
approach is the observation of subjects viewing art and the exploration
of the mechanics of vision. It is proposed that pleasing sensations are derived from the repeated
activation of neurons due to primitive visual stimuli such as horizontal
and vertical lines. In addition to the generation of theories to
explain this, such as Ramachandran's set of laws, it is important to use neuroscience to determine and understand the neurological mechanisms involved.
Neuroaesthetics approaches can be either descriptive or experimental. Descriptive neuroaesthetics refers to the practice of mapping
properties of the brain onto aesthetic experiences. For example, if
color is important to the experience of Fauvist art, then it is likely that areas of the brain that process color
will be engaged when looking at such art. The claims of descriptive
neuroaesthetics are regarded as hypothesis-generating and are typically qualitative in nature. Experimental neuroaesthetics, like any experimental science, produces data that are quantitative and vetted statistically. Experimental neuroaesthetics tests hypotheses, predicts results, and invites replication or falsification. The typical experimental methods used are those of cognitive neuroscience: fMRI, ERP, TMS, TDCS, and neuropsychology. Critics of neuroaesthetics typically target descriptive and not experimental neuroaesthetics.
The link between specific brain areas and artistic activity is of great importance to the field of neuroesthetics. This can be applied both to the ability to create and interpret art. A
common approach to uncover the neural mechanisms is through the study of
individuals, specifically artists, with neural disorders such as savant syndrome or some form of traumatic injury.
The analysis of art created by these patients provides valuable
insights to the brain areas responsible for capturing the essence of
art.
The aesthetic enjoyment of individuals can be investigated using
brain imaging experiments. When subjects are confronted with images of a
particular level of aesthetics, the specific brain areas that are
activated can be identified. It is argued that the sense of beauty and
aesthetic judgment presupposes a change in the activation of the brain's
reward system.
In 2004, Helmut Leder has developed a broad research program on the psychology of aesthetics and the arts. This program was introduced as a cognitive model of the appreciation of art in a paper published in the British Journal of Psychology. This model has served to frame many studies on the cognitive foundations of art, neuroaesthetics, product design, and web design, among other fields.
A crucial aspect of research lies in whether aesthetic judgment can be thought of as a bottom-up process
driven by neural primitives or as a top-down process with high level
cognition. Neurologists have had success researching primitives.
However, there is a need to define higher level abstract philosophical
concepts objectively with neural correlates. A phenomenon called
embodied cognition allows art viewers to mentally place themselves
inside the artwork, and feel not only as if they were there but feel how
the creator of the art may have felt [1a]. Embodied cognition is a
theory that suggests sensory experiences, motor actions, and the
environment play significant roles in shaping how we think, reason, and
understand the world; our material world is just that, not a projection
created by the mind. It is suggested that aesthetic experience is a function of the
interaction between top-down, intentional orientation of attention and
the bottom-up perceptual facilitation of image construction. In other words, because untrained persons automatically apply the
object-identification habit to viewing artworks, top-down control to
reduce this habit may be necessary to engage aesthetic perception. This
suggests that artists would show different levels of activation than
non-artists.
Aesthetic responses to different types of art and techniques has recently been explored. Cubism
is the most radical departure from Western forms of art, with the
proposed purpose of forcing the viewer to discover less unstable
elements of the object to be represented. It eliminates interferences
such as lighting and perspective angle to capture objects as they really
are. This may be compared to how the brain maintains an object's
identity despite varying conditions. Modern, representational, and impressionistic art
has also been studied for the purpose of explaining visual processing
systems. Yet aesthetic judgments exists in all domains, not just art.
Subcategories
Neuroarchitecture
It has been proven that architecture surrounding us has the ability to impact our emotions. A study done by Trujillo and colleagues measured stress levels of
participants in 20 different waiting rooms showed that the architecture
of a waiting room could impact individuals stress response to be either
lower or higher. Research such as this can serve the argument that compositions of
aesthetics such as architecture have a direct link to our
neurophysiology. Evidence for this has been shown in testing different
mechanisms in response to different environment, Joel Martínez-Soto and
colleagues showed that exposure to restorative environments, such as
structures with natural component led to activation of the middle
frontal gyrus, middle and inferior temporal gyrus, insula, inferior
parietal lobe, and cuneus linking these reactions to increased
relaxation. Moreover, a study measuring stress response showed that the waiting
room with a window versus without a window triggered less of a stress
response, measured by physiological reactions of this stress state
consisted of both heightened and prolonged spikes in salivary cortisol. it's unknown what exact components of architecture create more calm or
stress responses in participants, or via which mechanisms they may be
interacting with the nervous system to either elicit calm or stress
responses, however this research serves to show how aspects we already
widely accept to be restorative and calming, such as windows, natural
light or vegetation can impact us on a neurophysiological level. Research on how this varies from individual to individual along with
personal style is where future research is headed in this field.
