The Cumulative Model for Empirical Research in the Arts: A Semiotic Answer to the Challenge of Interdisciplinarity

Abstract

The empirical study of the arts would greatly benefit from truly interdisciplinary research. The diverse epistemic perspectives of the main disciplines concerned with researching the artistic experience (humanities, psychology, natural sciences) pose, however, a challenge to their collaboration. Rather than starting from a conceptual definition of art, we take a theoretical, cognitive-semiotic stance, analyzing art as a recursive imaginative sense-making process. This provides us with a clear picture of the multilayered structure of the artistic. As it acknowledges the innate, the learned, and the semiotic dimensions that together are constitutive of the artistic experience, the Cumulative Model for Empirical Research in the Arts, although it does not offer a practical experimental guide, provides a comprehensive theory-based framework that can support cooperation across disciplines in the research of the arts.