 Studies such as these may be thought valuable in their capacity to explain persistent features of aesthetic artefact-making but are unlikely to provide more than a general background against which aesthetic preferences and judgements, debates and disagreements concerning particular artefacts are played out. Saturated blue will be the right colour in a certain context, while muddy brown will be right in another. We cannot say that the presence of saturated blue in a picture is in general a reason, even a pro tanto reason, for admiring it or preferring it to a picture without that colour. When it comes to aesthetic reasons and judgements rather than unreflective preferences—when, that is, we consider top-down effects—cognitive science so far offers little to help us. This may to some extent be due to the nature of human cognition itself. Aesthetic reasons, in so far as we have them at all, are highly resistant to formulation in general terms (Sibley 1959), and once we abandon the view that aesthetic qualities supervene on an object’s appearance narrowly described (colour, shape and size in the case of visual art), there is no obvious way to limit the factors that legitimately impact on such judgements. This suggests a domain where, roughly speaking, everything is relevant to everything: the isotropy that is crucial to Fodor’s (1983) scepticism about a cognitive science of thinking. One recent study does attempt a unification of top-down and bottom-up approaches. Bullot and Reber (2013) develop a “psycho-historical” process that begins with a perceptual confrontation with the work, and culminates in artistic understanding, mediated by the viewer’s adoption of the design stance which involves reconstructing the genealogy of the work. This approach encounters two difficulties. First is their assumption that progress between stages is able to be done largely by the extraction of information from the perceptual signal. In fact the work’s appearance is often ambiguous or misleading as to its history—as when a work is carefully constructed to look haphazard in its construction (Levinson 2013; Ross 2013). The model needs to recognise the importance of art-historical knowledge gained from such sources as lectures and text books, knowledge which will often precede and inform the first stage. The second objection concerns the role of presumed essentialist assumptions in people’s approach to art works. Bullot and Reber argue that the historical nature of appreciation is explained by our commitment to psychological essentialism which makes us look beyond a things appearance to investigate its essence (2013: 132). But an inclination to look beyond appearances need not depend on essentialism; it might be that the interest or value of a thing sometimes resides in its relational and contingent properties (Korsgaard 1983). Valuing a work on account of its history of making no more implies an essential connection between the work and its history than valuing an object because it was a gift from a loved one implies an essential connection between the object and the giver.