In a recent paper published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Onerva Kiianlinna (KLI & University of Helsinki) argues that the enactivist and representationalist frameworks can and should be brought together when talking about aesthetic judging.

Cognition is often explained differently by two influential but often contradictory and mutually exclusive schools of philosophy: the enactivists stress the subject’s direct affective inter­action with its environment, whereas the representationalists treat cognition as an indirect informa­tion processor, which involves processing inputs, and then producing outputs. The divide between these views became so significant that there is even “radical enactivism” which aims at theorizing about the mind with no reference to any representational content.

In this paper, Onerva investigates whether both approaches to cognition can meaningfully coexist when forming aesthetic judgments. Aesthetic judging means the cognitive process of forming aesthetic judgments such as saying that an object "X is beautiful." While radical enactivists claim that lived history of an organism is enough to account for its cognitive processes, representationalists hold that cognitive processes rely on computational representations. Enactivists like to emphasize more "holistic" embodied interaction between organisms and environments. Radical enactivism and representationalism are seen as alternatives when it comes to the so-called basic cognition.

Aesthetic judgments are formed based on perceptual qualities, such as shape or color, but these qualities do not automatically dictate the judgment made. For example, the color red may influence either a judgment of beauty or ugliness. So, the color does not necessarily determine it. This distinction suggests that aesthetic judgment is not part of "basic cognition," but rather a more complex, metacognitive process. Onerva argues that one can and indeed should incorporate aspects of both enactivism as well as representationalism to do justice to the phenomenon of aesthetic judging. Perceiving aesthetic value requires subjective, or embodied, metacognitive evidence. This rep­resentational enactivism entails that the aesthetic subject can be seen as an emergent system while the functional sub-systems that constitute the subject can be characterized in representationalist terms. When it comes to aesthetic cognition, both enactivism and representationalism are useful. The article lays out a model for representational enactivism in aesthetics.

Publication: Kiianlinna, O. (2024). Aesthesis, noesis, or both? Enactivism meets representationalism in aesthetics. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1-18.