Carroll—A contemporary introduction—Chapter 4—Part 2

Noël Carroll
Philosophy of Art: A contemporary introduction
(1999)

 

[SK's vitriol]

 

---

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Part II
The aesthetic dimension

Aesthetic experience revisited

...   the aesthetic theory of art is not a comprehensive theory of all art. However, the notion of aesthetic experience pervades our discussion of art. ...

... the most popular conception of aesthetic experience claims that it is

the disinterested and sympathetic attention and

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contemplation of any object whatsoever for its own sake.

... Our responses to artworks—let us call them art-responses—may encompass things other than aesthetic experience. Yet what is it when we experience an artwork aesthetically? ...

We can have what we call aesthetic experiences of artworks, or of everyday things, like nature. These experiences involve

attention

and

contemplation

as their most characteristic elements. ...

Moreover, what are called aesthetic experiences are

sympathetic,

at least in this sense

: that we

take cognizance

of the object in question and we attempt to let it

guide us where it will.

 

I think that, ideally, we would not attempt so hard. Ideally, we would only realize later (if at all?) that we had been guided.

If so, then we might as well go ahead and define 'interestedness' as 'whatever is preventing us from being "guided"'. And this, of course, includes trying so hard to be guided that we can't even breathe.

Yes, this all sounds too gooey and romantic. In one sense it is extreme. Why go quite so far? Because,

"Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id's will into action as if it were its own."

(Freud)

 

...   [The work] may be intended to lead us where we do not wish to go. It may

alienate our sympathies.

However,

our experience can still be called aesthetic

so long as we approach the work openly, ...

...

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... We would not typically call an experience of a work aesthetic that altogether ignored the structures of the work and what they were intended to do.

 

I would hesitate to call an experience aesthetic if it made too much of intentions and not enough of structures . . .

 

... what of disinterestedness? Disinterestedness is generally regarded as the most important element of aesthetic experience. But is aesthetic experience really disinterested?

...   The existence of such a state is often inferred by considering certain examples and by proposing disinterestedness as the best concept for explaining them. For instance, if someone goes to a school play because her daughter is in it, and she spends all her time nodding beamingly at her offspring's performance, proponents of disinterestedness will suggest that we all agree that her experience is not aesthetic. What is wrong here? The proponent of disinterestedness explains: her attention is guided by her personal interests; it is not impartial; it is not disinterested.

Likewise, if a patron of the arts admires his recently acquired painting because he is sure it will make him world famous, his attention is motivated by his personal interests; ...

Finally, where a Bolshevik commissar reads a novel solely to confirm that all the references to Stalin are adulatory, he was not reading in a manner that most would call aesthetic. ...

Surely in these cases, there is something

wrong

or

deficient

about the way in which the audience members in question are responding to the relevant artworks.

 

As a friend of aesthetics, I ask: What tf is really, truly wrong with these cases as given? It's clear enough that they are deficient, if we insist on wording things that way. It's clear how they are "deficient," and in what they are "deficient." But what's really wrong with being deficient in just this way?

A parent may be smothering, a patron may be vain, and a commissar may be morally bankrupt and unfeeling, but of course this is not at all what Our Man means to suggest, and he is correct, presumably, that the (un)wisdom of these various stances is no more what is at issue in the diagnosis and consideration of "interested" attention than it is in the construction of ideals of "disinterested" attention.

What is at issue? It's a question of what is or is not happening. It's a simple question, really. The dialogue around it is so complex only because so many people, so much of the time, don't like the answers.

When the "happening" is cognitive rather than behavioral, it is extremely difficult to catch any glimpse at it at all; but that also is not what is at issue above. No matter on what side of the issue we have situated ourselves, by entering capital-P debate we presume to apply some deductive rigor to the problem as we see it; and if empirical investigation is difficult or impossible in the given case, that is no deterrent to such nonempirical methods as the capital-Ps deploy; if anything, a problem's intransigence to empirical methods actually validates the appeal to nonempirical methods.

So, speaking for a theory in which he does not personally believe, a theory which he has in fact made a career of opposing, Our Man Here professes surety that the Aesthetic Theorist thinks there is something wrong with "interested" attention paid to an artwork which (let us just presume) also affords the attention-payer the opportunity for aesthetic satisfaction. But how could there really be some big-picture moral principle at stake here? If there is such a principle at stake, then pretty much everyone who believes in a Judgment Day is in for a much tougher time than they realize, since pretty much everyone has been "wrong" about art in precisely this way, if not all the time then at least some of the time. Why? Because we are profoundly interested creatures. It's necessary, actually, that we reset ourselves to "interested" in certain situations! The above-given examples, each in their own way, suggest a few of the more salient human situations in which "disinterest" would be pathological.

Where I think friends of aesthetics have erred most often and most egregiously is in characterizing the effort to achieve "disinterest." For the longest time it seems this was construed as an effort of the aesthete to achieve some stance vis-a-vis the object of interest. I've never been sure how that would even work, since it seems . . . very "interested," explicit, and self-conscious to put forth just that much effort toward the taking in of some artwork. It seems possible to me only in the abstract that "effort" could be "disinterested"; in reality, I don't see how I could evince "effort" and "disinterest" together in a single thought or action: should this be demanded of me, then the demand itself has simply created an "interest"; or, if there is no real demand, then there can be nothing like "effort" either.

