Minds, Brains and Artworks

The next (hybrid) meeting of the seminar ‘Philosophy of Cognitive Science’ is scheduled for Wednesday, October 30th, at 10:00 AM (Warsaw, CET). This time we will meet in person (and online), the seminar will take place in Staszic Place (IFiS, PAN), room: 161, and at GoogleMeet (link: https://meet.google.com/ncd-djqu-gnx).
Our guest will be Michael Wheeler (University of Stirling). He will give a lecture titled: 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 endeavour 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. It will be a talk of 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. Here I’ll build partly on prior work by Kitcher (Deaths in Venice: the Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach). In the second half of the talk 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 modelling, 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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