Frank Palmer
- Published in print:
- 1992
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198242321
- eISBN:
- 9780191680441
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198242321.003.0008
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics, Moral Philosophy
When asked what is learned in literature, the most often given answer is that it is dependent upon what is read, by whom, and in what spirit. However, the point in question in this chapter focuses on ...
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When asked what is learned in literature, the most often given answer is that it is dependent upon what is read, by whom, and in what spirit. However, the point in question in this chapter focuses on two aspects: what literature can contribute to education and what literature can contribute to moral education. In exploring these two points, there is a risk of conflating two different things: the importance or value of literature and its educative power and the independent value or importance it has regardless of its educative function. While the distinction between the educational value and moral education value is not totally separate and there are indeed some relations in some way, certainly literature should not be considered as mere device for moral instruction or a fuel for the cause.Less
When asked what is learned in literature, the most often given answer is that it is dependent upon what is read, by whom, and in what spirit. However, the point in question in this chapter focuses on two aspects: what literature can contribute to education and what literature can contribute to moral education. In exploring these two points, there is a risk of conflating two different things: the importance or value of literature and its educative power and the independent value or importance it has regardless of its educative function. While the distinction between the educational value and moral education value is not totally separate and there are indeed some relations in some way, certainly literature should not be considered as mere device for moral instruction or a fuel for the cause.
Michael Ridge
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199682669
- eISBN:
- 9780191774454
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199682669.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
We all form judgments about what ways of life are worthwhile, what we are morally required to do and so on. These so-called ‘normative’ judgments have seemed puzzling in part because they exhibit ...
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We all form judgments about what ways of life are worthwhile, what we are morally required to do and so on. These so-called ‘normative’ judgments have seemed puzzling in part because they exhibit both belief-like and desire-like features. Traditional cognitivist theories hold that these judgments are beliefs rather than desires; traditional non-cognitivist theories hold that they are desires rather than beliefs. Each of these traditions tries to accommodate or explain away what the other tradition handles so easily. One often gets the sense that the defenders of these increasingly complex theories are trying to force a square peg into a round hole. So-called ‘hybrid theories’ try to have the best of both worlds by understanding normative judgments as constituted by both belief-like and desire-like states. This book defends a distinctive hybrid theory it calls ‘Ecumenical Expressivism’. By emphasizing the often neglected distinction between meta-semantics and semantics, Ecumenical Expressivism accommodates both the context-sensitivity of normative predicates and a broadly truth-conditional approach to semantics. The book builds on this solution with a theory of propositions which accommodates irreducible normative propositions in an expressivist framework. This, in turn, sets the stage for a theory of truth which does not depend on controversial ‘deflationist’ assumptions, but can be combined with any otherwise plausible conception of truth. Finally, the book develops and defends a novel theory of disagreement and a more cognitivist hybrid theory of talk of rationality.Less
We all form judgments about what ways of life are worthwhile, what we are morally required to do and so on. These so-called ‘normative’ judgments have seemed puzzling in part because they exhibit both belief-like and desire-like features. Traditional cognitivist theories hold that these judgments are beliefs rather than desires; traditional non-cognitivist theories hold that they are desires rather than beliefs. Each of these traditions tries to accommodate or explain away what the other tradition handles so easily. One often gets the sense that the defenders of these increasingly complex theories are trying to force a square peg into a round hole. So-called ‘hybrid theories’ try to have the best of both worlds by understanding normative judgments as constituted by both belief-like and desire-like states. This book defends a distinctive hybrid theory it calls ‘Ecumenical Expressivism’. By emphasizing the often neglected distinction between meta-semantics and semantics, Ecumenical Expressivism accommodates both the context-sensitivity of normative predicates and a broadly truth-conditional approach to semantics. The book builds on this solution with a theory of propositions which accommodates irreducible normative propositions in an expressivist framework. This, in turn, sets the stage for a theory of truth which does not depend on controversial ‘deflationist’ assumptions, but can be combined with any otherwise plausible conception of truth. Finally, the book develops and defends a novel theory of disagreement and a more cognitivist hybrid theory of talk of rationality.
Stephen Schiffer
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- April 2005
- ISBN:
- 9780199257768
- eISBN:
- 9780191602313
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0199257760.003.0008
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Language
The account of indeterminacy is brought to bear on conditionals, both indicative conditionals and counterfactual conditionals. The existence of conditional propositions is easily secured on the ...
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The account of indeterminacy is brought to bear on conditionals, both indicative conditionals and counterfactual conditionals. The existence of conditional propositions is easily secured on the theory of pleonastic propositions, and conditions are specified under which a conditional proposition is determinately true, determinately false, or indeterminate. These truth conditions generate a puzzle, in that the way we form partial beliefs in indeterminate conditional propositions is not what their truth conditions predict. The resolution makes an important concession to non-cognitivist accounts of indicative-conditional sentences.Less
The account of indeterminacy is brought to bear on conditionals, both indicative conditionals and counterfactual conditionals. The existence of conditional propositions is easily secured on the theory of pleonastic propositions, and conditions are specified under which a conditional proposition is determinately true, determinately false, or indeterminate. These truth conditions generate a puzzle, in that the way we form partial beliefs in indeterminate conditional propositions is not what their truth conditions predict. The resolution makes an important concession to non-cognitivist accounts of indicative-conditional sentences.
William P. Seeley
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- February 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190662158
- eISBN:
- 9780190662189
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190662158.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
What is it about art that can be so captivating? How is it that we find value in these often odd and abstract objects and events that we call artworks? My proposal is that artworks are attentional ...
