I respond to the commentaries of each of my critics, while seeking to offer a through line of argument distilling some central themes addressed in the symposium. In response to Terrone, I focus on the place of normativity in the model of triangulation, noting that “proto-normativity” is already present in the biological world. Sticking with normativity but shifting the focus specifically onto moral questions, I respond to Vidmar Jovanović’s comments on the ways in which character, and emotion, are related to morality, while also acknowledging the specifically political dimension of our engagement with films. I argue that the goal of appreciating a work on the terms of its design complements, and indeed makes possible, recognition of the interpretive activity of actual spectators. Building on Marchetti’s detailed defense of Film, Art, and the Third Culture’s substantive claim that “seeing-in” is operative in the context of movie viewing—achieved via an exemplary demonstration of triangulation—I stress the role of film and art in expanding the range of perceptual, cognitive, and emotional experience. I welcome Cavaletti’s focus on the standing of phenomenological evidence within triangulation, along with her proposals for strengthening and systematizing the gathering of such evidence through microphenomenology. At the same time, I endorse D’Aloia’s complementary emphasis on neuroscience; his framing of it as a tool for exploring the mind, rather than merely the brain, within triangulation; and his emphasis on the embodied nature of cognition, not least in our experience of film. I conclude by stressing the desirability, as well as the challenge, of fully integrating normative concerns into a naturalistic framework.
I thank my commentators for their insights and generosity in engaging, thoughtfully and in detail, with Film, Art, and the Third Culture (Smith 2020a), now translated into Italian as Cinema, evoluzione, neuroscience: Un’estetica naturalizzata del film (Smith 2022c). The scientific enterprise is a social one, which depends on members of the scientific community occupying multiple roles, as commentators and critics as well as primary and secondary researchers, PIs and CIs. The author-meets-critics symposium is a crucial platform for exchanges among researchers; without the oxygen of critical discussion in general and critical-call and authorial-response in particular, ideas are apt to be apt to become museum pieces, trapped like flies in amber—perhaps beautiful and mysterious but no longer living parts of the intellectual ecosystem. My critics have saved me from that fate, for at least…
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