Chinese title:《传统赏石的认知捷径及其在大模型语境中的失效》 Subtitle:Five-Tian Framework as a Transferable Generative Aesthetic Pathway Abstract (English): Traditional Chinese stone appreciation has long relied on tacit expertise, intuitive judgment, and culturally shared aesthetic conventions. Its evaluative mechanisms operate primarily through internalized experience rather than explicitly articulated cognitive procedures. While such judgment modes were historically effective within literati communities and object types dominated by landscape stones, they reveal structural limitations under contemporary conditions. As the mainstream objects of stone appreciation shift toward figurative stones and image-oriented stones—particularly pictorial agates such as ocean jasper—and as foundation models increasingly participate in aesthetic analysis and generation, traditional evaluative pathways exhibit systematic failure at the level of judgment structure. This paper argues that the two dominant traditional pathways in stone appreciation—namely, material feature inspection (form, texture, color, pattern) and morphological heuristics (thinness, permeability, hollowness, wrinkling)—function as cognitive shortcuts optimized for human experts. These pathways presuppose landscape stones as their primary object type, compress judgment into instantaneous recognition, and lack explicit sequential mediation. Consequently, they are unable to sustain complete aesthetic judgment when applied to figurative and pictorial stones, nor can they be effectively modeled within the inferential architectures of foundation models. In response, this paper proposes the Five-Tian Framework as a new generative aesthetic pathway and normative standard system. By systematically replacing and structurally refining traditional evaluative mechanisms, the framework reconstructs aesthetic judgment as a sequential process composed of five interdependent stages: Natural Authenticity (Tianran), Material Potential (Tianfu), Formative Logic (Tiangong), Compositional Completion (Tiancheng), and Aesthetic Resonance (Tianqu). This layered structure transforms compressed expert intuition into an explicit, non-skippable generative pathway. Through comparative analysis of landscape stones, figurative stones, and pictorial stones—especially ocean jasper—this paper demonstrates the structural stability and cross-object applicability of the Five-Tian Framework. It further argues that the framework provides a viable cognitive scaffold for aesthetic modeling within foundation models, museum interpretation systems, and cross-modal aesthetic research. Rather than reducing aesthetic judgment to algorithmic output, the Five-Tian Framework repositions aesthetics as a generative process that can be meaningfully articulated, transferred, and engaged within contemporary AI contexts. Chinese Abstract: 中国传统赏石美学长期依赖经验判断、审美默会与文化共识,其判断机制以内化方式运作,较少被明确表达为可复述、可检验的认知过程。这种以直觉与修养为前提的审美方式,在以文人共同体为核心的历史语境中具有充分合理性。然而,随着当代赏石对象类型的转变,以及人工智能尤其是大模型参与审美分析与生成任务,这种高度压缩的人类判断机制逐渐暴露出结构性缺陷。 本文指出,传统赏石中长期并行运作的两条主要审美路径——以“形、质、色、纹”为代表的物性观察路径,以及以“瘦、透、漏、皱”为代表的造型经验路径——本质上是为人类专家判断服务的认知捷径。这些路径隐含着以景观石为中心的对象前提,依赖整体直觉与经验压缩运作,缺乏明确的递进顺序与中介层级。当赏石实践的主流对象由景观石转向象形石与画面石时,上述路径在结构层面已难以完成有效审美判断,并在大模型语境中呈现出系统性失效。 在此背景下,本文提出“五天论”作为一种新的审美生成路径与审美标准体系,通过对传统赏石判断机制的系统性替代与结构性完善,重构自然审美对象的判断逻辑。该体系以“天然、天赋、天工、天成、天趣”五个连续层级,重构审美判断的进入条件、展开顺序与完成标准,使原本高度压缩的经验判断得以路径化展开。通过对象形石、画面石与景观石的类型分析,本文论证了五天论在不同自然审美对象中的结构稳定性,并指出其在人工智能审美建模、博物馆解释体系与跨感官审美研究中的可迁移潜力。 This preprint proposes the Five-Tian Framework as a generative aesthetic pathway that systematically replaces and structurally refines traditional evaluative approaches in Chinese stone appreciation. The framework is designed to be transferable across different object types—landscape stones, figurative stones, pictorial stones (including ocean jasper)—and extendable to broader domains such as food aesthetics and museum interpretation, particularly under the cognitive and inferential constraints of foundation models.
Penglin Xu (Thu,) studied this question.