But the artist, conventionally speaking, makes an effort too: the artist can make an effort to entrain the subject into so-called "aesthetic" subjectivity; or they can make no such effort, or they can make some other effort, or (this one really caught on for a while) they can make great, valorous effort to entrain the subject into non-aesthetic subjectivity. If we really do think we can place a given artist on such a continuum, then we have surely identified one kind of "intent"; and then, for any "intentionalists" among us, there is the semblance of a principled reason for declaring there to be "something wrong" with the doting mother or (Urmson's example seized upon by Dickie) the greedy impresario. Something seems intuitively "wrong," or at least unfair, about all that noble art-effort coming to nothing on account of such base motives as attachment or greed.

Our Man does seem to believe in intent, and in intent-ional-ism. He seems actually, i.e. personally and professionally, to believe in it.

I do not believe in intentionalism.

I do believe that "disinterestedness" and "interestedness" both happen, and that the distinction between them is a coherent distinction, both abstractly and empirically.

I believe that "disinterested" aesthetic experience has an indispensible social function. However, this does not simply stipulate by implication that its "interested" counterpart is "wrong," either in general or in given cases, as above.

What is wrong? Intentionalism is wrong. Stuffed-shirt art-papistry is wrong. Calling a mother "wrong" for being unable to "distance" herself from her young daughter's school theater production is definitely super wrong! Labelling her connoisseurship of kid-theater as "deficient" is closer to the capital-P truth, but this is a bit rude and misdirected even for my tastes.

What can we say about the latter case? We can say much that will get us in equally hot water with a whole other department of the institutional Boomersphere leviathan. That is, we can refuse to agree that "disinterest" is in evidence when we have good reason to think otherwise, and we can refuse to agree that "interestedness" is not in evidence when it very clearly is.

We can simply notice

that this silly little example actually is fully paradigmatic;

that mother-to-daughter is only the most powerful of many particularistic attachments;

that these attachments do not need to be half this powerful to be, nonetheless, fully destructive of "disinterest" and constitutive of "interest";

that culture is "a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value" (Becker again), and that this is an "interest" that lives in every single human being, sometimes sublimated, other times exploding above the surface;

BUT, all the same, that such "interest" does not simply come and go at the same time, to the same degree, with same consequences, for everyone alike;

that every particularlistic attachment, every self-conscious tribal identification, every pang of hunger for "a feeling of primary value," every single one of these is a tidal wave of explicit "interest" countervailing any implicitly "disinterested" practice;

and that it is not possible for "disinterest" to simply push back with equal force, since the very essence of "disinterest" is that it is implicit, unspoken, and yes, therefore intensely fragile.

 

The friend of disinterestedness offers an explanation that covers all these cases ... these "art-lovers" bring the wrong sort of attention to the pertinent artworks. Their attention is interested, rather than, as it should be, disinterested.

This account, however, makes

a significant presumption,

namely that attention and contemplation

are

the sorts of things

that are

interested or disinterested. ...

Disinterestedness is supposed to pick out a certain kind of attention. But does it? Is a woman who is only concentrating on her daughter's

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performance

attending to the play interestedly

(rather than disinterestedly)? Or, is she

not paying attention to the play at all?

 

I assume this is (now) George Dickie talking.

If the latter, then we can, still, within the confines of the hypothetical, give a clear reason why she is not paying attention at all. Then, we can theorize a near-identical scenario, with all else is left as is but this single 'reason' for distraction omitted. Then, the outcome presumably would (or at least could) be different.

At that point, what remains problematic is the assumption that absent this single "interest" she would be rapt in adept aesthetic attention. Of course that can never be assumed; all else being equal it would be safer to assume the contrary.

 

Similarly, the art patron who fantasizes about incipient glory ... is just not attending to the painting, period. ... Nor is the commissar paying attention to the novel as a whole; he is reading it incompletely, ...

These aren't failures to mobilize a peculiar kind of attention called disinterested attention. Rather, these are examples of inattention. ...

Commonly a distinction is drawn between disinterested and interested attention. ... But is that contrast a real one, ... ? ... Shouldn't we be talking about attention versus nonattention in these cases rather than disinterested versus interested attention?

 

Not if we can give clear reasons for instances of one or the other. Maybe we cannot really do that. But if we go along with the given hypotheticals, then we have indeed been given clear reasons, and at that point it makes no philsosophical sense, I wouldn't think, to settle for any less proximate explanation than the very most proximate one we can manage.

 

To determine whether or not there is some special form of attention worthy of the title disinterested attention, consider the case of Sydney and Evelyn. Both of them are listening to Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. ...

But there is this difference ... Tomorrow Evelyn has an exam in music theory in which she will be expected to discuss the aesthetic properties and musicological structures of the Emperor Concerto at length. Evelyn is listening to the concerto with a personal interest, ... But does the fact that Evelyn is motivated in this way entail that the manner in which she attends to the concerto need be any different from the way in which Sydney listens to the music?

Sydney and Evelyn listen to all the same notes, phrases and movements. Both apprehend the same aesthetic properties. Both follow the same musical structures as they evolve over time. Indeed, it is even possible that Evelyn takes notice of more aesthetic properties and structures in the concerto than Sydney does. Surely, Evelyn is paying

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attention to the concerto in a way that is appropriate to what the artist intends. She may be doing exactly what Sydney is doing, and even then some. What sense does it make to say that Evelyn's mode of attention must be different in kind than Sydney's?

