There will be an occasional series of lectures on aesthetics in Cambridge over the next few months. Here are the details of the first.
Time: 5.00pm to 7.00pm, 21st November. Venue: No. 1 Newnham Terrace, Darwin College. Speaker: Dr Jason Gaiger, Head of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford. Topic: Epistemic Images: Rethinking the Analog-Digital Distinction Jason Gaiger studied art History and philosophy at St. Andrews, Essex, and Heidelberg. He regularly publishes in philosophy journals, and (amongst other books) has written Aesthetics and Painting (Continuum, 2008). Here is the abstract: Epistemic Images: Rethinking the Analog-Digital Distinction The ‘data deluge’ in current science, made possible by technological advances in the storage, retrieval and processing of data, has led to an increasing reliance on image processing and visualisation as a means of presenting and analysing information. The use of such techniques to establish scientific claims raises a number of questions about the cognitive value of images and the contribution that visualisation can make to the enhancement of knowledge. That art, too, can make a contribution to knowledge and that there can be ‘visual discovery through art’ lies at the basis of the cognitivist theories put forward by figures such as Ernst Gombrich and Konrad Fiedler. Although such theories provide a useful starting point, I argue that they do not provide an adequate basis for identifying the distinctive cognitive gains that can be achieved through images and other forms of visualisation. In this paper I examine whether a more satisfactory account can be derived from Dretske’s analysis of the conversion of information from analog to digital form in his Knowledge and the Flow of Information (1981). Dretske’s reworking of the analog vs. digital distinction needs to be carefully distinguished from the traditional conception – which rests on the contrast between a continuous and a discrete representational system – but his description of digital conversion as a process that involves a loss in the richness and profusion of information and a gain in ‘generalisation, categorisation or classification’ offers a promising means of understanding the cognitive value of visualisation techniques. While Dretske himself consistently identifies pictures with the analog encoding of information, contrasting pictures with linguistic representation, I show that this assumption is not licensed by his employment of these terms relative to the information the encoding is intended to convey. -- The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).
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