From PhilPapers forum Aesthetics:

2015-07-07
“Neuro-aesthetics” anyone?
Reply to Derek Allan
PS to my last:

I have just glanced at the first paragraph of the article. I am inclined to think now that Christy copied it to the thread as an example of a garbled, question-begging, jargon-laden approach to the issues at hand. (He hasn’t actually said why as yet. Perhaps he thinks it’s great stuff?)

Take even the second sentence: “… Neuroscience and psychology may help us understand how we perceptually engage with artworks, how we parse some aspects of their formal-compositional structure, recover their expressive properties, etc. They may provide some traction in understanding how we recover the melodic structure of musical works, the depictive content of images, or the mental and emotional lives of characters in narrative fictions.”

may help us”? Who said so? How?

“perceptually engage”? What is that?  Jargon for “look at” or “listen to” maybe?

"parse some aspects of their formal-compositional structure”. Yeah, right.

“recover their expressive properties etc” Recover? Did they get lost? (The "etc" as well?)

“traction in understanding how we recover etc..” Of course, “traction” had to make an appearance…

“how we recover …the depictive content of images? Er …maybe look at them?

Appalling stuff. All too common in some areas of aesthetics though…

DA