Cluster 1: Perception and Cognition: Dimensions of Mediality, Types, Forms, and the Epistemic Power of Perception
of the core topic "Perception: Episteme, Aesthetics, Politics"
The cluster entitled Perception and Cognition is dedicated to critical reflection on the cognitive claim of perception from the perspectives of various disciplines in the humanities and in cultural studies. On the one hand, we are interested in human rationality and human perspectives as a prerequisite for knowledge. We will thus pursue questions about the (pre-)rational constitution of perception, that is, questions which become particularly virulent in connection with attempts to naturalize the concept of sensory understanding. Furthermore, the relationship between concrete insights and the world (or worldviews) as entities then emerges as significant in the sense that the link between or transition from the recognition of individual things to an understanding of the respective object in the context of a larger whole or comprehensive system becomes clear. This raises the question as to whether each individual perception bears the seed of a referential context—a seed through which one can explain how perceptual experiences inherently reference the world/worldviews as whole(s) and how this context of referentiality can be identified in different medial, philosophical, or technologically influenced ways of perception. In this context, it is of particular interest to examine cognition not only as knowing that, but also as recognizing or understanding why. With regard to its relationship to perception, such an understanding of cognition raises the following question: can perception eo ipso already provide a basis for understanding why? Or is this only achieved through referencing perception in the course of overarching cognitive processes?
Complementary to philosophical approaches and inquiries, this cluster will be a hub for research in literary and cultural studies, and specifically for intermediality theory and heuristic approaches. The examination of mediality serves, among other things, to raise awareness of meaning-constitution through the impact of semiotic systems, technological channels, and cultural-historical contexts of the creation and reception of media content.
Intermediality allows us to grasp that this is not about constructing or upholding rigidly defined media boundaries. Instead, intermediality theory offers inroads towards understanding how media are perceived and understood based on aesthetic processes which, more often than not, combine media or cross boundaries between them. From this vantage point, a deeper understanding of the very processes of perceiving different media (such as sounds, images, and printed words or rather, music, the visual arts, and literature) is essential. To counter the drive for homogenization that debates on media convergence and the impact of digital technology have sparked, differentiating specific meaning-producing mechanisms in the poetics of media and their contextual dimensions has become increasingly crucial. This endeavor goes far beyond researching aesthetic processes of different art forms. Instead, it responds to the fact that the ubiquity of variegated types of mediality in the twenty-first century necessitates awareness of how different medial forms exert myriad kinds of impacts. Humanities research on intermediality thus paves the way for in-depth examinations of media literacy, a kind of conscious perception which can enable all perceivers (whether in the context of school education or in trying to manage communication in multiple contexts) to examine image, text, sound, and film material with a critical perspective on how they exert which kind of impact and how they develop their potentially manipulative power.
Finally, digitalization confronts the humanities with a technological development that seems to call their basic epistemological assumptions into question: Hermeneutic methodology presupposes an analogy between producers of cultural products and their thinking and researching recipients. What a person produces can also be perceived by a person. The “datafication” of perception introduces algorithms and data representations as intermediaries into the cognitive process. Machines are now being created that produce text to which humans attribute meaning. These latter developments have even elicited the claim that text production, which is a core competence of humanities scholarship, can be automated. A critical examination of these developments, which takes both their opportunities and their risks seriously, has long been pursued by the field of digital humanities. Building on its findings, the cluster will inquire into forms of perception that have emerged through the use of digital tools and the representation of humanities knowledge in data, and into how they can be classified epistemologically.
The theories and approaches in Cluster 1 jointly strive to elucidate the justifying power of perception within certain forms of cognition, the reflection on the central concepts of mediacy and immediacy in relation to perception, and the multi-faceted mediated quality of human perception (for example through artistic but also through other forms of mediality).
Exemplary research topics at a glance:
- Intermediality and transmediality as approaches to the aesthetic and politicized perception and interpretation of analogue/digital difference and media convergence (Nassim Balestrini)
- Therelationship between perception and mathematical models in physical theories (Philipp Berghofer)
- Knowledge about perception. The aesthetic as a site of sensory cognition (Hildegard Kernmayer)
- The relationship between mediated/discursive cognition and direct/intuitive cognition and the role of the thinking subject in determining the relationships and mutual limitations between cognition and perception (Claudia Luchetti)
- Realism in Early Phenomenology. How is Intelligibility Given? (Daniel Neumann)
- Perception and justification, types of perception, objects of perception, perception of abstractions (Michael Wallner)
- Aesthetic cognitivism: Does art enable cognition? (Antonia Veitschegger)
- Perception and Artificial Intelligence in the Humanities: The Role of Verdatung and Algorithms in the Process of Cognition in the Humanities (Georg Vogeler)