The Nonconceptual Nature of Aesthetic Cognition

Abstract

1. For example, J. H. Di Leo, Young Children and Their Drawings (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1970); H. Gardner, Artful Scribbles: Significance of Drawings (New York: Basic Books, 1980); R. Kellogg, Analyzing Art (Palo Alto, Calif.: Mayfield, 1969). 2. For a lengthier overview of this trend and of the accompanying trend in art education, see R. Smith, The Changing Image of Art Education: Theoretical Antecedents of Discipline-based Art (forthcoming). 3. R. Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954); and Visual Thinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 4. H. Gardner, Arts and Human Development: A Psychological Study of the Artistic Process (New York: Wiley, 1973). See also essays collected in his Art, Mind and Brain: A Cognitive Approach to Creativity (New York: Basic Books, 1982). 5. See, e.g., D. Perkins and B. Leondar, eds., Arts and Cognition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); and Harvard Project Zero: Basic Abilities Required for Understanding Creation in the Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, 1974). 6. E.g., N. Smith and M. Franklin, eds., Symbolic Functioning in Childhood (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1979). 7. H. Werner and B. Kaplan, Symbol Formation (New York: Wiley, 1963). 8. P. Machotka, Criteria in Childhood: Justifications of Preference, Child Development 37 (1966): 877-85. 9. Gardner, Arts and Human Development. 10. H. Gardner, E. Winner, and M. Kircher, Children's Conceptions of the Arts, Journal of Aesthetic Education 9, no. 3 (July 1975): 60-77. 11. S. Gablik, Progress in Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976). 12. E.g., in pp. 8-42 of J. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). 13. J. Piaget, Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child (New York: Orion Press, 1970). 14. L. Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development, vols. 1 and 2 (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981). 15. J. M. Baldwin, Thought and Things: A Study of the Development and Meaning of Thought, vol. 3 (London: Swann, Sonnenschein and Co., 1914; reprinted New York: Arno Press, 1974). 16. M. Parsons, How We Understand Art: A Cognitive Developmental Account of Aesthetic Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 17. See M. Parsons, Talk about a Painting: A Cognitive Developmental Analysis, Journal of Aesthetic Education, forthcoming.