2018/07/14 by Mark Windsor · 2 citations
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Aesthetic Perception and Analysis #Aesthetics #Art #Epistemology #Impossibility #Perception #Philosophy #Psychology #Relevance (law) #Uncanny #Uncanny valley
paper · doi:10.1093/aesthj/ayy028
openalex publication_date 2018/07/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
I propose a definition of the uncanny: an anxious uncertainty about what is real caused by an apparent impossibility. First, I outline the relevance of the uncanny to art and aesthetics. Second, I disambiguate theoretical uses of ‘uncanny’ and establish the sense of the term that I am interested in—namely, an emotional state (a kind of anxiety) directed towards particular objects in the world which are characteristically eerie, creepy, and weird. Third, I look at Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ as a means of drawing out the conditions that I claim are essential to uncanny experiences, and then elaborate the terms of my proposed definition. Finally, I show how the definition accounts for two paradigmatic kinds of uncanny phenomena: cases of ‘uncanny resemblances’, which include twins, doppelgangers, and very lifelike representations of the human body; and unlikely coincidences of events.