Conjunctive Theory (Book)

The seminar is based on the following book, which can be checked out from the CSM Library or purchased from the CSM Bookstore or Cognella.

Conjunctive Theory: Mental Imagery in the Arts and Sciences
Author Mohsen Janatpour

Part I: A Unified View of Mental Imagery
Part I presents a cohesive concept of mental imagery. To achieve this goal, it divides the multiple brain states involved in mental imagery into two general categories that conjunctively produce mental images. More specifically, it argues that mental images result from the mental states that supervene upon two types of brain states: object-triggered brain states (OTBS) and emergence-triggered brain states (ETBS). This categorization of the brain states lends itself to a unified view of the different kinds of mental imagery, that is, perception, illusion, hallucination, imagination, memory, and dreams. Moreover, the notion of two types of brain states is conducive to a mathematical model of human perceptual response using phasors. This model, in turn, leads to a generalization of the Fechner-Weber Law of Perceptual Response and to the most crucial thesis of Part I, the new conjunctive principle, from which Gestalt principles follow. Lastly, the concept of emergence is a crucial issue for our understanding of mental imagery. After reviewing the classical views of emergence, I introduce two kinds of emergence in this part of the book: physical (structural) and psychological. Physical emergence results from physical laws, and their perception rests mainly on OTBS. By contrast, psychological emergence is predominately a consequence of ETBS.

Part II: Applications: A Theory of Art and its Measure
Part II applies the concepts developed in Part I of this book to clarify the notion of beauty and its role in works of art, starting by introducing the categories of ontic and modal beauty, the beauty of being, and the beauty of doing. Next, it explores the criteria for the emergence, appreciation, and enjoyment of beauty in each group, finding that while the requirements for the emergence are the same, the appreciation and enjoyment for ontic versus modal beauty require different criteria. Since beauty plays a central role in my theory of art and its measure, I have distinguished between the experience of beauty and other aesthetic experiences and labeled it as a kallosthetic experience. The investigation of the kallosthetic experience concept and its applications is one of the main themes of Part II. More crucially, I propose that every time one perceives beauty, one has freshly constructed it. In this way, kallosthetic experience is the experience of a particular kind of flow. Building on these concepts, I will introduce a new theory of art, which considers art behavior as a shared experience of modal beauty, i.e., a shared kallosthetic experience. Finally, based on this theory, I close the book by introducing a measure of artwork utilizing a methodology that evaluates specific aspects of its modal beauty.