Aesthesis, noesis, or both? Enactivism meets representationalism in aesthetics
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences November 22, 2024 Onerva Kiianlinna
Two prominent models of the mind—enactivism and representationalism—are often seen as contradictory, but this article argues they can coexist in explaining how people form aesthetic judgments. The main disagreement between the models does not apply to aesthetic judging, because perceiving aesthetic value is not a form of basic cognition that must be either enactive or representational. Instead, aesthetic judgment requires subjective, embodied metacognitive evidence, which allows incorporating aspects of both models. The proposed view, representational enactivism, treats the aesthetic subject as an emergent functional system while characterizing its sub-systems in representationalist terms, doing justice to the phenomenon of aesthetic judging.