Abstract
In recent years, neuroscientists like V.S. Ramachandran and Semir Zeki have made bold claims for the capacities of their work to transform our understanding of visual art. Considering key ideas advanced by Ramachandran and Zeki, this article analyzes what the claims of these leading proponents of “neuro-aesthetics” entail and how the prospects for their projects stand.
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Notes
- 1.
Following the description of peak-shift as “a common denominator underlying all types of art” (1999, 16) and “the key to understanding what art really is” (1999, 17), the more cautious phrase “the evocativeness of much of visual art” may signal a quiet step in reverse. (As the philosopher J.L. Austin once said, there’s the bit where you say it and there’s the bit where you take it back.) However, even the qualified claim is an exaggeration. The trouble is that the claim that some art is caricature is neither very exciting nor very new.
- 2.
This line of criticism is elegantly advanced in Martindale (1999). In response, Ramachandran acknowledges that he is “not using the phrase ‘peak shift’ in its original, strict technical sense” (1999, 73), and he has added (in correspondence with me) that he isn’t “much concerned with the exact meaning of words and phrases like ‘peak shift’” and that he deplores “excessive preoccupation with purely semantic issues”. But these comments are not reassuring. For how nonchalant we can afford to be about the definition of a term depends on the term. “Peak shift” is a technical term, so it means nothing until it has been explained. And if it is not being used in its original, strict technical sense, no alternative sense has been introduced. Furthermore, scientists do need to think about semantic issues, i.e. about the concepts they use and the language in which these concepts are expressed. This is an indispensable part of the most serious and challenging work in science—try to imagine twentieth-century physics without Einstein’s analysis of the concept of simultaneity—and there is no reason for thinking that neuroscience is exempt.
- 3.
This comparison is entirely derived from White (1999).
- 4.
My comments on imaginativeness are entirely derived from Passmore (1998).
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Hyman, J. (2010). Art and Neuroscience. In: Frigg, R., Hunter, M. (eds) Beyond Mimesis and Convention. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 262. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3851-7_11
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