To articulate the explanatory value of predictive processing for cognizing art works in categories, we need to further elaborate on script-based, art-historical estimates, namely predictions that take as their object the temporal relationships between works and their place in art history. How exactly do we bring art-historical estimates to bear in art appreciation? If such estimates must take as their object causally linked events occurring in a specific temporal or logical order, surely it would be far-fetched to say that we appreciate artworks as causally linked in the exact order in which they were made and became part of a history of art. And yet, art-historical estimates cannot entirely be ruled out from the appreciation of art. More specifically, when we appreciate art, we compare script-based, art-historical estimates to the art works we experience to form comparative judgements based on salient similarities (e.g., when we notice Cubist tendencies in an Impressionist work and make assessments such as “Picasso is a bit like Cézanne” as opposed to assessments in terms of resemblance or representational properties, e.g., “this patch of color looks a bit like a mountain”). This is to say that in art appreciation we assess predictions for their validity against a shared, script-like (§II, 1.2), art-historical background, in which works are sorted into sequences according to their art histories, namely according to the place they occupy in a tradition of art and the way they relate to other works (Walton 1970, 334–335; Carroll 2001, 86–87). Had the history of art been different, our appreciation of art would be different as well since we would be appreciating different works.

Art history can shape the appreciation of art if a minimal art-historical reflexiveness is prevalent in an artistic culture. We live in an anthropological environment that privileges or facilitates art-historical exposure, in which we are constantly primed with art stories (through art education, guided exhibitions but also through media exposure, art billboards or subway art posters, to give just a few examples). Such exposure allows us to form a minimal internalized art-historical knowledge (Holly 2002, 451) – or art scripts – that would orient us in the space of the art world. I leave open the question whether the propensity to make predictions based on an art-historical background is a matter of historical contingence, or whether this hypothesis could be advanced with respect to different traditions of reception in different periods and cultural contexts. Given that scripts are culturally permeable, the tendency to place works in a tradition of art might be a peculiarity of our “Euro- artistic cultures” (Lopes & Ransom 2022; Davis 2010, 712; Currie 2021, 272, 275–276), built around a European developmental model of art. In any case, it is safe to say that in our artistic cultures, there is a built-in assumption that artistic value or merit is to be determined in relation to past artistic continuities and innovations. The propensity to respond to art-historical features such as artistic technique, style or execution has become internalized to a greater or lesser extent as a default mode of appreciating art. Notions such as “secondary attractors”, or a culture-specific art instinct, among others (Matthen 2015, 175, 177; 2017, 20) serve to capture this learned propensity to respond to art-related content.

There are several competing models that try and explain art appreciation in terms of categories or a minimally internalized art-historical knowledge. The question of how we cognize art works in categories and appreciate them qua art was initially addressed by Kendall Walton in his seminal paper “Categories of Art”, which has had a significant impact in philosophical aesthetics. The main thesis in Walton’s paper is that art appreciation is based on an implicit assessment at the perceptual level of the category membership of works (i.e., media, genre, style, and any other relevant category which would impact the perception of art in a significant way, e.g., paintings in the style of Cézanne, Brahmsian music etc., Walton 2020, 80).

Two psychological models push forward the question raised by Walton regarding art categoricity, namely the model of perceptual learning and the model of cognitive penetration. One way to articulate the role of art-category expectations is to say that they figure in perceptual experience as a result of perceptual learning (§II, 1.1.1). Perceptual learning is an acquired capacity, defined in terms of “structural and functional changes in the perceptual system due to repeated exposure to a stimulus that result in a change in perceptual experience. This change must make a difference to how or whether something is perceived, and it must be brought about as a result of learning” (Ransom 2022, 12). According to Ransom, perceptual learning allows us to understand our facility with art categories. We learn to perceive through exposure to art, in a social environment which is rife with learning samples (Ransom 2022, 21). This happens through the construction of perceptual prototypes (Ransom 2020, 69)– or schemas (§III) – which would allow us to detect features typical of art categories (e.g., an Impressionist brushstroke). In sum, the perceptual learning model seeks to explain how it is that we perceive a work differently once we have assigned to it a category.

