What kind of impacts can artwork have on viewers? Establishing a taxonomy for aesthetic impacts

Aesthetic cognitivism is the philosophical position that art can advance knowledge and understanding. Operationalizing the claim of aesthetic cognitivism is necessary to put this philosophical view to test empirically. In pursuit of this goal, we recruited five aesthetics experts from different academic disciplines: art history, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and theology. Together, the group curated a set of terms that corresponded to descriptive features (124 terms) and cognitive-affective impacts (69 terms) of artworks. Using these terms as prompts, participants (n = 899) were given one minute to generate words for each term related to how an artwork looked (descriptive features) or made them think or feel (cognitive-affective impacts). Using network psychometric approaches, we identified terms that were semantically similar based on participants’ responses and applied hierarchical exploratory graph analysis to map the relationships between the terms. Our analyses identified 17 descriptive dimensions which could be further reduced to 5, and 11 impact dimensions which could be further reduced to 4. The resulting taxonomy demonstrated overlap between the descriptive and impact networks as well as consistency with previous reports. Terms directly relevant to aesthetic cognitivism were centrally positioned relative to other terms in the networks. This taxonomy could serve as the foundation to empirically evaluate aesthetic cognitivism’s claim.