 

Just . . . try it yourself, my man! That's all I've got!

 

Attention is a matter of

concentrating the mind on something.

Evelyn is certainly concentrating her mind on the Emperor Concerto. There is no reason to suppose that the quantity, quality, and focus of her concentration here are any different from Sydney's. What difference should it make that Evelyn's motives differ from Sydney's— ...

The bank robber and the rescue team may have different reasons for attending to the combination lock on a vault: the safe-cracker wants to steal the money inside; the police officer to save the people trapped behind the door. But both attend to the clicks of the tumbler in the lock mechanism in the same way.

 

That's just two people taking two different exams. Try again. What we're looking for is more like an OCD hobbyist.

 

Similarly, if we imagine some third party, solely concerned with opening the lock for the fun of it, we would not say that the mode of attention he lavishes on the combination lock is different in kind from the thief's or the policeman's.

 

Well . . . he still seems to me to be having a different experience. There are even more peculiar externalities introduced here, as before, by the choice of example, and perhaps it's dealing in bad faith to attempt to exploit those. I'm thinking of everything that follows from the 'professional' position of the robber and the rescuer as against the 'amateur' enthusiast.

The contention that there is only one kind of attention rather than two (or more) only holds up if we truly believe that different interests and incentives (as seem to be granted by the choice of examples) do not affect 'attention' in the the least; and THAT contention seems not nearly worth going to war over. Probably, for most purposes that matter, any differences are negligible; and, probably, there is a perfect uniqueness of phenomenal experience if we're intent on drilling down far enough to find it.

There is, further, the question of whether we really are definining "attention" phenomenologically or behavioral(istica)ly. TBC on that.

 

There are not two kinds of attention here—two different ways of concentrating—one called interested attention and the other called disinterested attention. There is just plain attention.

 

But there are two kinds of experience. And then there are (at least) two kinds of everything which follows from experience, e.g. memories, learning, and perhaps ultimately and most importantly, beliefs.

I would think?

I certainly "believe" that I had a very different experience studying for these listening tests in college than I had in any of my other listening, before or since!

 

An act of attention is identified

in terms of its object.

Acts of attention can be undertaken

for different motives.

The critic scrutinizes a sculpture with an eye to writing a review; the gallery-goer contemplates it for sheer enjoyment. ... Does it seem credible to say that the critic's mode of attention—

what she looks at,

or

how she considers it imaginatively

—need be different than the plain gallery-goer's, just because she has to file an article?

 

If not, then we can finally be done with critics and criticism once and for all.

 

...   Jerome is also playing a recording of the Emperor Concerto. But Jerome is playing the recording to impress his lover ... He barely listens to the music, and when he does he spins into reveries of how it will persuade his lover to hold him in awe. Shall we call his attention to the concerto interested?

But is Evelyn's attention in any way like Jerome's?

 

Their common property is that both are not like Sydney's. This common property is therefore an extrinsic property. This extrinsicness certainly limits what can be said: most notoriously, it implies no commonality between the two of them (Jerome and Evelyn) anywhere the third item (Sydney) is not the common point of comparison. But I don't see how this is a problem for the Old Aesthetes, because the Old theory posits only this extrinsic difference; I don't see how the theory of disinterest can be faulted for failing to map the "interested" territory in granular detail, just so long as the territory it does map is mapped accurately. To that end, if attention is identified in terms of its object, then all attention toward the same object is the same attention. But that only makes the consideration of motives more salient and urgent, at which point we are entitled to point out, following the logic here, that impressing a partner and studying for an exam are (obviously!) different motives. If we're simply not allowed to generate extrinsic properties by bringing in some third "motive" as a common reference point, then indeed we are stuck with exactly one kind of "attention" and infinite "motives."

 

... Doesn't it seem right here to say that Jerome isn't paying attention to the music, whereas Sydney and Evelyn are, ...

That is, there is attention and there is nonattention, here, instead of disinterested and interested attention. The notions of attention and inattention do

as well as,

if not a better job of,

explaining the cases of the mother, the art patron and the commissar as do the notions of

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disinterested and interested attention.

 

I fear that this actually explains nothing at all about these people's experience, no matter what it says about their cases. And we began here (quite rightly) intending to investigate experience.

Why would neglecting a major proximate cause of the inattention do a better job of explaining things?

 

...

...   Attention is concentration. ... We can concentrate on any object in any of these ways, irrespective of our motives.

Motives are not part of the activity of attention proper.

They

cause

acts of attention, but they do not

qualify them as particular kinds

of acts of attention. ...

Our motives

do not determine

the quality of our attention.

 

It seems that by seizing upon the word "attention" we have simply found a very effective way of ignoring everything about experience that our motives do determine.

 

"Disinterestedness" refers to our motivation with respect to certain acts of attention. Thus, it is not a part or kind of attention proper. At best it alludes to certain causal factors, or the lack thereof, that may prompt certain acts of attention. It is not a constituent of attention, nor a way of attending. ...

Furthermore, ... the concept of disinterested attention ... is not really the best explanation of what went wrong with the mother, the art patron, and the commissar. Their way of responding to their respective art objects was not defective because they failed to attend disinterestedly, but because they failed to attend to them at all.