Another way to account for art-category expectations is through cognitive penetration, which occurs when cognitive states (e.g., background beliefs with respect to art-historical facts) impact or alter perceptual experience in a causal way (Ransom 2020, 67; 2022, 5–6), by triggering a shift in the way we attend to categorial features. In other words, according to this model, art-historical knowledge would alter our perceptual experience by shifting our attention toward aspects of the work that are relevant for its art-categoricity (Ransom 2022, 9).

Perceptual learning and cognitive penetration are two models of learning that try and provide an answer to the question of how we internalize art-historical knowledge and how such knowledge affects our perception of artworks (i.e., via implicit exposure to learning perceptual samples or, respectively, via cognitive inferences and high-order representations, possibly formed through explicit training). Both models are used for explaining the perception of the categoricity of art (Waltonian categories can be understood here in terms of schemas, §III). But the models aren’t fully satisfactory. Several aspects of these models can be questioned.

A first question that arises is how we come to form the categories in which we appreciate works of art in the first place. Is there, for instance, a place for temporal relationships when we establish the membership of a category (e.g., art-historical relationships, understood here in terms of scripts, that would get us from a genre or art style to another, say, from Impressionism to Cubism)? Can temporal features be diagnostic of category membership? Can we experience art histories of works or art-historical relations? According to many art theorists, art-historicity is an essential feature of art-making and art appreciation (Levinson 1979, 242–243, 249; Wollheim 1980, 95–97; Davis, 1993, 331–332; 2011, 9–10; 2013, 207). We rarely appreciate works in isolation, as self-contained; we rather appreciate the ways in which such works relate or diverge from a tradition of art (e.g., through “repetitions, amplifications, or repudiations of acknowledged artistic tendencies in the tradition”, Carroll 2001, 71). Importantly, this means that the appreciation of a work is not confined to assessing the contextual circumstances and art-historical facts that were available to the artist at the time of producing the work (Walton 2021, 403), and that subsequent developments and innovations in the tradition of art also have an important part to play. The scripts available to present-day observers will always differ from those of the audiences intended by the artist. These will generate different expectations and different strategies for establishing the category membership of works.

Another important question is how far we can go with a perceptual explanation of art categories. Art appreciation overflows perception, it is more than just a matter of detecting perceptual categorial features. We use broader cognitive strategies, not just perceptual cues, to appreciate art. Making script-based predictions is one such strategy, with scripts pointing to generalizations about developments and innovations in a tradition of art against which we make hypotheses about individual works of art. These hypotheses are the ground for comparative judgements about individual pieces of art.

The proposal based on predictive processing better explains apprehending art works in categories than the above-mentioned competing models. While the account in terms of script-based predictions (or art-historical estimates) explores further the psychological aspects of Walton’s theory, namely understanding the psychological mechanisms that are related to how we establish the category membership of art works, it departs from it in many respects. For Walton, cognizing art works in categories amounts roughly to determining the permeability of perception by the historical circumstances of a work of art (such as its origin or history of making or its relation to internalized art norms within the community to which the artist belongs, Walton 1970, 364–365; 2020, 80–81; Davies 2020, 77–78; Ransom 2020, 80). The prediction account shifts the emphasis from perception to appreciation, that is, from perceiving works of art in mere art categories (Walton 2020, 80–81) – or schemas –, to appreciating works of art by making predictions with respect art-historical categories – or scripts –, that encompass temporal or logical sequences in which such works occupy a place. The account explains appreciation in terms of prediction formation, where predictions are compatible with correct appreciation. An accuracy condition on predicting is that predictions have to be related to the art historicity of the work, to relevant art-historical facts. One significant advantage of the prediction model over its competing models is that it offers a dynamic approach to establishing category membership.

Regarding Walton’s compatibility with the prediction approach, there are further notable differences. For Walton, the identification of categories amounts to detecting Gestalt-like, static configurations (Walton 1970, 340–341) through exercising our perceptual skills or sensitivity (Ransom 2020, 2022), whereas art-historical estimates are weighed in appreciation rather than in perception only. In other words, Waltonian categories are not determinable in terms of non-perceptual considerations, whereas art-historical estimates are (i.e., such estimates can be made based on extra-perceptual information, for instance based on implicit beliefs with respect to artistic continuities and innovations). The account in terms of script-based predictions suggests that one internalizes art-related scripts (i.e., works as ordered in standard sequences, however coarse), which will enable us to discern causal relations among works. What a script-based explanation best captures is appreciating the dynamics of artistic innovations and change over time and a work’s position in this dynamic. Such temporal aspects are overlooked by Waltonian models.