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What is it about art that can be so captivating? How is it that we find value in these often odd and abstract objects and events that we call artworks? My proposal is that artworks are attentional engines. They are artifacts that have been intentionally designed to direct attention to critical stylistic features that reveal their point, purpose, or meaning. My suggestion is that there is a lot that we can learn about art from interdisciplinary research focused on our perceptual engagement with artworks. These kinds of studies can reveal how we recognize artworks, how we differentiate them from other, more quotidian artifacts. In doing so they reveal how artworks function as a unique source of value. Our interactions with artworks draw on a broad base of shared artistic and cultural constitutive of different categories of art. Cognitive systems integrate this information into our experience of art, guiding attention, and shaping what we perceive. Our understanding and appreciation of artworks is therefore carried in our perceptual experience of them. Teasing out how this works can contribute valuable information to our philosophical understanding of art. Attentional Engines explores this interdisciplinary strategy for understanding art. It articulates a cognitivist theory of art grounded in perceptual psychology and the neuroscience attention and demonstrates its application to a range of puzzles in the philosophy of the arts, including questions about the nature of depiction, the role played by metakinesis in dance appreciation, the nature of musical expression, and the power of movies.Less
What is it about art that can be so captivating? How is it that we find value in these often odd and abstract objects and events that we call artworks? My proposal is that artworks are attentional engines. They are artifacts that have been intentionally designed to direct attention to critical stylistic features that reveal their point, purpose, or meaning. My suggestion is that there is a lot that we can learn about art from interdisciplinary research focused on our perceptual engagement with artworks. These kinds of studies can reveal how we recognize artworks, how we differentiate them from other, more quotidian artifacts. In doing so they reveal how artworks function as a unique source of value. Our interactions with artworks draw on a broad base of shared artistic and cultural constitutive of different categories of art. Cognitive systems integrate this information into our experience of art, guiding attention, and shaping what we perceive. Our understanding and appreciation of artworks is therefore carried in our perceptual experience of them. Teasing out how this works can contribute valuable information to our philosophical understanding of art. Attentional Engines explores this interdisciplinary strategy for understanding art. It articulates a cognitivist theory of art grounded in perceptual psychology and the neuroscience attention and demonstrates its application to a range of puzzles in the philosophy of the arts, including questions about the nature of depiction, the role played by metakinesis in dance appreciation, the nature of musical expression, and the power of movies.
Noël Carroll and William P. Seeley
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199862139
- eISBN:
- 9780199332755
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199862139.003.0003
- Subject:
- Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience
Artworks are attentional engines, or artifacts intentionally designed to direct attention to formal features that are diagnostic for their artistically salient aesthetic, expressive, and semantic ...
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Artworks are attentional engines, or artifacts intentionally designed to direct attention to formal features that are diagnostic for their artistically salient aesthetic, expressive, and semantic content. This is nowhere more true than the movies. Moving pictures are constructed from a suite of formal and narrative devices carefully developed to capture, hold, and direct our attention. These devices are tools for developing content by controlling the way information is presented throughout the duration of our engagement with a movie. In this respect moving pictures are analogous to visual routines used to direct and bias attention in natural behavior—they are artifacts used to deliver information on the fly as it is needed for the development of the narrative. This chapter reviews some of the fundamental devices movie makers use to discharge this function—such as variable framing and criterial prefocusing—and discusses their relation to our underlying cognitive, affective, and neurological architecture. These formal devices are designed to guide and control salient aspects of viewers behavioral responses to mass market movies. Therefore, the chapter argues that it is no surprise to discover that that they are fine tuned to the architecture of emotion, perception, and cognition.Less
Artworks are attentional engines, or artifacts intentionally designed to direct attention to formal features that are diagnostic for their artistically salient aesthetic, expressive, and semantic content. This is nowhere more true than the movies. Moving pictures are constructed from a suite of formal and narrative devices carefully developed to capture, hold, and direct our attention. These devices are tools for developing content by controlling the way information is presented throughout the duration of our engagement with a movie. In this respect moving pictures are analogous to visual routines used to direct and bias attention in natural behavior—they are artifacts used to deliver information on the fly as it is needed for the development of the narrative. This chapter reviews some of the fundamental devices movie makers use to discharge this function—such as variable framing and criterial prefocusing—and discusses their relation to our underlying cognitive, affective, and neurological architecture. These formal devices are designed to guide and control salient aspects of viewers behavioral responses to mass market movies. Therefore, the chapter argues that it is no surprise to discover that that they are fine tuned to the architecture of emotion, perception, and cognition.
Hilary Radner and Alistair Fox
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474422888
- eISBN:
- 9781474444767
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474422888.003.0011
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
In this section of the interview, Raymond Bellour explains why he thinks hypnosis is superior as a model for explaining the effects of cinema, on the grounds that it involves a somatic displacement ...
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In this section of the interview, Raymond Bellour explains why he thinks hypnosis is superior as a model for explaining the effects of cinema, on the grounds that it involves a somatic displacement that comes from outside the spectator. At the same time, he explains his objections to cognitivist film theory. Finally, Bellour recounts how his interest in animals, which began in the 1970s, derived from his perception of the way in which animal figures were being used in American cinema in films like Howard Hawks’s Bringing up Baby and Monkey Business and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, which in turn led him to consider the issue of animality itself.Less
In this section of the interview, Raymond Bellour explains why he thinks hypnosis is superior as a model for explaining the effects of cinema, on the grounds that it involves a somatic displacement that comes from outside the spectator. At the same time, he explains his objections to cognitivist film theory. Finally, Bellour recounts how his interest in animals, which began in the 1970s, derived from his perception of the way in which animal figures were being used in American cinema in films like Howard Hawks’s Bringing up Baby and Monkey Business and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, which in turn led him to consider the issue of animality itself.
