{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.023706896551724137, 'fraction_numerical': 0.007004310344827586, 'mean_word_length': 5.632142857142857, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 1, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Mapping Aesthetic Development and Epistemological Understanding

How do we know? What personal theories of mind do we hold about knowledge and knowing in general and theatre in particular? When critiquing performances, what sources of artistic knowledge, evidence, and criteria do we rely upon to articulate our aesthetic experiences and justify our judgments? If one goal of theatre education is to acquire and extend knowledge about human experiences, knowing how students and we ourselves think about that knowledge may assist us when teaching performance criticism. Since the late 1960s, cognitive psychologists have examined how we acquire, understand, and construct knowledge as subjective knowers in relation to the objectively known world of phenomenal reality. Over time, we construct tacit theories about our minds as individual ways of knowing, known as a “personal epistemology,” along four main dimensions. These dimensions include our perspectives regarding 1) the un/certainty of knowledge, 2) the simplicity and complexity of knowledge, 3) our sources of knowledge and evidence, and, 4) our assertions, claims, or justifications based on the criteria we employ to test the validity of our evidence. Convergent frameworks of personal epistemology are characterized by how often we position ourselves in four basic stances as 1) imitative realists, 2) dualistic absolutists, 3) relativistic multiplists, and 4) critical evaluatists. These domain-general perspectives or “stages” of epistemological understanding may operate in a spiraling progression of recursion in that we may repeat some traits from a previous stage in varying degrees depending on domain-specific tasks in situated contexts.2 In the specific domain of visual art, Michael Parsons has proposed a developmental framework of aesthetic epistemology that describes how we move