 

Hmm. Were they attending to anything? To some-thing? Or, to no-thing?

Who has ever once "attended to" an artwork if none of these three examplars can be considered to be performing that action? Can we ever be said to attend to the whole without becoming fixated on some part(s)?

 

The notions of distraction, inattention and nonattention—in their ordinary language usages—are far more accurate, serviceable, and appealing than the concocted, technical notion of disinterested attention for explaining why certain kinds of responses to artworks—like the art patron's—are flawed.

 

They are more general, certainly. Most people will agree that this does make them more serviceable and appealing. I think it also makes them less accurate.

 

...

...

...   if there is no such thing as disinterested attention (and contemplation), then that is yet another reason why the aesthetic definition of art, construed in terms of the affect-oriented account, cannot be correct. ...

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...

...   However, people, or at least philosophers (they're people too), have been talking about aesthetic experience for two centuries. Did the concept mark nothing at all? ...

Probably not. But in order to see what people were getting at, ... We need to return to what in the last section was called the content-oriented conception of aesthetic experience. That conception

calls an experience aesthetic

in virtue of

what it is an experience of.

An experience is aesthetic, if it is an experience of the

sensuous properties,

aesthetic properties,

and

formal relations

of its objects of attention.

 

This whole thing is ASS BACKWARDS. When we talk about experience we're already talking about something ineffable and nontransferable; the 'unrevealable' inside which Becker refers to; or whatever Sartre is on about; etc. That stuff. Hence we do poorly to define experience by its object. We do better to define the object by experience. It matters not whether our experiences of the object actually diverge at all. They could be perfectly identical, I suppose, if such a notion is even permissable here. (Frankly, this seems ultimately absurd, far more absurd than the notion of total nontransferability.) The whole point and provenance of a 'definition' (object-by-experience, or vice versa) is intersubjective. We want everyone to understand what we mean, conceptually, when, in this case, we call an experience aesthetic, or call it a bust, or mind-blowing, or whatever. We're seeking conceptual functionality, measured by vulgar pragmatist standards, not by those pristine standards of uniformity of experience that would make it half-coherent to try to define experience by its object. The whole notion of defining experience-by-object belongs to a much narrower pragmatic discipline, i.e., it belongs to the so-called Public Sphere, i.e., to the Public Order, i.e. to the strictly transactional part of a liberal democratic order. That is a peculiar artifact of one peculiar culture, nominally the one which both I and this author and quite a few of the artworks and artists implicated here have been fortunate enough to live under. It is an artifact of this way of life, or perhaps an ideal which has seldom been realized or given its due (most particularly it is critics who have sold it short, up to and including vicious dissent from Beardsley's admirable codification and promotion of its most indispensible strictures). All of that being as it is, defining experience-by-object is terrible epistemology. Is this not actually precisely the reverse of what phenomenology proposes? Or only one half of it? Half being closer to none at all? Is this phenomemology standing on its head? Am I missing something here?

 

In this regard, what in the previous chapter was called design appreciation is a major subcategory of aesthetic experience. Design appreciation focuses upon

how a work works.

It is preoccupied with

the ways

in which

the means

employed in an artwork

suit (or ill-suit)

its purposes.

 

Well . . . this is exactly the path Beardsley warned us against taking. Best to defer/refer that discussion to his own work, coming soon to a weblog near you.

 

This is not the only response that we can have to an artwork, nor even the only appropriate response. But it is one very common response.

 

I remain to be convinced of this. Is it at all common to parse artworks in terms of ways and means? That seems more to be the aftertaste of befuddlement, or the foretaste of pomposity.

 

Indeed, we often

read books

and

attend art appreciation classes

in order

to learn how to do this,

since

it can be very satisfying.

 

🤮 🤮 🤮

 

Design appreciation is one thing that people often mean by the phrase "aesthetic experience." Moreover, it is easy to see how

attention to the design of the work

could have been

mistaken for and misdescribed

as "disinterested attention." When we focus on the design of a work, we

batten on its internal structure.

We

examine the parts

in order to

take note of the whole.

Our attention is, so to speak, centripetal. We are not directly involved in assessing the consequences of the work for either ourselves or for society. We are simply concerned with

how it works.

 

I consider the concept of something working to be a canonical form of interest. If we are merely "interested" in how it works, and if we are not "interested" in whether or not it works, then in that limited sense we are bringing to the work an "attitude" of "disinterest" along at least one important vector.

That said, again, I find the whole notion of something "working" (or not) to be very nearly the paradigm of "interest" to which the old notion of "disinterest" opposed itself. So, we may have no monkey on our back in quite the way the parent or the patron does, but already, in the sorts of things that art appreciation classes traffic in, we have what seems to me to be an obvious intrusion of "interested attention" upon some activity to which we previously brought no such "attitude"; and all the proof that we indeed did not previously bring it is contained in the hypothetical itself, wherein we have taken the class in order to learn how to do something. This "something" we seek to do may certainly be described as battening on works' internal structure; but as for the mere fact that the object of "attention" (I suppose I should say, the content of our content-oriented experience) is now "structure" rather than our daughter or our bank account, this makes no difference: we have instrumentalized the experience, and we have done so, we might say, in the "interests" of some instrumental end.

