Art, Self and Truth

Abstract:

Art offers us the opportunity to transform and reconfigure how we represent ourselves, our world, ourselves in our world and our world in ourselves. It accomplishes this by a special use of experience as exemplars of representation. This form of representation, exemplarization, exhibits the form of representation and intentionality, that is, the connection between the objects we represent and how we represent them. Moreover, as we seek to represent ourselves in terms of our free actions of self-expression, we construct, a story of our selves. As we exemplarize our experiences to represent ourselves we tie our story together with our experiences in a loop. As we aggregate our conceptions of ourselves and our world with those of others, we obtain a theory of our world that contains a theory of truth as a component. That component completes a coherent explanatory account as art shows us how to connect truth with experience.