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i think what this cog-sci does really is simply pushes the notion of judgment out of its transcendent position and into the process of pattern generation, interaction with afforances, information limitation (all more or less synonyms). the other thing that contemporary cog-sci (complex dynamical systems in particular) does is forces one to link this judgement process back to broader patterns of socialization. what it doesn't do is explore some of the implications of this move---for that you need to move into social ontology and wade through some of the more psychoanalytically influenced work--particularly that which comes out of melanie klein---which opens onto the ego as a matter of affective investment, and the modalities of ego activity as well. i don't have time to go into this too much right now (maybe later)--but one point of bringing this up is that when you make the move into the social-historical, you really aren't talking about the subject as traditionally understood plus a network of friends--you're pushed into an account of the formation of the ego itself, so into a developmental space, in order to begin talking about basic grids (this is too quick, it's shorthand) which are transposable from region or region and which come together in that general network of orientations toward the world that pierre bourdieu talks about as habitus.
so these dispositions that enable an affective investment in ethical action are in a sense aesthetically oriented--if by aesthetic you simply point to a preference for, say, certain kinds of symmetry (i desire for whatever reason that my actions conform to model x, say)...but it doesn't necessarily follow that therefore these investments ARE aesthetic---it just implies that the basis for the sense of fit between a way of thinking the self, action and outcomes is not based on the detached reflection that a traditional moral or ethical philosophy (which is to some extent a straw man, but whatever) would have you think.
there's nothing particularly radical in this---in a sense it's simply includes something like--you're reading an account of ethics, but something keeps you reading it that's not included in the arguments themselves, but that's in a sense presupposed by them, that is by the fact of the text itself, which is that you feel a sense of resonance, you feel a sense of correctness or its absence---this is separate from (but conditions) your interactions with the formal argumentation itself...
i don't know if i'm explaining myself well because i have to leave for work in a minute and am trying to jam this in before i go...
maybe i'll come back to it later.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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