(If we can't agree here that "appreciation" is an "instrumental end," then I'll just stop reading and throw the book in the river. It already seemed to belong there, even before this chapter.)

 

Our attention is bracketed on its structure. It is this bracketing that people attempt to characterize by notions like disinterested attention, though it may be suggested that a more accurate way of describing it is to say that we are

centrally focussed upon

and attentive to

the design of the work

—the way in which the form of the work functions to realize its intended point and/or purpose.

When immersed in the process of design appreciation, we are

involved in

determining and assessing

the form of the work.

 

" . . . we are interested in determining . . . "

 

We attend to and contemplate its design. We generally

put to one side

questions

about whether

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the point or the purpose of the work

is ignoble or noble, useful or harmful ...

 

" . . . We put to one side certain questions, but many others continue to nag at us . . . "

 

Just as a pacificist can study the design of an armored car and note the suitability of its modifications for its purpose—even though she deplores the purpose—we can size up the design of an artwork, irrespective of the interests it serves.

 

Are all pacifists equally good (or bad) at this kind of thing?

Is it perhaps easy for some and totally impossible for others?

Do the contours of someone's pacifism go any way at all toward predicting their ability to do this?

Aren't there at least a few ordinary language speakers who would render this as a matter of attitude?

 

Indeed, where our response to an artwork is primarily to its design, dwelling on the point or purpose of the work in terms of a framework of broader interests is generally outside the purview of our concerns.

 

Indeed, we have narrowed our interest, but it remains . . . an interest!

 

...

Perhaps it is this bracketing of broader interests for the sake of focussing on the design of the work that some have misnamed "disinterested attention." But design appreciation is not a matter of a special kind of attention. Rather it is a matter of focussing attention in a certain way—of limiting it in scope to the form of the work.

 

" . . . or of limiting it in scope to our daughter's performance . . . "

 

Design appreciation is not disinterested attention, nor should it be described that way. Disinterested attention allegedly names a kind of attention; design appreciation merely refers to

the scope of our attention

in certain circumstances. Design appreciation is just plain old concentration, directed and focussed upon a certain kind of object, namely

the form of the artwork.

 

That is, concentration upon the relations between parts of an artwork (p. 140).

Does that sound like your aesthetic experience?

 

If our attention is primarily engaged with the design of an artwork, then that is an instance of aesthetic experience, no matter the interests that motivate us to be so preoccupied. ...

...

But the design of artworks is not the only object of aesthetic experience. Along with formal relations, aesthetic experiences are also experiences of

aesthetic properties,

including expressive properties, of varying intensities. ...

Aesthetic properties

Watching a dancer pirouette, we are struck by her

gracefulness.

Reading a novel, we sense its

dark

qualities. A great deal of our attention to artworks is

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devoted to detecting their

characteristic aesthetic properties.

When discussing artworks, a major source of interest is in

comparing our descriptions

of their aesthetic properties with those of others, including

our friends

and

professional critics.

One value of art, one value among many, is that it affords the opportunity for us to exercise our powers of discrimination.

 

discriminating
≠
discussing

 

We enjoy

clarifying

the impression that the artwork has made on us, both during the experience and afterwards in recollection. ... artworks challenge and often reward our

sensitive consideration

of them.

Sometimes the detection of aesthetic properties blends into design appreciation as in cases where

we seek out

the structures

that give rise to

the dark, brooding aura of the novel. But aesthetic experience

also occurs

where we

simply apprehend

the aesthetic qualities of a work,

without searching

for any subtending structures. We may simply note and savor the gracefulness of the dancer. To confirm the significance of this aspect of aesthetic experience, reflect upon how often your own descriptions of artworks are dominated by taking notice of the aesthetic properties of the works in question.

 

Well, almost all of my describing of artworks was done on assignment, for a grade. I have always presumed that the reason professors give such assignments is to help them to know whether and how deeply their students have actually engaged with the class material, when that material substantially involves "artworks." As may be obvious, I never did particularly enjoy this, nor have I ever seen what the benefit for the student could possibly be. This is by far the most carried away I ever got, about which I remain somewhat embarrassed. I don't recall how much recourse I had to aesthetic properties. I do recall being utterly perplexed by the very term when I first began to encounter it (long after leaving school), and when I found that the Sibley article was completely paywalled, I ordered a used copy of the Margolis anthology (for around half the paywall's asking price) intending to use it only to read Sibley. I remain mostly perplexed, though I at least understand the basic backstory now. The whole idea still seems pretty empty. It seems like it's really about rescuing a certain kind of criticism, along with certain of its underlying assumptions and rationalizations, from ever-encroaching 'analytic' skepticism. So, sure, even I can be coaxed into having recourse to "description" that is comprised mostly of "aesthetic properties," but I would have done far less of this (almost none, I think) had I gone to school for dentistry instead of music. But because I did go to school for music, and because I was coaxed into more of this than I would have liked, I did learn something important after all: post facto "description"-on-command is the most pernicious form of retrospective revisionism on experience that is available to us. I'm sure I've done plenty of that here over the years, seeing that verbalizing and burnishing is in fact the best (the worst?) way to make it happen. What can I say? I can't help myself when it comes to blogging. On the other hand, I've always found "description" of artworks to be very avoidable. I'm very good at avoiding it, both as writer and as reader.