Frameworks
Aesthetic triad
Aesthetic
experiences are an emergent property of interactions among a triad of
neural systems that involve sensory-motor, emotion-valuation, and
meaning-knowledge circuitry. Understanding that much of the research done on neuroaesthetics
utilizes the aesthetic triad. The aesthetic triad are the components of
the neural system utilized in an aesthetic experience and in research
method, these components include sensory-motor, knowledge meaning and
emotional valuation. The sensory- motor aspect is our automatic response to the recognition
of objects and our engagement with said objects through our natural
embodied reactions, while knowledge meaning establishes the
understanding that our experience depends on the context and content
present within the experience as shown in studies on neuroaesthetics,
lastly the emotional valuation of these experiences is the component of
our emotional response of either anger, fear, elation, or awe in these
settings. Exploring the different subtopics of neuroaesthetics and the research being done aligns with this aesthetic triad.
The visual brain segregates visual elements like luminance,
color, and motion, as well as higher order objects like faces, bodies,
and landscapes. Aesthetic encounters engage these sensory systems. For
example, gazing at Van Gogh's dynamic paintings evokes a subjective sense of movement and activates visual motion areas V5/MT+. Portraits activate the face area in the fusiform gyrus (FFA) and landscape paintings activate the place area in the parahippocampal gyrus (PPA). Beyond classifying visual elements, these sensory areas may also be
involved in evaluating them. Beautiful faces activate the fusiform face
and adjacent areas. The question of how much and what kind of valuation takes place in sensory cortices is an area of active inquiry.
Looking at paintings that depict actions also engages parts of people's motor systems. This engagement taps into the extended mirror neuron system. Mirror neurons, first discovered in monkeys, are neurons that respond to both the execution and perception of actions. A similar system exists in humans. This system resonates when people infer the intent of artistic gestures or observe the consequences of actions such as in Lucio Fontana's cut canvases. This subtle motor engagement may represent an embodied element of our empathetic responses to visual art.
The pleasure that people derive from looking at beautiful objects automatically engages general reward circuitry. For example, attractive faces activate the FFA and parts of the ventral striatum even when people are not thinking explicitly about the attractiveness
of these faces. The orbito- and medial-frontal cortex, the ventral
striatum, anterior cingulate and insula respond to beautiful visual images and the medial orbitofrontal cortex and adjacent cingulate cortex respond to different sources of pleasures including music and even architectural spaces.
Kirk and colleagues investigated the effects of expectations on neural responses. People
rated abstract "art-like" images as more attractive if labeled as being
from a museum than labeled as generated by a computer. This preference
was accompanied by greater neural activity in the medial orbitofrontal
and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Thinking an image was a museum piece also produced activity in the entorhinal cortex,
suggesting that people's expectations draw on memories that enhance (or
probably also diminish) visual pleasure. Similarly, Lacey and
colleagues found that people's ventral striatum and parts of the orbitofrontal
cortex were more responsive to the "art status" than to the actual
content of visual images. Huang and colleagues found that people have different neural responses when told that they are looking at an authentic or copied Rembrandt portrait. Authentic portraits evoked orbitofrontal activity, whereas copies evoked neural responses in the frontopolar cortex and the right precuneus.
Alternatively, according to the Neo-Kantian approach, "aesthetic
pleasure arises from the fitting of predictive representations to
sensory experiences". When our predictive representations align well with our sensory
experiences, it results in a sense of aesthetic pleasure. This alignment
might involve things like finding coherence, harmony, or resonance
between what we expected and what we actually perceive.The implication
of these studies is that context and knowledge beyond the sensory
qualities of visual images demonstrably affects people's neural activity
in aesthetic experiences.
Semir Zeki's laws of the visual brain
Semir Zeki, professor of neuroesthetics at the University College of London, views art as an example of the variability of the brain. Thus a neurological approach to the source of this variability may explain particular subjective experiences as well as the ranges of abilities to create and experience art. Zeki theorizes that artists unconsciously use techniques to create visual art to study the brain. Zeki suggests that
"...the artist is in a sense, a neuroscientist, exploring the potentials
and capacities of the brain, though with different tools. How such
creations can arouse aesthetic experiences can only be fully understood
in neural terms. Such an understanding is now well within our reach."
