Triangulating Depiction: Pictorial Experience, Vision Science, and the Standard of Correctness
Issue: • Author/s: Luca Marchetti
Topics: Aesthetics, Cognitive science, Epistemology, Philosophy of mind
Smith’s Film, Art and the Third Culture is dedicated to developing a naturalized aesthetics of film, and at the heart of his proposal for a methodological “triangulation” is the principle that our research should take serious account of three levels of analysis, each with its respective type of evidence: the phenomenological level, the psychological level, and the neurophysiological level. While Smith addresses many aspects of our perceptual, emotional, and cognitive engagement with movies within this framework, he rarely discusses what underlies our visual engagement with films: the fact that they…