​This book investigates the nature of aesthetic experience and aesthetic objects. Written by leading philosophers, psychologists, literary scholars and semioticians, the book addresses two intertwined issues. The first is related to the phenomenology of aesthetic experience: The understanding of how human beings respond to artworks, how we process linguistic or visual information, and what properties in artworks trigger aesthetic experiences. The examination of the properties of aesthetic experience reveals essential aspects of our perceptual, cognitive, and semiotic capacities. The second issue (...) studied in this volume is related to the ontology of the work of art: Written or visual artworks are a specific type of objects, containing particular kinds of representation which elicit a particular kind of experience. The research question explored is: What properties in artful objects trigger this type of experience, and what characterizes representation in written and visual artworks? The volume sets the scene for state-of-the-art inquiries in the intersection between the psychology and ontology of art. The investigations of the relation between the properties of artworks and the characteristics of aesthetic experience increase our insight into what art is. In addition, they shed light on essential properties of human meaning-making in general. (shrink)

Semiotics embraces linguistics, philosophy, and literary studies, as well as linking to anthropology, art, psychology, and biology. This new Routledge collection helps to make sense of the subject’s huge interdisciplinary corpus of scholarly literature and brings together the best and most influential materials from ‘the first phase’, neo-classics from the institutionalization of semiotics in the 1960s, and contemporary works illustrating the ongoing development of semiotics and its widening applications. Volume I collects pre-modern material showing the genesis of semiotics from Locke (...) to Peirce, along with a range of work from the last thirty years. Volume II includes key work from recent developments in cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics, while Volume III focuses on ‘Text and Image’. Finally, Volume IV gathers the best offerings from other disciplines, and from emerging fields such as ‘biosemiotics’. Fully indexed, and with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, that places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, this is an essential work destined to be valued by scholars, students, and researchers as a vital one-stop reference resource. (shrink)

This article addresses the phenomenology of aesthetic experience. It first, critically, considers one of the most influential approaches to the psychophysics of aesthetic perception, viz. neuroaesthetics. Hereafter, it outlines constitutive tenets of aesthetic perception in terms of a particular intentional relation to the object. The argument comes in three steps. First, I show the inadequacies of the neuroaesthetics of beauty in general and Semir Zeki’s and V.J. Ramachandran’s versions of it in particular. The neuroaesthetics of beauty falls short, because it (...) develops hypotheses of aesthetic experience which have no consequences for the understanding of what art is, that is, how artists produce visual meaning effects in their works. This is so because they make the rewarding feeling of beauty the cornerstone of aesthetic experience. Next, I show why and how aesthetic experience should be defined relative to its object and the tools for meaning-making specific to that object, and not relative to the feeling (of beauty) it may elicit. Finally, I sketch the import this fact may have on a research program in empirical aesthetics. (shrink)

