The interaction between the recovery of the artist’s intentions and the perception of an artwork is a classic topic for philosophy and history of art. It also frequently, albeit sometimes implicitly, comes up in everyday thought and conversation about art and artworks. Since recent work in cognitive science can help us understand how we perceive and understand the intentions of others, this discipline could fruitfully participate in a multidisciplinary investigation of the role of intention recovery in art perception. The method (...) I propose is to look for cases where recovery of the artist’s intentions interacts with perception of a work of art, and this cannot be explain by a simple top-down influence of conscious propositional knowledge on perception. I will focus on drawing and show that recovery of the draftsman’s intentional actions is handled by a psychological process shaped by the motor system of the observer. (shrink)

Over the last decades, disciplines such as cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology and the neurosciences have shown an increasing interest for art. It remains unclear what kind of relation these "young disciplines" should have with more traditional endeavors and, more generally, in which way they can enrich our understanding of art. In this paper, I lay down the foundations of a methodological framework which distinguishes between three basic topics: the investigation of the cognitive phenomena elicited by the experience of things that (...) we call 'artworks', the investigation of the psychological structures determining the intuitive categorization of something as art and the study of the intuitions and arguments used to build justifications about whether something is a work of art. Each of these topics can benefit from the cognitive approaches, provided that some specific methodological recommendations are respected. (shrink)