 

There are various different sorts of aesthetic properties. There are the expressive properties discussed in Chapter 2, ... But many aesthetic properties are

nonanthropomorphic.

Some are

Gestalt properties

like "unified," "balanced," "tightly knit," "chaotic." And others, because they are related to

certain standards,

may be called

"taste" properties:

"gaudy," "vulgar," "kitschy," "garish" and so on. Finally, there are also certain aesthetic properties that might be categorized as

reaction properties

because they are derived from the way in which certain artworks move us or arouse various mental states; these properties include the sublime, the beautiful, the comic, the suspenseful, and so on. The aforesaid categories, of course, are neither exhaustive, nor are they always mutually exclusive, ...

Moreover, we often have different grounds for ascribing aesthetic properties to artworks. A film will be called suspenseful on condition that it

raises a certain mental state

in normal viewers, whereas a piece of orchestral music expresses elation only if

it sounds

elated.

 

Kivy has written in great detail about this distinction between 'arousal' and 'expressiveness.' Here, however, these are different grounds for making the same ascription. How is this possible? Presumably it is because the given object-artwork indeed possesses some property in both cases. The difference is that the human feeling corresponding to the property may truly be 'aroused' in some instances, whereas it is merely 'expressed' (without arousal) in others. In both cases, though, the property is . . . detected; and then, because we are in the habit of thoroughly unpacking and burnishing our "aesthetic experiences" after they've happened, we may duly "ascribe" the property to the work in which it has been . . . detected. But what is "aesthetic" here? It's also possible to 'detect' properties in works without "experiencing" the works. Without being able to score-read very well, and without hearing the piece, I could nonetheless look at a small orchestral score and (in most cases) accurately pick out a small handful of Gestalt properties. But if cognizance of a property is dependent upon my actually "experiencing" the work, either by score-reading (quite unlikely to work in my case) or by simply hearing a performance, then in that sense anything I can turn up only this way seems to deserve to be called an "aesthetic property" if only to differentiate it along precisely this axis.

 

Many aesthetic properties are perceptible properties, but not all. A work of literature may express alienation by enabling us to entertain an estranged point-of-view on the world.

 

A point-of-view is not perceptible? It's not concrete, not tactile. If it's not "perceptible" and it's not our own introspective invention, then how have we come to know (of) it, other than by "perceiving" it?

 

Literature, of course, may also possess aesthetic qualities in virtue of its perceptible properties—such as its sounds and rhythms—but it also presents aesthetic properties through the organization of its fictional worlds.

 

So I guess this organization is the non-perceptible property? And it is supervenient upon the "perceptible" qualities of language?

 

[191]

Aesthetic properties are different from the properties that interest physicists. Physicists are preoccupied with the

quantitative

properties of things their weight, mass, velocity, length, and so on. The aesthetic dimension is

qualitative.

 

Unless (perhaps?) there is some (any) question as to the mere presence or absence of any such property. The simplest (mathematically and logically simplest) case of quantity becoming quality is the change between 0 and 1. In a sense this is, also, an absolute change, and that too is unknown in any other case of quantitative change.

 

The physicist's description of the universe is not dependent on human psychology.

 

Okay . . . you know what he means, and what he means is valid . . . but how did this guy get as far as he did writing sentences like this?? I hate to make it personal, but . . . how?? I don't get it.

 

Creatures from other galaxies ... should, in principle, be able to understand our physics ... But it is unlikely that they will grasp the aesthetic properties of our artworks so readily, since aesthetic properties are, as we said earlier, response-dependent— ...

 

Maybe I unduly ignored that the first time it was said. It can't be ignored this time: if you don't respond like everyone else, you're as good as an alien (the outer-space kind, befitting Our Man's native aesthetic soil).

Again, you know what he means, and if so then there is no problem at all. It's just that we're ostensibly living in an 'analytic' republic here, and I fear that an adequate 'analysis' of the 'concept': response-dependent property would turn up all sort of inconvenient dirt. It seems to depend (entirely!) on this planetary-scale thinking vis-a-vis "response." But even if it does not, we have already been given so many different sorts of aesthetic properties to work with (p. 190 above) that it shouldn't be difficult to find human beings' myriad and diverse "responses" to the entire motley of "properties" to be widely variable. (One of these categories is even called "taste properties"! To say that "taste properties" are "response-dependent" is all but tautological! But how many such circles are there? Probably many more than the two that the alien-human duality suggests.)

 

But aesthetic properties are not free-floating.

They depend

for their existence on

the kind of properties that physicists study.

 

Is that supposed to make them . . . any less "response dependent"? Because it cannot do that.

 

For a particular line in a painting

to be

elegant, it must still be a line

of a certain length and thickness.

 

Well, this time we can't be quite so forgiving of Our Man's imprecision. We can't find it in our hearts no matter how hard we look.

Surely we can find a line long-and-thick enough so that no human auditor will ever find it elegant; but that is something else entirely from what the above sentence is getting at. It is impossible for the above to be true in general. I presently lack the requisite Philosophical artillery to be able to say exactly what kind of statement is made above, but I think I understand this pre-conceptually. (Ha!) It needs to be followed/completed by something like:

". . . in any given case."