He proposes two supreme laws of the visual brain:
Constancy
Despite the changes that occur when processing visual stimuli (distance, viewing angle,
illumination, etc.), the brain has the unique ability to retain
knowledge of constant and essential properties of an object and discard
irrelevant dynamic properties. This applies not only to the ability to,
for example, always see a banana as the color yellow but also the recognition of faces at varying angles.
Comparatively, a work of art captures the essence of an object.
The creation of art itself may be modeled off of this primitive neural
function. The process of painting for example involves distilling an
object down to represent it as it really is, which differs from the way
the eyes see it. Zeki also tried to represent the Platonic Ideal and the Hegelian Concept
through the statement: forms do not have an existence without a brain
and the ability for stored memory, referring to how artists such as Monet could paint without knowing what the objects are in order to capture their true form.
Abstraction
This
process refers to the hierarchical coordination where a general
representation can be applied to many particulars, allowing the brain to
efficiently process visual stimuli. The ability to abstract may have
evolved as a necessity due to the limitations of memory. In a way, art
externalizes the functions of abstraction in the brain. The process of abstraction is unknown to cognitive neurobiology.
However, Zeki proposes an interesting question of whether there is a
significant difference in the pattern of brain activity when viewing
abstract art as opposed to representational art.
Ramachandran's eight laws of artistic experience
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and his fellow researchers including William Hirstein, developed a highly speculative theory of human artistic experience and the neural mechanisms that mediate it. These "laws" combine to develop underlying high order concepts of the
human artistic experience. Although not all encompassing as there are
undoubtedly many other principles of artistic experience, the theorists
claim that they provide a framework for understanding aspects of visual art, style and design.
Although testing of these principles quantitatively may provide future
evidence for specific areas of the brain responsible for one kind of
aesthetic appeal, the theory faces substantial philosophical and historical objections.
Peak shift principle
This psychological phenomenon is typically known for its application in animal discrimination learning.
In the peak shift effect, animals sometimes respond more strongly to
exaggerated versions of the training stimuli. For instance, a rat
is trained to discriminate a square from a rectangle by being rewarded
for recognizing the rectangle. The rat will respond more frequently to
the object for which it is being rewarded to the point that a rat will
respond to a rectangle that is longer and more narrow with a higher
frequency than the original with which it was trained. This is called a supernormal stimulus. The fact that the rat is responding more to a "super" rectangle implies that it is learning a rule.
This effect can be applied to human pattern recognition and aesthetic preference. Some artists attempt to capture the very essence of something in order to evoke a direct emotional response.
In other words, they try to make a "super" rectangle to get the viewer
to have an enhanced response. To capture the essence of something, an
artist amplifies the differences of that object, or what makes it
unique, to highlight the essential features and reduce redundant
information. This process mimics what the visual areas of the brain have
evolved to do and more powerfully activates the same neural mechanisms
that were originally activated by the original object.
Some artists deliberately exaggerate creative components such as shading, highlights, and illumination to an extent that would never occur in a real image to produce a caricature.
These artists may be unconsciously producing heightened activity in the
specific areas of the brain in a manner that is not obvious to the
conscious mind. A significant portion of the experience of art is not
self-consciously reflected upon by audiences, so it is not clear whether
the peak-shift thesis has any special explanatory power in
understanding the creation and reception of art.
Isolation
Isolating
a single visual cue helps the organism allocate attention to the output
of a single module, thereby allowing it to more effectively enjoy the
peak shift along the dimensions represented in that module. In other words, there is a need to isolate the desired visual form before that aspect is amplified. This is why an outline drawing or sketch is sometimes more effective as art than an original color photograph. For example, a cartoonist may exaggerate certain facial features which are unique to the character and remove other forms which it shares such as skin tones.
This efficiency prevents non-unique features from detracting from the
image. This is why one can predict that an outline drawing would be more
aesthetically pleasing than a color photograph.
The viewer's attention is drawn towards this single area allowing
one's attention to be focused on this source of information.
Enhancements introduced by the artist more carefully noted resulting in
the amplification of limbic system activation and reinforcement.
Grouping
Perceptual
grouping to delineate a figure from the background may be enjoyable.