Much is said about Middle Eastern and North African publics opposing gender equality, often referring to patriarchal Islam. However, nuanced large-scale studies addressing which specific aspects of religiosity affect support for gender equality across the MENA are conspicuously absent. This study develops and tests a gendered agentic socialization framework that proposes that MENA citizens are not only passively socialized by religion but also have agency. This disaggregates the influence of religiosity, highlights its multifacetedness, and theorizes the moderating roles that gender (...) and sociocognitive empowerment play via gendered processes of agentic dissociations. Using 15 World Values Surveys and multilevel models, our analyses show that most dimensions of religiosity fuel opposition to gender equality. However, the salience of religion in daily life is found to increase women’s support for gender equality and cushion the negative impact of religious service attendance. Also, gender and education moderate the impacts of several religiosity dimensions; for instance, women’s support for gender equality more sharply declines with increased service attendance than men’s. Altogether, this study finds that religious socialization is multifaceted and gendered, and that certain men and women are inclined and equipped to deviate from dominant patriarchal religious interpretations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Literature, Imagination, and Human RightsWillie van Peer“the poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen”Aristotle: Poetics, 1451aAristotle’s dictum has been of vital importance to the development of literary theory, and its significance can still be felt today. It is the foundation of the distinction we make between journalism and literature, between history and fiction. Literature, Aristotle proposes, is (...) about things that could happen, not about things that have taken place in reality. Literature is thus inscribed in the realm of the imagination. However, imagination does not operate in an epistemological vacuum. A fictional text entertaining no relation with the world would have no meaning. Perhaps giants, dragons and witches do not really exist, and perhaps it is not really possible to cover seven miles with each step of those wonderful boots that Tom Thumb discovered. But we have no difficulty in imagining those things, precisely because they entertain an intimate relationship with forms and things, events and actions that happen in daily life. The details of the relationship between reality and fiction are less important for the present argument than the fact that fiction is embedded in our pragmatic attitudes. 1 Ernst Bloch has given this human tendency a name: The Hope Principle. Our desire for a better world expresses itself in hope, a distinctive feature of the species Homo Sapiens. The importance of the imagination in the project of humanity has received eloquent and systematic treatment in the philosophical work of Hans Vaihinger and Helmuth Plessner. 2 Imagination also gives impetus to history, because it drives us toward the realization of aims and plans that initially lived only in our hearts and minds: “Someone dreaming never remains in the same place.” 3 [End Page 276]Similar things have been asserted about literature, by Horace, Sidney, Matthew Arnold, and others. Reading is supposed to make us better humans, heightening our awareness, increasing our sensibility, and thus indirectly guiding our actions toward the establishment of a better world. Sometimes noble motives are associated with this function. Reading literature, it is then assumed, makes the reader more socially tolerant, more perceptive about other humans, and more politically conscious. This is the so-called Edification Hypothesis. Anthony Savile sums up this view when he submits the thesis that literature has a unique power to make us understand the thoughts and feelings of other human beings. This ethical perspective on literature has been expressed since Greek Antiquity. 4 It will be remembered that Plato condemned literature precisely for this reason: because it diverts our attention from the real world, itself already an imperfect reflection of Pure Ideas. Aristotle rejects this view and develops a theory squarely opposed to that of his teacher. According to him, literature contributes to the elevation of mankind, to paideia. By showing us that which is possible, and by involving us in the inescapable passage of tragic events, readers and spectators are drawn into emotions of fear and compassion, emotions that lead to katharsis, a process that purifies us of megalomania (hubris), safeguarding democratic government and protecting us from unrestrained tyranny. 5The Aristotelian view that literature has an edifying effect had been generally present in Western tradition till about 1800. Until then literature was viewed almost universally as an ethical category. Consider, for instance, the self-evident way in which Richardson prefaces Pamela: “If to divert and entertain, and at the same time to instruct and improve the minds of the YOUTH of both sexes: If to inculcate religion and morality in so easy and agreeable a manner, as shall render them equally delightful and profitable: If to set forth in the most exemplary lights, the parental, the filial, and the social duties....” 6The embarrassment a modern reader may feel when confronted with such overt claims to morality is largely a product of the nineteenth century, when literature came to be seen as a predominantly aesthetic category, eluding all attempts at moral categorization. This movement has resulted in a liberation of literature from moralism. At the same time, it has created nontrivial difficulties in thinking about ethical and political issues, so... (shrink)

This paper provides a précis of Ernst Cassirer's concept of art as a symbolic form. It does so, though, in a specific respect. It points to the fact that Cassirer's concept of "symbolic form" is two-sided. On the one hand, the concept captures general cultural phenomena that are not only meaningful but also manifest the way man makes sense of the world; thus myth, religion, and art are considered general symbolic forms. On the other hand, it captures the formal structures (...) and semiotic tools thanks to which meaning is constructed within each general symbolic form (Cassirer called these structures "modes of objectivation"); thus, in art, perspective or the golden section are well-known examples of symbolic forms, now in a narrow sense, i.e. they are means to configure parts into an organized, meaningful whole. The paper will comment on art along both these two dimensions, but its main goal is to provide with concrete examples of aesthetic symbolic forms in the narrow sense in order to show how conceptual meaning can be inscribed in the space of aesthetic intuition. (shrink)

