Extracting Value: Appreciative Engagement as Metacognition
Defended on March 4th, 2020
Abstract:
A considerable part of human life is structured around appreciative pursuits, including but not limited to the arts. While these pursuits are vastly heterogeneous, they share some general psychological underpinnings. My dissertation investigates some of those underpinnings.
First, I argue that general theories of appreciation in aesthetics have been unduly constrained by the dominance of hedonistic accounts of aesthetic value. Aesthetic hedonism posits a constitutive link between the values of appreciative experiences and the aesthetic values of their objects. But once alternatives to hedonism are taken seriously and this constitutive link is no longer taken for granted, new avenues open up for theorizing about appreciation, and its relevance to value theory beyond aesthetics comes into clearer view.
Second, I revisit the aesthetic attitude theorists’ much maligned idea that appreciation involves a distinctive mode of attention. Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of games, I develop a novel account of this distinctive attentional mode, in terms of a nested hierarchy of goals by which attention is guided in appreciative episodes.
Finally I argue that our thinking about how self-awareness figures in episodes of appreciation should be more thoroughly informed by empirical work on human metacognitive capacities. I review two bodies of empirical literature on the subject and use them to develop a proposal about metacognition’s role in appreciation.
Defended on March 4th, 2020
Abstract:
A considerable part of human life is structured around appreciative pursuits, including but not limited to the arts. While these pursuits are vastly heterogeneous, they share some general psychological underpinnings. My dissertation investigates some of those underpinnings.
First, I argue that general theories of appreciation in aesthetics have been unduly constrained by the dominance of hedonistic accounts of aesthetic value. Aesthetic hedonism posits a constitutive link between the values of appreciative experiences and the aesthetic values of their objects. But once alternatives to hedonism are taken seriously and this constitutive link is no longer taken for granted, new avenues open up for theorizing about appreciation, and its relevance to value theory beyond aesthetics comes into clearer view.
Second, I revisit the aesthetic attitude theorists’ much maligned idea that appreciation involves a distinctive mode of attention. Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of games, I develop a novel account of this distinctive attentional mode, in terms of a nested hierarchy of goals by which attention is guided in appreciative episodes.
Finally I argue that our thinking about how self-awareness figures in episodes of appreciation should be more thoroughly informed by empirical work on human metacognitive capacities. I review two bodies of empirical literature on the subject and use them to develop a proposal about metacognition’s role in appreciation.