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This is a bizarrely ignorant assertion. What was the 'philosophy of mind' prior to Kant, which failed to 'take into account' empirical evidence concerning mind and brain? Hartley? Hume? Locke? Prior to Kant no 'philosophy of mind' would imagine that a sentence such as Bordwell's was POSSIBLE.

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Bordwell's project for a 'good naturalisation' = the attempt to explain responses to or formal properties of artistic works on the grounds of 'natural' mental processes as these are explained in the discipline of brain science ('cognitivism').

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'Cognitivism' is the preferred approach for Bordwell because (a) he wants to explain human responses to films and (b) cognitivism provides (i) a theory of the centrality of cognitive processes to even simple modes of aesthetic response (e.g. perception) and (ii) a typology of cognitive processing (e.g., inference, cues).

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On 'constructivism': semiotics in film theory wishes to be 'constructivist', in the sense that they wish to show how meaning is 'socially constructed' through semiotic organisation of film elements. But Bordwell says, or rather he sneeringly insinuates, that this is an anti-materialist position, because it doesn't recognise how semiotics can only work in relation to 'prior factors, particularly those that might be biologically innate'. This is obv. the usual simple-minded confusion of logical and material processes of construction or constitution, reference to 'feedback' notwithstanding.

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Cognitive constructivism and its 'basic', 'a priori', neurophysical elements provide us with a basic vocabulary for common aesthetic devices.

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Bordwell's account of 'schemas' and 'prototypes' in cognitive processing dimly resembles Hume's account of the organisation of 'abstract ideas' (their nature as merely representative particulars). The schemata (collection of essential elements) once scaled up provides the basic elements of the story...

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Action and Representation (here & preceding paras). The importance of these categories for Bordwell is as follows. 'Action' includes habits of interpretation that can be ascribed to the audiences of 'mainstream' films. Cognitivism explains these actions by means of a theory of 'representation', or, in other words, it makes references to the ways that films appeal to our cognitive faculties and induce us to generate schemata ('representations') that then guide our interpretative inferences. An alternative approach would simply cut out the mediating level of representations and show how film actions produce response actions. This would be some species of filmic behaviourism.

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Now Marx invoked polemically to downplay the role of the unconscious in the organisation of social (and consequently aesthetic) desire. This is the main line of argument, even when it isn't admitted to be such.

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schemata can be given a temporal-performative aspect by being described as scripts.