Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

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…

Fred Dretske made important contributions to the debate concerning how to distinguish perception from cognition, to the question of whether perceptual content is ‘Rich’ or ‘Sparse’ and to developing the thesis that perceptual experience employs a distinctively iconic format of representation. In Dretske (2015) he offered a method or criterion for determining whether or not two subjects have visual experiences with different phenomenal characters, which he dubbed the ‘Goldilocks Test’. In this paper I criticize Dretske’s proposal, drawing on various visual phenomena in order to argue that this ‘Goldilocks Test’…

The currently mainstream view is that, in normal conditions, our perceptual representations are largely accurate, as natural selection tends to favor epistemically reliable perceptual systems. This latter assumption has been questioned by Donald Hoffman and his collaborators by drawing on the formal tools of evolutionary game theory. According to their model, an organism whose visual system were tuned to objective reality would be driven to extinction. We argue that their model fails to take environmental modifications into due account, and we show that, once such changes are incorporated into the…

This dialogue explores the question of whether intentionality––the “ofness”, “aboutness”, or “directedness” of mental states––is a relation. We explore three views: the Naive View, on which intentionality is a relation to ordinary, everyday objects, facts, and other such items; the Abstract Contents View, on which intentionality is a relation to mind-independent abstract entities; and the Aspect View, on which intentionality is a matter of having intentional states with particular (non-relational) aspects that are our contents. We consider the challenges facing these views, which include empirical challenges in accounting for all…

This essay is the English translation of the foreword to the Italian edition of Film, Art, and the Third Culture, published in 2022 as Cinema, evoluzione, neuroscienze: un’estetica naturalizzata del film (Rome: Dino Audino). It approaches Murray Smith’s study as a key entry point into the ongoing dialogue between film theory and the cognitive sciences, and as a catalyst for rethinking the epistemological foundations of film studies in light of neuroscience. The analysis situates Smith’s notion of “cooperative naturalism” within a broader critical framework that questions how the humanities can…

At the heart of Murray Smith’s proposal of a methodological “triangulation” is the principle that in our research we take into serious account three levels of analysis, with their respective types of evidence: the phenomenological level; the psychological level; and the neurophysiological level. However, the author’s trust in phenomenological evidence appears to be fluctuating, and the issue of how to concretely take advantage of it appears underexplored. On this grounding, I will address the broad topic of a rigorous usage of phenomenological evidence by touching upon three main points: 1)…

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…

This paper rejects the autonomy myth that treats works of art as self-contained worlds and instead situates them within nature. Following Murray Smith’s “Third Culture” program, I retain triangulation—structure, function, and appearance—as necessary to explain how artworks affect perceivers: material structures impinge on perceivers’ brains, recruit psychological functions, and yield phenomenal experience. But triangulation is incomplete. I propose a fourth vertex—normativity—thus “squaring the triangle.” Normativity explains why works of art can and should be experienced in a certain way. Works of art are artifacts whose functions are stabilized by communities…

This paper critically examines Murray Smith’s proposal of building ‘the third culture’, a research paradigm that unites sciences and the humanities. While I am sympathetic to Smith’s proposal, exemplified in what he calls naturalized aesthetics, I argue that it is lacking in two respects: by not giving a proper account of the spectators’ moral engagements with films, and by ignoring a wider social nature and cultural embeddedness of spectators’ artistic experiences.