This chapter introduces what I call the ‘predictive turn,’ in which cognitive processes traditionally described in terms of remembering the past are reoriented to face the future. Here, the first-order topic is the phenomenology of reading literary texts, including the emotions of surprise and interest, the senses of agency and presence, and the feelings of immersion and flow, whereas the second-order method triangulates among insights gained from theoretical cognitive neuroscience, cognitive philosophy, and cognitive literary studies. The first part explains how aspects of perception can be understood in terms of prediction, prediction errors, and the management of precision, or the evolving confidence that we place in our predictions, including those related to unfolding stories and their narration. The second part unpacks the relationship between memory and prediction, including revisiting the cognitivist concept of the schema and how it can be applied to literary intertextuality. The third part clarifies how predictive processing is related to movement, grounded language, and active inference, in which perceptual and motor systems work together to reduce prediction error. For literary texts, this might entail attending to the use of grounded or ‘embodied’ language (Kukkonen 2020), among other possibilities such as feelings of estrangement and narrative foregrounding.

To begin, I draw a parallel between why it is challenging for philosophers to define open concepts such as art and why it is difficult for scientists to study artistic encounters and aesthetic experience, noting that only exceptional cases of neuroaesthetics attempt to locate what is salient about particular artworks as a function of medium, style, culture, and era, thus placing the natural sciences in a more robust dialogue with the humanities. Next, I introduce the second-order method of natural philosophy, which engages in theory construction via bidirectional influence between the empirical and the conceptual to better understand a shared first-order object such as art. This approach suggests that naturalized aesthetics ought to decentre art as a perceptual ‘stimulus’ and instead draw attention to the imagination, affect, embodiment, and aesthetic pleasure. Finally, I argue that what might seem to be the particular challenges of cognition and the arts are actually challenges for cognitive science generally. This is because the first-order topic of cognition—like art—is not a natural kind that exists apart from human understanding. Further, the second-order, interdisciplinary field of cognitive science—like naturalized aesthetics—is a historically contingent natural philosophy that has the potential to be reimagined.

In this chapter, I observe that some cognitive film theorists appear to have uncritically accepted basic emotions theory in their approach to cinematic expressive depiction. Instead, I argue that the theory of constructed emotion, in which emotional concepts are socially constructed categorizations of affect, better fits the available empirical data and presents greater opportunities for productive interdisciplinary synthesis. First, I draw the relevant distinctions between the two theories, noting that the former posits that each basic emotion has a distinct neurophysiological signature and a facial/vocal expression that is universally recognized, whereas the latter permits more complex relationships among brain states, physiological signs, facial movements, and their meaning. Second, I review evidence regarding the brain basis of emotion, cross-cultural research on emotional recognition, and the roles of concepts and words, noting opportunities to place the cognitive neuroscience of emotion in dialogue with philosophy of film. Third, I observe an opportunity for robust interdisciplinary triangulation in the Kuleshov effect, a phenomenon of film editing in which the meaning of a facial expression is thought to change in the context of a montage. Overall, the theory of constructed emotion might draw greater attention of experimentalists to questions of cultural relativity and historical specificity.

The book concludes with a brief epilogue that recapitulates the exploration of cognition and the arts.

This concluding chapter revisits naturalized aesthetics, in which our understanding of art and aesthetic experience is clarified through a bidirectional exchange between philosophy and the empirical sciences, arguing for further collaboration with history and literature—disciplines whose existing cognitivist subfields are known as the cognitive humanities. The first part takes a closer look at the troublesome concept of the ‘natural,’ noting a tendency for neuroaesthetic approaches to search for human universals rather than attending to the particulars of culture and era. By contrast, naturalized aesthetics is—and ought to be—centrally concerned with other ‘natural’ connotations such as coherence with empirical evidence. The second part argues for the historical contingency of mental taxonomies and offers the history of emotions as a model for historicizing cognition and the arts. Awareness of past conceptions helps us ‘denaturalize’ present-day understandings to better appreciate how cognition is emergent and biocultural. The third part discusses scholarship applying the framework of distributed or situated (4E) cognition to aspects of the Early Modern theatre and the Enlightenment novel. Overall, a robust engagement between naturalized aesthetics and the cognitive humanities transforms the topic of cognition and the arts as well as the interdisciplinary exchange known as cognitive science.

This chapter considers a fundamental question about how the mind works: Are the algorithms of cognition specifically implemented by the nervous system, with a unique role played by representations and processes internal to the brain? Alternatively, is cognition better understood as a product of the brain and body—or perhaps the result of the entire organism interacting with its environment? The first part focuses on the theoretical shift from mental representation and mind–brain identity to the embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive mind, approaches collectively known as 4E, distributed, or situated cognition. In the second part, 4E concepts such as epistemic action are applied to aspects of art and music, specifically the creation of visual depictions, the invention of musical notation, and the use of musical instruments. In the third part, the scope widens to the interdisciplinary exchange itself. Consistent with the themes of this book, I suggest that expanding the concept of cognition benefits from bringing the empirical sciences in closer dialogue with philosophy and the humanities. Specifically, the distributed perspective strengthens the interdisciplinary framework of naturalized aesthetics by drawing increased attention to the conceptual rigour valued by philosophers and to the cultural–historical contingencies emphasized by scholars of the humanities.