Aesthetics and Reinforcement: A Behavioural Approach to Aesthetics

Abstract

Aesthetics has three aspects, the cognitive aspect, the hedonic aspect, and creation. In this chapter I focus on the second and third aspects. In some cases, human art, in either the visual or the auditory dimension, has a reinforcing property for non-human animals, suggesting that human art has hedonic value for them. The process of art creation has its own reinforcing property, and artists create art for its own sake; in other words, art has functional autonomy. Observation of primates in the laboratory and bowerbirds and songbirds in nature suggests that their art-like behaviour has functional autonomy, although this requires further experimental study. Their art-like products have, however, no reinforcing property for their conspecifics. Finally, I review evolutionary theories of aesthetics. Honest signals of the quality of the message sender and the physical constraints of materials must have played a role in the evolution of our aesthetics, but almost anything can be art if a considerable population of our species agree to accept it as an art. In other words, beauty is the verbal expression of our preferences.