This paper provides a précis of Ernst Cassirer’s concept of art as a symbolic form. It does so, though, in a specific respect. It points to the fact that Cassirer’s concept of “symbolic form” is two-sided. On the one hand, the concept captures general cultural phenomena that are not only meaningful but also manifest the way man makes sense of the world; thus myth, religion, and art are considered general symbolic forms. On the other hand, it captures the formal structures (...) and semiotic tools thanks to which meaning is constructed within each general symbolic form ; thus, in art, perspective or the golden section are well-known examples of symbolic forms, now in a narrow sense, i.e. they are means to configure parts into an organized, meaningful whole. The paper will comment on art along both these two dimensions, but its main goal is to provide with concrete examples of aesthetic symbolic forms in the narrow sense in order to show how conceptual meaning can be inscribed in the space of aesthetic intuition. (shrink)

The present investigation challenges the traditional distinction between cohesion and coherence; i.e., the distinction between the syntactical rules governing the composition of lexical units within the scope of the clause and the semantic-pragmatic rules guiding the composition of text units beyond the scope of the clause. To this end it exposes two major principles of semantic combination that are active through all levels of linguistic composition: viz. frame-schematic structure and narrative structure. These principles are considered as being components of a (...) semantic combinatorial system to be determined in terms of dependency relations. (shrink)

The present investigation challenges the traditional distinction between cohesion and coherence; i.e., the distinction between the syntactical rules governing the composition of lexical units within the scope of the clause and the semantic-pragmatic rules guiding the composition of text units beyond the scope of the clause. To this end it exposes two major principles of semantic combination that are active through all levels of linguistic composition: viz. frame-schematic structure and narrative structure. These principles are considered as being components of a (...) semantic combinatorial system to be determined in terms of dependency relations. (shrink)

This paper explores the connections between two common circulating discourses about queer youth and the ways that these discourses are wielded in the name of creating safe spaces for queer youth. First, the discourse of innocence is still applied to queer youth, however, the application has shifted to focus largely on the ways that queer youth are innocent victims in a society structured around heteronormativity. Second, a common response to this innocent victim discourse has been to position queer youth within (...) a discourse of activist educators. “Discourses not only represent the world as it is, they are also projective, imaginaries, representing possible worlds which are different from the actual world, and tied into projects to change the world in particular directions”. Gay Straight Alliances are one example; GSAs have sprung up across the country because adults, queer adults and allies in particular, have employed both of these discourses in policy decisions and discussions regarding queer students. This paper will highlight some of the ways the discourses of innocent victims and activist educators have been used in the GSA movement. The paper will apply a queer theory lens to the relationship between these discourses and the GSAs to tease out the ways that they work to simultaneously support queer students and serve to limit how queer students and their schools are imagined. The paper will conclude with a discussion of some possibilities for reworking, rupturing, or transforming these discourses so that schools, as well as the queer students and teachers within them, might be better served. (shrink)

While there is a substantive literature on the link between welfare states and individuals’ trust, little is known about the micro-linkage of the conditionality of welfare as a driver of trust. This study presents a unique randomized social experiment investigating this link. Recipients of the regular Dutch social assistance policy are compared to recipients of two alternative schemes inspired by the basic income and based on a more trusting and unconditional approach, testing the main reciprocity argument in the literature: a (...) trusting government will harvest trust from welfare recipients in return. Particularly trust in local government – the level at which the experiment was implemented – increases among recipients of the alternative treatments. Subsequently, we innovatively theorize and test rigorously which mediating mechanisms might explain this increase. Policy evaluation, social integration, and psychological well-being are studied in this respect. Of these, the only underlying mechanism proven to mediate the treatment effect in local political trust, is citizens’ satisfaction with policy. (shrink)

This article discusses the benefits and limitations of collecting electronic data for large-scale thematic content analysis. We will discuss a number of methodological and technical issues. The first one is the construction of a list of relevant keywords that serves as the primary data collecting device. This is not only a technical necessity, but also secures a theoretically and empirically valid collection of data. The second concern is the quality of electronic archive information. Finally, source-specific data characteristics and coding difficulties (...) are dealt with. In conclusion, seven guidelines for electronic data collecting are proposed. (shrink)