Otherwise, we read it literally (and how else is one "Analytic Philosopher" to read another???) and we find, in that event, not only that (1) it is suddenly possible to perfectly predict aesthetic response, but also (2) that the aesthetic object upon which we base our prediction must match our predefinition exactly. Obviously both of these things are absurd, and two absurdities do not make a profundity. Granted that they point towards different truths, and these two truths seem to be profoundly contrary in pragmatic terms: how are we suppose to live with a widespread inability to make predictions when there are undeniably some cases (if they don't exist, can can easily construct them) where certain predictions are, within very limited bounds, not only available conceptually but readily able to be validated empirically? And, what to make of those aesthetic objects that really do, whether we like it or not, seem to determine our response to them, whether by what I prefer to call 'brute force', or by actual appeal (not widely available, contra Our Man Here, but perhaps available here and there) to truly universal human traits?

I think that these are real possibilities, and maybe they are not even outliers in any earnest sense; nonetheless, there is no hope of mapping any pragmatic territory with these cases as paradigms. They are not paradigms. I'm not sure that any paradigm case of an "aesthetic property" can be ensconced. We've already been given plenty of reason to think that this indeed is not possible. If it is possible, then supervenience upon the kind of properties that physicists study seems an unpromising avenue. But, I gather that there is much written about this of which I am as yet ignorant.

 

In cases like these, the property of elegance is said

to supervene on

certain base-properties,

... This term, "supervenience," signals

a relation of dependence

between aesthetic properties like elegance and their base properties such that were the base properties different, the aesthetic properties would be different also.

But

the elegance of the line is

not reducible to

its physical dimensions;

it is also related to the way in which creatures like us typically apprehend the line.

 

Does this mean that we cannot know what the effect of any base-property will be until we try it and find out? To be able to say in advance what the effect will be seems precisely to reduce "aesthetic properties" to the physical dimensions of whatever element(s) they are supervenient upon.

 

Since aesthetic properties are response-dependent, the base in question includes not only the length and thickness of the line, but its

relation

to percipients with our sensibilities—percipients who view the line in standard conditions (in the right light, from the right distance, ... and so on). In this way, aesthetic properties are very much like color properties, which also supervene on certain molecular structures. And, in turn, aesthetic properties can supervene on what are called

secondary properties,

such as color,

as well as on

primary properties

...

such as mass, weight,

... In this respect, aesthetic properties are sometimes called

tertiary

—or third-order—properties.

This account of aesthetic properties, however, raises certain skeptical worries ... we think of aesthetic properties as properties of the objects ... to which we predicate aesthetic property-terms. We think the sadness is an objective property of the music.

 

Actually, I have never quite been able to think of it that way, and not for lack of trying. Got anything for creatures like me?

 

But since aesthetic properties are response-dependent, can we be sure that they are not simply properties in us—really subjective properties, not objective properties? ...

 

Perhaps they really are not objective properties. That would explain a lot. It would explain more-and-better than anything here has explained.

And this possibility . . . this raises worries? It raises no worries at all, unless you have something important staked to the premise that these properties are objective . . . and if these stakes are your stakes, then I detect the cloying, slightly rancid scent of "interested attention" paid; all the same if the "content" of your "interest" is "structure" as if it is personal gain or activist ambition.

Pastiching the Philosopher of Art with the Deconstructionist for a moment: Whose interests are served if aesthetic properties prove to be objective?

 

[192]

...

Detection or projection?

...   Aesthetic properties are response-dependent. But is their response dependency sufficient grounds for denying that they are real, objective properties?

Typically, we regard color properties as real, objective properties of objects... But color properties are also response-dependent properties. Nevertheless, we believe that our responses with respect to color

track real phenomena.

One reason ... is that this explains why

most humans,

save the color-blind,

tend to converge

on their color judgments ...

...     isn't aesthetic experience pretty much on all fours with color perception?

...   on phenomenological grounds, it would be arbitrary to say that color perception tracks objective qualities, whereas aesthetic experience does not. ... response-dependency is no reason to categorize aesthetic experience as purely projective, if we do not treat color perception likewise.

[193]

Moreover, we believe that color perception tracks objective properties, because this hypothesis has

explanatory power;

it explains our observations of such things as blueness in objects.

 

Hmm. This is another annoyingly fudgy sentence. By one reading this is literally/technically true, but I wonder if blueness really is an equivocation? All that is explained this way is the fact of agreement; the basis of agreement (I don't know what else to call it . . . the thing agreed upon?) could be anything, and we have not "explained" why it is just what it is; and if we don't know what we're agreeing on, then the fact of agreement is not much of a fact. (Or: if we do know what blueness is, then the hypothesis that it tracks some real phenomenon is not a hypothesis at all but rather a result or conclusion that we are forced into accepting for lack of being able to produce a single counterinstance. This comes at the end, not at the beginning. Don't we have to be shown a few blue things before we can progress through the chain of reasoning as above?)

 

But so does a similar treatment of aesthetic experience. Most people, under standard conditions, will agree that the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony are powerful.

 

What about the others? Are they powerblind? When people say that the Beboppers were 'just playing for themselves, not for an audience,' are these people 'blind' to something? Or are they even more sensitive to/of it than the Beboppers themselves, so much so that they detect a wildly different "anthropomorphic property" supervenient upon the same structures? (In my experience, most people are of this latter type.)

 

It is unlikely that this kind of convergence could be explained convincingly in terms of subjective projection. It would be an astounding coincidence if everyone just happened to have the same personal associations with the opening bars of the symphony.

