I am a philosopher with research interests in cognitive science, philosophy of art, and artificial intelligence. I use artworks to explore the nature of perception. This is a methodological strategy I have borrowed from cognitive science. Dance has, for instance, been used to study expertise effects in perception, the role of artificial grammars in observational learning, and the crossmodal foundations of our capacity to recognize and understand emotionally expressive behavior in social contexts. The strategy generalizes to other artistic media and can be used to explore a range issues in philosophy of art including the nature of depiction, …
I am a philosopher with research interests in cognitive science, philosophy of art, and artificial intelligence. I use artworks to explore the nature of perception. This is a methodological strategy I have borrowed from cognitive science. Dance has, for instance, been used to study expertise effects in perception, the role of artificial grammars in observational learning, and the crossmodal foundations of our capacity to recognize and understand emotionally expressive behavior in social contexts. The strategy generalizes to other artistic media and can be used to explore a range issues in philosophy of art including the nature of depiction, the puzzle of musical expression, filmgoers and readers’ empathetic engagement with fictional characters, and the normative dimension of artistic appreciation. Some colleagues and I recently received an NEH grant to explore how machine classifiers might enhance our understanding of categories of art and artistic style. I am also a sculptor. My sculpture has been exhibited in New York City, Tokyo, at The Addison Gallery of American Art, Centenary College of Louisiana, Indiana University and Yale University. I have collaborated with colleagues in dance and computer science to develop automatic scoring techniques for multi-media performances. I am currently exploring chance procedures and embodied cognition in large scale oil crayon drawings.
