Abstract
Due largely to the influence that logic has had as the primary tool in the analysis of what we broadly call ‘meaning’, the pragmatics literature has tended to focus on objects that can be either true or false: propositions. Emotions, feelings, attitudes and moods, which are often related to art and aesthetic experience, are ineffable. When such phenomena are communicated, they cannot be paraphrased without loss. They are non-propositional and, as a consequence,have been largely overlooked. As a result, a gap remains in the literature on the place of ineffable contents in verbal and non-verbal interaction generally and this thesis is conceived as one way of plugging this gap. It uses the concept of descriptive ineffability to explore the three related issues: affect, art and mind.
The thesis takes a theory of utterance interpretation which has its roots in the cognitive revolution – Relevance Theory – and explores the extent to which the ineffable unparaphrasable content conveyed by literature, poetry and artworks might be explained using a theory of pragmatics which offers new ways of dealing with vague communication. It is built around three aims: to explore the role of affect in the aesthetic interpretation of artworks; to examine how an existing pragmatic framework of communicative effects can account for the ineffability of art-related meanings; and to offer a set of proposals outlining new ways in which such a theory might be adapted to explain these effects and, indeed, aesthetic experience generally. After an introductory chapter, the thesis contains three chapters which lay the theoretical ground necessary to achieve these aims. They summarise the main developments in a range of different areas – philosophy, theories of affect, aesthetics, neuro-aesthetics, relevance-theoretic pragmatics – and show how the cognitive underpinning of relevance theory might be used to shed light on some of the problems identified during the discussion. The thesis then takes a practical turn and qualitative evidence from a small-scale pilot study based around responses to artworks is presented and discussed. Relevance theory is used as an exploratory model of analysis to discuss the findings from 10 semi-structured interviews in terms of three tasks (aesthetic judgement, affective and selection) and on the nature of aesthetic experience. Drawing on Marr’s framework on vision, a relevance-theoretic model of aesthetic experience is tentatively proposed which addresses the shortcomings of existing models. The penultimate chapter takes one famous historical artwork, the Parthenon Sculptures, and examines the role played by context in the derivation of effects yielded during the interpretative process. Through this example, a loose use of translation is proposed according to which ineffability is translated into affect.
The thesis concludes with observations on the centrality of the role of affect in the aesthetic interpretation of artworks and makes proposals suggesting that cognitive effects and affective effects are involved in interpreting the ineffable in art-related meaning. The interplay between cognition and affect in the aesthetic interpretation of art-related meaning forms a delicate equilibrium, which can be further explained through the new notion of translation proposed here. These proposals open the door to broader future discussions on not only the interpretation of art, but also on how – as one by-product of colonialism – poor contextualisation of artworks can actually hinder the interpretation of ineffable aspects of meaning.
| Date of Award | Jan 2025 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Tim Wharton (Supervisor), Aakanksha Virkar (Supervisor) & Elly Ifantidou (Supervisor) |