William P. Seeley, "Attentional Engines: A Perceptual Theory of the Arts" (Oxford UP, 2020)
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What is the central question about distinguishing art from non‑art artifacts?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello and welcome to New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdur, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talise, Alexis McLeod, and Sarah Tyson. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with William Seeley. who is associate professor at the University of Southern Maine. We're talking about his new book, Attentional Engines, A Perceptual Theory of the Arts, which is just out from Oxford University Press. How do we distinguish art from non-art artifacts? And what does cognitive science have to do with it?
In Attentional Engines, Sealy offers a cognitive science-based account of how we engage with art, what it is that artworks do, and what artists do to make sure they do it. In his Diagnostic Recognition Framework for Locating Art, artworks are communicative devices in which art Artists embed perceptual cues that enable the perceiver to categorize the work as intended and thereby unlock its meanings. Seeley considers how his framework might handle conceptual art, what goes wrong when a novice about art perceives an artwork, and the relation between the neuroscience of art and neuroaesthetics. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Bill Seeley. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
Hi, thanks, Carrie. It's nice to be here. Thanks for having me.
Um looking forward to our discussion about attentional engines. Um, before we get to the book itself, tell us a bit about yourself. uh your philosophical interests in general, um and the writing in this book and you know, one of the points that you make, you know, early in the book, you know, in the introduction I think is, you know, you're a sculptor, you're you've been an artist. So, you know, a lot of the the topic of the book is close to your heart, but you also have both artistic background as well as philosophical background. So um So yeah, tell us about Bill Seely.
Uh, okay. Well, um I started my professional life as a sculptor in New York. А анарт е за арт-сіст про манифарсь. Uh and one thing that was particularly interesting and fascinating to me actually was that when you walked into a studio and started working, you may know something about the artwork, but you you might not really know the ins and the outs of it. Um, but pretty soon after you started uh working for that artist and started working on that art, you learned a whole lot about uh the background information that went into making it and the choices that the artist made in building those sculptures. And what was curious to me is that you gained an affinity for work that you might even
early on have walked into just thinking of a job. Uh and so uh so not too long after I had been Doing this I became kind of interested in how artworks work. How artworks work to sort of convey information and pass that information along to us. Uh and so as a result, after working as an artist for a number of years in New York, I went back to school. took a PhD and started thinking about art as a philosopher interested in cognitive science. uh and philosophy of mind and it just so happened. That when it came time for me to write a PhD Uh a couple of fairly well known neurophysiologists wrote a couple of books about art. And what we now call neuro aesthetics uh was born. Uh and so there was a nice sort of convergence of events that uh drove me into this into this field.
And then after about ten years of writing on it, I ended up writing a book collecting my thoughts that I'd been writing about into what I hope is a coherent model for a neuroscience of the arts.
Excellent. Um so that kind of gets to my next um, you know, general issue is uh you specify that it's a book in the neuroscience of art rather than neuro aesthetics. Could you clarify that distinction?
Yeah, so um within the philosophy of art, uh we have sort of two names that we sometimes use.
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