Of mind and other matters

Emotions and feelings are, I agree, required of aesthetic experience; but they are not separable from or un addition to the cognitive aspect of that experience. They are among the primary means of making the discriminations and the connections that enter into an understanding of art. Emotion and feeling, I must repeat once more, function cognitively in aesthetic and in much other experience. We do not discern stylistic affinities and differences, for example, but "rational analysis" but by sensations, perceptions, feelings, emotions, sharpened in pratice like the eye of a gemologist or the fingers of an inspector of machined parts. Far from wanting to desensitize aesthetic experience, I want to sensitize cognition. In art– and I think in science too–emotion and cognition are interdependent : feeling without understanding is blind, and understandig without feeling is empty.

p. 7-8

For me, cognition is not limited to language or verbal tought but employs imagination, sensation, perception, emotion, in the complex process of aesthetic understanding.

p. 9

cognition between habit and problem-solving. Wartofsky stresses situations where our familiar procedures are confronted by and ambiguity (or a vagueness or an obscurity or a multiplicity of function) that calls for deliberation, decision, reorientation and reorganization–situations where habitual responses and established routines are challenged by something novel and puzzling. Obviously they are equally crucial in science and in life in general. Without the hability to master and to modify habits we should be lost. Understanding consists largely of the interdependent skills of establishing and of breaking habits as may be required.

p. 17

Aspects of a general conception of cognition are reflected in the emphasis in both papers upon habituation and problem-solving. Wartofsky and Gardner participate in the current transition from static absolutism to dynamic relativism in epistemology. The search is no longer for a raw given or fixed forms of the understanding or a unique and mandatory system of categories. Rather, knowing is conceived as developping concepts and patterns, as establishing habits, and as revising or replacing the concepts altering or breaking the habits in the face of new problems, needs, or insights. Reconception, reorganization, invention, are seen to be as important in all kings of knowing as they are in the arts.

p. 19

Thinking in cannot be reduce to thinking of. Words we think in are somehow "in the mind", while the cabbages or words we think of are not. But what can this mean ? What sort of thing is a mind that words can be in and how can words be in it ?

The difference between what we think in and what we think of seems something like the difference between what we speak and what we speak of. We can speak in words or in English without speaking of words or of English, and we can speak of cabbages but not in cabbages. A notable difference between the of and the in here is that speaking of cabbages or of words does not require producing them. This suggests that thinking not only is like but may actually be speaking, that silent thought is in words we speak to ourselves. Such a proposal has the virtue of not needing a mind for words to be in. Rather, thinking like speaking is a performance.

p. 22

What I do urge is that the study of laws of form must include–and will find an intriguing field of exploration in–the study of how the processes and states involved in thought are related dynamically and statically, to each other, of how they affect and are affected by the symbols to be produced or perceived or judged, and how the forms of the symbol systems we think in and employ in our world-versions determine the forms of the worlds we think about and live in.

p. 28