This document discusses the concept of aesthetic cognitivism, which views art as a source of understanding rather than just pleasure. It explores both the advantages and challenges of this view. The key advantages are that cognitivism can explain artistic value judgments and critical vocabulary referring to themes, insights, and convincing/unconvincing portrayals. However, two major difficulties are how exactly art advances understanding, given it lacks the logical structure of inquiry found in sciences, and how the ideas in art are less directly expressible than in other fields. The document aims to provide a balanced examination of aesthetic cognitivism.

1. Aesthetics Evaluation:
Art and understanding
MRE 3014

2. Introduction
• Artists often have ‘messages’ that they intend to convey.We need to
distinguish between works of art which merely display or assert and those
which lead us to a better understanding.
• Art with a ‘message’ can be nothing more than propaganda, the skillful
promotion of a point of view.

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• The interesting version of the claim that we learn from art, then, is that
paintings, poems, plays, and so on, do not provide us with information or
even propagate opinions in attractive ways, but that they advance our
understanding.
• This is the reason why we always caught in the middle when trying to
understand how some people appreciate arts.

4. Art and knowledge (Art Cognitivism)
• The theory that art is valuable because of what we learn from it is
sometimes called ‘cognitivism,’ a label derived from the Latin for knowing,
and one we will use here.
• In the opinion of some philosophers, however, advancing our knowledge is
just what art ought not to do.
• They hold that to entertain cognitivism with respect to art is to give in to a
certain sort of prejudice against art proper.

5. Can arts be judge?
• According to Douglas Morgan (1969) argues that trying to construe art as a
source of understanding is not only forcing it into a mould it will not fit, but
is overestimating the relative value of knowledge.
• What it means that arts somehow cannot be judge by its message that
convey behind it this will course arts to be less valuable.
• Example; some of the high arts such as music that composed by the
musicians convey a certain music for only to allow the beauties of what
music is all about without dealing with any propaganda of meaning.

6. Why need to value arts on cognitivitism?
• However it must be acknowledged that cognitivism about art has had far
fewer supporters among either philosophers or artists than expressivism.
• This is because it undoubtedly faces several important difficulties which
have to be examined carefully if cognitivism is to be plausible.
• Before doing so, it is worth reviewing the advantages cognitivism enjoys as
an explanation of the value and importance of serious art because these
show that there is good reason to persist in trying to solve the problems that
it encounters.

7. Aesthetic cognitivism
• Aesthetic cognitivism is one of the arts evaluation that merge under
thought in film theory, literary theory and other fields of arts that believe
that in order to value arts not simple as sources of delight, amusement,
pleasure or emotional but instead the source of understanding.

8. How it works?
• If art is a source of understanding this also enables us, in principle at any
rate, to explain the discriminations that we make between works of art.
• A work may be said to have substance and seriousness to the degree that it
enhances our understanding and be relatively undistinguished to the extent
that it does not, in just the same way that the importance of one experiment
or mathematical proof is judged greater than that of another in accordance
with its contribution to wider intellectual concerns.

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• Cognitivism also helps us explain an important range of critical vocabulary
which is widely used. If greater understanding is what art offers us, we can
describe a work as the exploration of a theme in a straightforward sense and
without any conceptual or linguistic oddity.

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• It also makes sense, if cognitivism is true, to speak of insight and profundity,
superficiality and distortion in art, and it will be appropriate to describe a
portrayal of something as convincing or unconvincing, just as we would
describe an argument.

11. Basic principle of cognitivism valuation in arts
• A principal virtue of cognitivism, then, is its ability to explain and sustain a number
of ways in which people actually think and talk about art. It is important to note
immediately, however, that not all attempts to speak of art in this way will be well-
founded.
• The world of art criticism is notorious for the pretension of its language, and
whether it really makes sense to speak of all forms of art as sources of
understanding capable of generating insight as well as illusion is an open question.
Can we for instance apply cognitive language to music, or to architecture?

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• So much for cognitivism’s advantages. It is time now to consider more
closely its difficulties.Two of these are crucial. How does art advance our
understanding, and of what does it do this?

13. ART AND UNDERSTANDING
• To appreciate the force of these questions it is instructive to examine in greater
detail Goodman’s original parallel between art and science. We have to understand
‘science’ here as a general term, encompassing more than the natural sciences and
including a wide variety of intellectual inquiries: history, mathematics, philosophy,
and so on, as well as physics, chemistry, economics, and so on
• In all these disciplines, we can characterize inquiry as a movement of thought from
an established original basis to a yet to be established conclusion via a logic or set
of rules of reasoning.

14. Challenges to evaluate arts
• There are important differences between disciplines, of course, but the
abstract analysis of the structure of intellectual inquiry allows us to pose
some important difficulties in the idea of art as a source of understanding.
• The first of these is that in a work of art there does not appear to be any obvious
parallel to the distinction between the established ground upon which we begin and
the terminus to which we are being led. Nor is there anything very obvious that might
parallel a ‘logic’ of inquiry.

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• A second major difficulty with cognitivism about the arts is this. In history, philosophy,
or natural science, the evidence, argument, and ideas that are employed, the
hypotheses advanced and the conclusions defended can almost always be expressed or
explained in widely differing ways.
• There can be better and less good formulations; some explanations are
better because they are more simply expressed than others for instance,
and sometimes physics employs mathematical formulae that cannot be
substituted.