Bullot & Reber (B&R) have a noble goal: integrating the science of aesthetic experience with art historical approaches. As someone with a deep interest in aesthetic science, I agree that empirical research on the arts has an ambivalent relationship with art history and philosophical aesthetics, which emphasize history, purpose, culture, context, and intention. I would go further, in fact, and suggest that aesthetic science has an ambivalent relationship with art itself. The field's history shows a curious preoccupation with non-art and art-ish research materials (Silvia Reference Silvia, Shimamura and Palmer2012). The figures who inspired a science of art – notably Fechner (Reference Fechner1876) and Berlyne (Reference Berlyne1971) – did surprisingly little work with actual art, and much of what we know about aesthetic experience comes from studies of color chips, stock photography, and randomly generated shapes, polygons, patterns, and tones. Such studies are probably exceptions in modern work, but the field does assume that decontextualized studies of non-art can illuminate how aesthetic experience works.

But if studying non-art could illuminate aesthetics, then aesthetic science would merely be a quirky branch of applied visual and auditory cognition. B&R provide the groundwork for a genuinely aesthetic approach to aesthetic science, one that recognizes concepts such as history, context, and intention as inherent to aesthetic meaning rather than extraneous variables to be controlled for or randomized away. I would suggest that their approach affords even deeper implications: it expands the kinds of feelings that qualify as aesthetic emotions because some states only come about from people's historical and intentional knowledge.

To understand why their approach affords a broader range of feelings, one should consider the impoverished meaning of “appreciation” and “experience” in most models of aesthetics – art history and philosophy included. Appreciating and experiencing art, for the most part, are thought to be mild pleasant experiences, the sort of low-intensity states that are idealized by Western cultures that value emotional control and positive experience. Mild pleasure and displeasure can come from low-level cognitive and perceptual processes that need no higher-order meanings (Palmer et al. Reference Palmer, Schloss, Gardner, Shimamura and Palmer2012; Reber Reference Reber, Shimamura and Palmer2012), so decontextualized theories explain such states well. But many fascinating aesthetic emotions go beyond mere liking, and these emotions entail aesthetic meaning, the higher-order understanding of a work that requires the constructs emphasized by B&R: knowledge about a work's historical background, conceptual art knowledge, beliefs about the artist's intention and purpose, and appraisals of how these all relate to one's own values, beliefs, and commitments.

Take, for example, negative emotions like anger, contempt, and disgust (Silvia Reference Silvia2009). Getting angry at art requires beliefs about what the artist was trying to communicate (Silvia & Brown Reference Silvia and Brown2007). When people believe that an artist created the work to trespass intentionally against their values and to offend people like them – consider Andres Serrano's notorious Piss Christ and its many defacements – they get mad, as the history of blasphemous and controversial art shows. The thematic meanings of trespass and contamination that are central to these emotions combine and require historical, cultural, and self-knowledge. Without an understanding of another's intention and how it relates to one's beliefs and values, hostile aesthetic feelings are impossible.

As another example, consider the complex emotion of pride. People commonly feel pride when they or someone they see as an ingroup member intentionally does something commendable. One sees aesthetic pride in action when artworks become symbols of group identity – all self-respecting hippies read Trout Fishing in America – and when groups hold communal celebrations, such as local festivals to celebrate distinguished writers, artists, and musicians. These groups can be art-historical groups (e.g., the New York School of poets), cultural or national groups, geographical groups (e.g., regional artistic traditions), or any other kind. Pride hence integrates historical and biographical information about an artist and a work, appraisals of a work's value, and self-knowledge (Silvia Reference Silvia2009).

If we agree that considering history and intention expands the family of aesthetic feelings, what kind of theory can explain these feelings? I have suggested that appraisal theories of emotion provide a robust framework for thinking about aesthetic experiences (Silvia Reference Silvia2005b; Reference Silvia2009; Reference Silvia, Shimamura and Palmer2012). An appraisal approach, with its emphasis on what people know, value, and believe (Ellsworth & Scherer Reference Ellsworth, Scherer, Davidson, Scherer and Goldsmith2003), is congenial to the integrative historical analysis proposed by Bullot and Reber. If emotions come from people's appraisals of how events in the world involve the self, then the self's knowledge and beliefs are fundamental to how people experience the arts.

I suspect that an appraisal approach is probably more fertile than the processing fluency approach advocated by B&R. I respect what the processing fluency approach seeks to do: like many of psychology's elegant theories, it seeks to explain a lot with a little, and it can accomplish much more than a skeptic would expect. At the same time, it is a model with one predictor variable – degree of fluency. Although many things are inputs for fluency, there is nevertheless only one variable available to explain a diverse range of aesthetic experiences. Appraisal theories presume a wide range of emotions and are probably more complicated than they need to be, so they seem better positioned for a pluralistic approach to aesthetic feelings. But theories evolve, and I'm curious to see where the processing fluency model goes.