By being lumped together with theories that superficially resemble it, TSC has mistakenly been criticised for reductionism. For instance, theories that focus on the role of perception for creating and experiencing art tend to do so at the expense of isolating artist, artwork, and viewer from their social, ideological, and historical settings (Dengerink Chaplin 2005). Thereby facts about how the historical context shapes perceptual experience are ignored that are vital for understanding art in symbolic terms, as a social and cultural phenomenon. However, in taking a broad perspective on cognition, TSC repudiates any attempts to account for cognition in isolation.