The source of the pleasure may have come about because of the
evolutionary necessity to give organisms an incentive to uncover
objects, such as predators, from noisy environments. For example, when viewing ink blots, the visual system segments the scene to defeat camouflage and link a subset of splotches together. This may be accomplished most effectively if limbic reinforcement is fed back
to early vision at every stage of visual processing leading up to the
discovery of the object. The key idea is that due to the limited
attentional resources, constant feedback facilitates processing of
features at earlier stages due to the discovery of a clue which produces
limbic activation to draw one's attention to important features. Though not spontaneous, this reinforcement is the source of the
pleasant sensation. The discovery of the object itself results in a
pleasant 'aha' revelation causing the organism to hold onto the image.
An artist can make use of this phenomenon by teasing the system.
This allows for temporary binding to be communicated by a signal to the
limbic system for reinforcement which is a source of the aesthetic
experience.
Contrast
Extracting contrast involves eliminating redundant information and focusing attention. Cells in the retina, the lateral geniculate body or relay station in the brain, and in the visual cortex respond predominantly to step changes in luminance rather than homogeneous surface colors. Smooth gradients
are much harder for the visual system to detect rather than segmented
divisions of shades resulting in easily detectable edges. Contrasts due
to the formation of edges may be pleasing to the eye. The importance of
the visual neuron's varying responses to the orientation and presence of
edges has previously been proven by David H. Hubel and Torsten Wiesel. This may hold evolutionary significance since regions of contrast are
information rich requiring reinforcement and the allocation of
attention. In contrast to the principle of grouping, contrasting
features are typically in close proximity eliminating the need to link
distant, but similar features.
Perceptual problem solving
Tied
to the detection of contrast and grouping is the concept that discovery
of an object after a struggle is more pleasing than one which is
instantaneously obvious. The mechanism ensures that the struggle is
reinforcing so that the viewer continues to look until the discovery.
From a survival point of view, this may be important for the continued
search for predators. Ramachandran suggests for the same reason that a
model whose hips and breasts are about to be revealed is more provocative than one who is already completely naked. A meaning that is implied is more alluring than one that is explicit.
Generic viewpoint
The
visual system dislikes interpretations which rely on a unique vantage
point. Rather it accepts the visual interpretation for which there is an
infinite set of viewpoints that could produce the class of retinal
images. For example, in a landscape
image, it will interpret an object in the foreground as obscuring an
object in the background, rather than assuming that the background
figure has a piece missing.
In theory, if an artist is trying to please the eye, they should avoid such coincidences. However, in certain applications, the violation of this principle can also produce a pleasing effect.
Visual metaphors
Ramachandran
defines a metaphor as a mental tunnel between two concepts that appear
grossly dissimilar on the surface, but instead share a deeper
connection. Similar to the effects of perceptual problem solving,
grasping an analogy
is rewarding. It enables the viewer to highlight crucial aspects that
the two objects share. Although it is uncertain whether the reason for
this mechanism is for effective communication or purely cognitive, the
discovery of similarities between superficially dissimilar events leads
to activation of the limbic system to create a rewarding process.
Support for this view is highlighted by the symptoms of Capgras delusion, where sufferers experience reduced facial recognition due to impairments in the connections from the inferotemporal cortex to the amygdala,
which is responsible for emotions. The result is that a person no
longer experiences the warm fuzzy feeling when presented with a familiar
face. A person's "glow" is lost through what is suggested as due to the
lack of limbic activation.
Symmetry
The aesthetic appeal of symmetry
is easily understandable. Biologically it is important during the
detection of a predator, location of prey, and the choosing of a mate as
all of these tend to display symmetry in nature. It complements other
principles relating to the discovering of information rich objects.
Additionally, evolutionary biologists suggest that the predisposition
towards symmetry is because biologically, asymmetry is associated with infection and disease, which can lead to poor mate selection. However, departures from
symmetry in visual art are also widely considered beautiful, suggesting
that while symmetry may explain the judgment that a particular
individual's face is beautiful, it cannot explain the judgment that a
work of art is beautiful.
Areas of the brain linked to the processing of visual aesthetics
Aesthetic perception relies heavily on the processing by the visual centers in the brain such as the V1 cortex. Signals from V1 are distributed to various specialized areas of the brain. There is no single area where all specialized visual circuitry connect,
reducing the chances of determining a single neural center responsible
for aesthetics, rather a neural network is more likely. Therefore, the visual brain consists of several parallel multistage
processing systems, each specialized in a given task such as color or
motion. Functional specializations of the visual brain are already
known.
