Michael Wheeler: Minds, Brains and Artworks Featured
We are pleased to announce the next meeting of our “Philosophy of Cognitive Science” seminar, featuring a talk by Professor Michael Wheeler from the University of Stirling. This event will be held in a hybrid format, allowing participants to join either in person or online.
Details of the Event:
- Date: Wednesday, October 30th
- Time: 10:00 AM (Warsaw, CET)
- Location: Staszic Place (IFiS, PAN), Room 161
- Online Platform: Google Meet
- Google Meet Link: email Przemysław Nowakowski przemyslaw.nowakowski@ifispan.edu.pl for the link.
Lecture Title: Minds, Brains and Artworks
Abstract:
Among other things, the creative arts and their associated humanities disciplines are concerned with revealing, understanding, and exploring human experience, thought, and emotion. So, if you wanted insights into these psychological phenomena, who would you ask? Shakespeare or a cognitive neuroscientist? Taylor Swift or a developmental psychologist? Henry James or William James? In this talk, I’ll suggest that the answer is in each case both, and preferably once they’ve had a long chat with each other. This answer seems to have obvious consequences for the ways in which we investigate the mind, but getting clear about how it’s all supposed to work is tricky. In this talk, I’ll endeavor to make progress on this issue by arguing for (i) the systematic relevance of cognitive science to the creative arts and their accompanying humanities disciplines, and (ii) the systematic relevance of the creative arts and their accompanying humanities disciplines to cognitive science.The talk will be divided into two halves. In the first, I’ll begin by defending an established (although still controversial) approach in narratology in which the literary theorist borrows concepts and insights from cognitive science and redeploys them in their own interpretations and analyses. I’ll then argue that this approach generalizes to the other creative arts, building partly on prior work by Kitcher (Deaths in Venice: the Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach). In the second half, I’ll take my point of departure from recent work in cognitive literary analysis by Bernini (Beckett and the Cognitive Method: Mind, Models and Exploratory Narratives). I’ll follow Bernini in holding that we should think of (at least some) literary texts as engaged in cognitive modeling, in a way that is continuous with what goes on in (cognitive) science, but I’ll go further than Bernini does in theoretically situating and defending that view. Working within a distributed cognition/niche construction framework, I’ll argue that artworks in general are often best conceptualized as ways of ‘externalizing’ our cognitive models (both folk and theoretical) to enable the shared stress-testing of those models. To illustrate the resulting position, and, crucially, our two target directions of relevance, I’ll end by briefly sketching my own reading of Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape.
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