[Fis] On what is art?

[Steve Watson]

Thanks all — I won’t rehearse the “operational footholds” point again (I’ve already posted something along those lines), but I’d like to suggest a very small procedural move that could help the discussion converge.

If we want genuine scientific deliberation (rather than parallel essays), could we each try to offer one discriminating prediction — i.e., a claim that would look different in data depending on which explanatory emphasis is doing the work?

To keep it simple, we could anchor predictions to three recurring contrasts in this thread:

A) Artefact vs practice (Mark’s point)

  *   What measures or signatures would distinguish practice (training/rehearsal/sketching/revision trajectories) from experience (aesthetic “pull”, affect, meaning)?

B) Valuation / affect vs cognition / skill (Kate’s emphasis vs Mark’s caution)

  *   What should we expect to see when the same formal pattern is presented with different relevance to “self/not-self”, reward, social belonging, or threat?
  *   Conversely, what should remain stable when valuation changes but skill acquisition and compositional constraints are held constant?

C) Human–animal continuity vs discontinuity (László’s question; John/Pedro’s lines)

  *   What would count as an “art-like” continuity at the level of operations (repeatable form + evaluative uptake + re-entry), even if cumulative culture differs?
  *   And what would count as a specifically human discontinuity (e.g., norm-governed pedagogy, explicit rehearsal regimes, symbolic recombination, long-range revision)?

If helpful, a concrete template could be as minimal as:

  *   Claim (one sentence): what you think primarily drives art-like practices
  *   Comparator: what you’d compare it against (human novice/expert; cross-cultural; animal patterned production; solo vs collective ritual; with/without audience; etc.)
  *   Prediction: what would be different if your claim is right
  *   Operational measure: what you’d actually record (timing/entrainment; prediction error; revision traces; uptake/norm formation; etc.)

That way, disagreement stays productive: we’re not trying to “win” metaphysics; we’re trying to generate contrasts that different metaphysical commitments can still treat as admissible.

Best wishes,

Steve



Sent from Outlook for iOS<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://aka.ms/o0ukef__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!Q5ZaeXAmOnoS8OSV4oDwLB99G3q6uNqKno8DT9kyh3bcQQJ_ROkloxqxxl_Woi4TFqfwTtr9D_eG6HgDb6Q7$ >
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listas.unizar.es/pipermail/fis/attachments/20260118/aece28d4/attachment-0001.html>