Physiological phenomenon can explain several aspects of art appreciation. Different extrastriate areas
of the visual cortex may have evolved to extract correlations of
different visual features. The discovery and linking of various visual
stimuli is facilitated and reinforced by direct connections from these
areas to limbic structures.
Additionally, art may be most appealing if it produces heightened
activity in a single dimension rather than redundant activation of
multiple modules, restricted by the allocation of attentional resources. In experimentation to determine specific areas, many researchers allow
the viewer to decide the aesthetic appeal prior to the use of imaging
techniques to account for the varying perceptions of beauty. When
individuals contemplate the aesthetic appeal, different neural processes
are engaged than when pragmatically viewing an image. However, processes of object identification and aesthetic judgment are
involved simultaneously in the overall perception of aesthetics.
Prefrontal cortex
Location of the orbito-frontal cortex shown through MRI
The prefrontal cortex
is previously known for its roles in the perception of colored objects,
decision making, and memory. Recent studies have also linked it to the
conscious aesthetic experience because it is activated during aesthetic
tasks such as determining the appeal of a visual stimuli. This may be
because a judgment is needed, requiring visiospatial memory. In a study
performed by Zeki and Kawabata, it was found that the medial orbito-frontal cortex (mOFC) is involved in the judgment of whether a painting is beautiful or not. There is high activation in this region when a person views paintings
which they consider beautiful. Other evidence shows that this same area
is active during the experience of beauty derived from different
sources, including musical beauty and moral beauty, and even mathematical beauty. Experience of the sublime, as opposed to the beautiful, results in a different pattern of brain activity; moreover, where it comes to judgment, although aesthetic and perceptual
judgments leads t activity in the same brain areas, the pattern of
activity is also different between the two, one of the most marked
differences being the involvement of mOFC in aesthetic, but not in
perceptual, judgments. Surprisingly, when a person views a painting which they consider ugly,
no separate structures are activated. Therefore, it is proposed that
changes in the intensity of activation in the orbito-frontal cortex
correlate with the determination of beauty (higher activation) or
ugliness (lower activation).
Conversely, activity in the motor cortex showed the opposite pattern. Additionally, the medial OFC has been found to respond aesthetics in
terms of the context of which it is presented, such as text or other
descriptions about the artwork. The current evidence linking the OFC to
attributed hedonistic values across gustatory, olfactory, and visual
modalities, suggests that the OFC is a common center for the assessment
of a stimulus's value. The perception of aesthetics for these areas must be due to the
activation of the brain's reward system with a certain intensity.
Prefrontal cortex is highlighted in orange. Location of Brodmann's areas indicated by numerical tabs.
Additionally, the prefrontal dorsalateral cortex
(PDC) is selectively activated only by stimuli considered beautiful
whereas prefrontal activity as a whole is activated during the judgment
of both pleasing and unpleasing stimuli. The prefrontal cortex may be generally activated for directing the
attention of the cognitive and perceptual mechanisms towards aesthetic
perception in viewers untrained in visual arts. In other words, related directly to a person viewing art from an
aesthetic perception due to the top-down control of their cognition. The
lateral prefrontal cortex is shown to be linked to higher order
self-referential procession and the evaluation of internally generated
information. The left lateral PFC, Brodmann area 10,
may be involved in maintaining attention on the execution of internally
generated goals associated with approaching art from an aesthetic
orientation.
Broca's Area, also in the Prefrontal cortex is impaired in many
individuals with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Dysfunction in
this area leads to deficits in speech production; in this case the
inability to verbally process a traumatic event(s). The process of
making art allows those affected to "access pre-language areas of the
brain" by creating their own symbolic imagery and connecting with others
through this. Directing attention towards aesthetics may have evolutionary significance.
Additional areas
Emotions
play a large role in aesthetic processing. Experiments designed
specifically to force the subjects to view the artwork subjectively (by
inquiring of its aesthetic appeal) rather than simply with the visual
systems, revealed a higher activation in the brain's emotional
circuitry. Results from these experiments revealed high activation in
the bilateral insula which can be attributed to the emotional experience of viewing art. This correlates with other known emotional roles of the insula.
However, the correlation between the insula's varying states of
activation and positive or negative emotions in this context is unknown.
The emotional view of art can be contrasted with perception related to
object recognition when pragmatically viewing art. The right fusiform gyrus has been revealed to show activation to visual stimuli such as faces and representational art. The neuroaesthetics of facial recognition hold particular importance,
as being drawn to faces likely increased sociability, allowing tribal
environments to grow, resulting in greater protection and more
availability of mates. This is likely involved in genetic fitness of offspring and child-rearing as well.