Moreover, art-historical estimates are not cashed out in terms of art-historical expertise. This view is endorsed for instance by some recent, strong contextualist models (Bullot and Reber 2013) and is one that Walton wanted to rule out from the outset: “‘Categories of art’ does not take appreciators’ perceptual experiences to be cognitively penetrated by art-historical knowledge. And drawing inferences about a work’s categories from such knowledge would not be perceiving it in them” (Walton 2020, 81). Nevertheless, Walton does acknowledge that art-historical knowledge still can influence aesthetic judgments but the exact nature of this influence – beautifully captured by the question “how guilty is the beholder’s eye?” (Walton 2020, 84) – remains problematic. As Walton rightfully remarks, often one does not purposely seek to acquire information about the art-historical context of a work (for instance, about its specific causal history, its provenance, by whom it was commissioned, in what context it was presented etc., Walton 2020, 82). Perceiving works in categories does not seem to be a matter of voluntary cognitive achievement, of painstakingly forming a mature art-historical judgment (Nanay 2018). The prediction approach is compatible with the idea that inferences about art-historical categories may be activated automatically in the process of appreciation; they don’t necessarily have to be reflexive. It differs from strong cognitive approaches in that it allows for coarse-grained, poorly-formed art-historical inferences – namely, inferences about what a work is in virtue of the position it occupies in an art tradition – to play a meaningful role in appreciation.

On the proposed prediction account, we internalize art-historical scripts (through exposure to both perceptual and extra-perceptual information) which enable us to get a sense of coarse relationships between works, styles, or periods of art. Such scripts enable us to apprehend works in a logically ordered sequence as if in a narrative structure.

That comparative judgments are a significant component of art appreciation is also a thought that Gombrich expressed, as one can read in the following passage:

Modern art and primitive forms are not the same as their primitive models. For that strange precinct we call art is like a hall of mirrors or a whispering gallery. Each form conjures up a thousand memories and after-images. No sooner is an image presented as art than, by this very act, a new frame of reference is created which it cannot escape. It becomes part of an institution as surely as does the toy in the nursery. If Picasso would turn from pottery to hobby horses and send the products of this whim to an exhibition, we might read them as demonstrations, as satirical symbols, as declarations of faith in humble things or as self-irony but one thing would be denied even to the greatest of contemporary artists: he could not make the hobby horse mean to us what it meant to its first creator. That way is barred by the angel with a flaming sword.” (Gombrich 1963, 11; Holly 2002, 452).

The passage seems to suggest that appreciation of art relies on something like script-based art-historical estimates. Every form of art keeps in the background a tradition of art, even if to subvert it. An objection that may arise is that the account of art appreciation in terms of art-historical estimates is only restricted to self-conscious art that explicitly keeps the art-historical tradition in the background; only works which display overtly an attitude toward art would require their audience to acknowledge the actual historical development of art. In other words, art-historical estimates would be triggered by a work only if it was the artist’s intention to generate such predictions through his or her work. And we can think here of many examples from modern art, or even more eloquently of John Baldessari’s Painting for Kubler, which consists of a text on a canvas that reads as follows:

This painting owes its existence to prior paintings. By liking this solution, you should not be blocked in your continued acceptance of prior inventions. To attain this position, ideas of former paintings had to be rethought in order to transcend former work. To like this painting, you will have to understand prior work. Ultimately this work will amalgamate with the existing body of knowledge.

While the question remains open whether there are paradigm cases or boundary cases of art appreciation in which art-historical estimates play a more prominent role than in others, we cannot exclude them from the way we appreciatively engage with artworks. The problem of serialized appreciation of modern works is just as applicable to other art forms outside the canonical space of modernism; there is no need for a special pleading for modernist art-historical estimates. Irrespective of whether specific works may succeed conspicuously in embodying art history (i.e., relevant art-historical facts, a tradition of doing things etc.) and temporal relations to cognate works, it is unlikely that we experience art configurations in complete isolation.