Sense-making in art through metaphor: an epistemic arc approach

Recent debates in aesthetics increasingly challenge the view that artworks are primarily sources of sensory pleasure, emphasising instead their capacity to generate genuine understanding. Within this context, aesthetic cognitivism maintains that art affords non-trivial cognitive value, yet the concrete mechanisms through which such value emerges remain underexplored. This article examines metaphor as an epistemic mechanism through which artworks generate insight. Drawing on predictive-processing accounts of aesthetic experience, and in particular the epistemic arc framework, the article argues that metaphor is particularly well suited to structure cycles of curiosity, epistemic action, and aha experiences. Addressing the problem of immediacy raised by Black’s critique of Goodman’s theory of expression, we argue that visual metaphor in representational art does not necessarily depend on incongruent imagery. Instead, it can emerge from tensions within the overall structure of an artwork. Whether generated by the interplay of compositional forces in painting or by the interaction of visual rhythms in film, these structural tensions invite viewers to move from the immediate experience of expressive qualities embedded in the artwork toward a level of metaphorical meaning. A concluding case study of Dreyer’s Ordet demonstrates this claim in relation to film art.