This holds importance in the field because as Ramachandran also
speculated, object recognition and the search for meaning can evoke a
pleasant emotional response. The motor cortex was also shown to be involved in aesthetic perception. However, it displayed opposite trends of activation from the OFC. It may be a common correlate for the perception of emotionally charged
stimuli despite its previously known roles. Several other areas of the
brain were shown to be slightly activated during certain studies such as
the anterior cingulate cortex, previously known for its involvement in the feeling of romance, and the left parietal cortex, whose purpose may be to direct spatial attention.
Different artistic styles may also be processed differently by the brain. In a study between filtered forms of abstract and representation art, the bilateral occipitalgyri, left cingulate sulcus, and bilateral fusiform gyrus showed increased activation with increased preference when viewing art. However, activation in the bilateral occipital gyri may be caused by
the large processing requirements placed on the visual system when
viewing high levels of visual detail in artwork such as representational
paintings. Several areas of the brain have been shown to respond particularly to
forms representational art perhaps due to the brain's ability to make
object associations and other functions relating to attention and
memory. This form of stimuli leads to increased activation in the left frontal lobe and bilaterally in the parietal and limbic lobes. Also, the left superior parietal lobule, Brodmann's area 7,
has been shown to play a role in active image construction during the
viewing of art specifically containing indeterminate forms such as soft
edge paintings. Bottom up processes such as edge detection and the exploration of
visual stimuli are engaged during this type of aesthetic perception.
These roles are consistent with previously known parietal lobe
responsibilities in spatial cognition and visual imagery.
Criticism
There are several objections to researchers' attempts to reduce aesthetic experience to a set of physical or neurological laws. It is questionable whether the theories can capture the evocativeness or originality of individual works of art. Experiments performed may not account for these theories directly.
Also, current experimentation measures a person's verbal response to how
they feel about art which is often selectively filtered. Ramachandran
suggests the use of galvanic skin response
to quantify the judgment associated viewing aesthetics. Overall, it can
be argued that there is lack of proportion between the narrow approach
to art taken by researchers versus the grand claims they make for their
theories.
Additional research carries the assumption that our emotions are
engaged when viewing or interacting with something related to aesthetics
such as architecture, fashion or art however, the argument has been
made by Alexis Makin, a researcher on visual neuroscience, that we can
not yet encapsulate the neuroscience and psychological experience that
occurs when having an aesthetic experience. Thus insinuating that we can not attribute our experience of aesthetics
to that of something on the neurophysiological level. In negation to
this, Skov and his colleagues make the argument that he emotional
response elicited and the perceptual cues engaged in aesthetic
experiences is enough evidence to ascertain the existence of empirical
aesthetics. The
majority of studies on neuroaesthetics have measured neural responses
to traditional and Western art styles. One journal suggested rerunning
these experiments using "traditional Chinese painting, Tang poetry,
Chinese courtyard landscapes". Limiting the scope of cultural stimuli creates bias in results because
factors such as familiarity may affect participant responses.
Future directions and related fields
Since
2005 the notion of bridging brain science and the visual arts has
blossomed into a field of increasing international interest. In his 2008
book, Neuroarthistory: from Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki, Professor John Onians of the University of East Anglia
considers himself to be at the forefront of the field of neural
scientific biased art historical research, although such a "history" is
much shorter than Onians would have us believe. Many historical figures he deals with as precursors for neuroarthistory
(Karl Marx, for example) have very little to do with modern
neuroscience as it is understood today. Contemporary artists like Mark
Stephen Smith (William Campbell Gallery, US), Guillaume Bottazzi and others have developed extensive bodies of work mapping the
convergence of brain science and painting. Smith's work explores
fundamental visual analogies between neural function and self-expression
in abstract art. The past decade has also seen a corresponding growth
in the aesthetics of music studied from neuroscientific approaches.
Psychological and social approaches to art help provide other theories
of experience.
Art and music therapy are two proposed clinical applications for
neuroaesthetics. Individuals with a variety of conditions including, but
not limited to, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), and Neurodegenerative
conditions such as Parkinsons, have shown symptom improvement after many
types of art therapy and art exposure.
The advancements of biotechnology over time should allow
neurophysiological responses to be recorded outside of the laboratory
setting[4a]. Future directions should measure these responses while
participants take part in immersive exhibits, especially those involving
immersive multimedia exhibits such as TeamLab Planets TOKYO.