 

Well, I'm going to go ahead and grab the low-hanging fruit here and point out that most has become everyone merely two sentences later. This is rhetorically necessary to make convergence of so-called personal associations as implausible as Our Man thinks it is. And as always, our choice of example looms large. Famous works are the worst choices for Our Man here because most likely it is specifically the very most famous works, and perhaps only these, where convergence-by-convention can be conclusively detected and observed. I expect that unknown works would serve him better; for empirical purposes I assume that is the best/easiest way to try to control for (or just to eliminate) the role of "personal associations." Still, I have trouble seeing this intermediary cognitive level of reception as a matter of "associations." It seems rather to be (I hate this word) semiotic, i.e. it's not a simple kind of "association" but rather a more complex web of cognitive connections . . . or whatever that's technically supposed to be called by the word-salad people or by the hard-linguists. I suspect that this is not quite so complex as to be fully intractable, but that it is complex enough so as to be inconvenient for the convergentist; natural experiments are hard to come by, and artificial ones are hard to design.

 

And even if we accept coincidence in this one case, could all the other examples of overwhelmingly convergent aesthetic experiences—such as the pervasive finding that the opening of Mozart's Twenty-Ninth Symphony is beautiful—also be merely coincidental?

 

Pervasive LOL. Is that to say all, or most?

It's probably not merely coincidental, but this points to a second hazard of relying upon warhorses to serve as pivotal evidence about convergence, namely: to approach the preponderance of evidence that is assumed here, we would have to give all of the 'silent evidence' its day in court; and dare I say that once we make that move, we see nothing like the level of convergence that we see with warhorses. It's not hard to say why: to become a warhorse, a piece must both be 'good,' AND it must beget convergence. But these things covary only if we stipulate as much, i.e. if we define the one in terms of the other. No one believes this, but many seem to end up with all of their ducks in this row, lacking only the explicit stipulation of all that is implicit in their accounts. (Doesn't Carroll himself get pretty deep into these sorts of issues in his writings on film? I think Ted Cohen also wrote something that is relevant here?)

 

...   A better explanation is that these convergent responses are the result of real properties of the works in question—

 

By now we've learned that better means 'more parsimonious.' I'm always a bit confused as to whether this axiom belongs jointly to 'philosophy' and to empirical 'science,' or whether it belongs only (and strictly) to the latter; as in: 'most parsimonious in light of the evidence.' i.e. I'm not seeing the virtue of parsimony for capital-P Philosophy. It's nice when it happens, etc. But I would think that the virtue of parsimony in 'science' arises from science as an 'earthly' pursuit. Philosophy, meanwhile, is 'cosmic.' (How's that for 'dualism'? If science and philosophy both 'work,' then . . . what? Or does just one of them truly work?)

 

...

Regarding aesthetic properties as objective properties

explains why artworks are

the way they are.

Beethoven arranged the notes of the opening of the Fifth Symphony

in the way he did

 

OMG he's REALLY going to do this! Somebody stop him before it's too late!!

 

in order to present the appearance of forcefulness to an audience who

he predicted

 

😠
🤢
🤮

👏 👏 👏

 

would appreciate that very property

because of the way

in which it addresses their common perceptual apparatuses, not because of any personal associations that they each might bring to the music.

 

So, rereading, I see now that it was mere lip service to concede that aesthetic properties are "not reducible to" the "physical dimensions" of the "base-property" upon which they supervene. Rather, because this is also related to the way in which creatures like us perceive such things, it is possible after all for the composer to triangulate a solution to any and every strictly "property"-bound aesthetic intention. It all is "reducible" after all, and eminently so. He even uses the word: predicted. That makes it as plain as it can be made!

 

That is, by citing the work's aesthetic properties, we are able to explain why the work has the features—the notes, time signatures, etc.—that it has as well as the audience's convergent, appreciative responses to the work.

 

Well, it's not surprising that we could do all of this after all of the evidence is in. But it was just asserted that the composer predicted all of this beforehand . . . ?

 

...   Many properties, like mental properties, are not part of the physicist's universe ... , but they exist. ... supervenient properties, such as mental properties and aesthetic properties, call for explanation, not dismissal.

... the physicist cannot explain why most find the Fifth Symphony powerful.

 

" . . . The reason why we desperately hope that he'll never be able to do so is because we sense that this indeed ought to be possible, even if it has not yet been accomplished . . . "

 

The best explanation of that is that there are objective aesthetic properties that ground the relevant aesthetic experiences. This is a more

[194]

scientific way of proceeding ... than declaring that aesthetic experience is nothing but random personal association.

 

Wake me up when some science is presented.

(Do Philosophers-doing-Philosophy get to assess each other's scientificness by degree?)

 

...

At this point, the skeptic about the realism of aesthetic properties is apt to object. He will argue that the analogy with color properties is exaggerated. There is not, he will claim, as much convergence in the attribution of aesthetic properties to objects ...

Furthermore, the skeptic adds, the explanation for what convergence there is ... is to be explained not by invoking chance but by claiming that it is the result of the common culture of the experiencers. ... Thus, we need not suppose that aesthetic properties are objective in order to explain convergence; aesthetic experience is projective, but it is culturally mediated projection. ...

...

These are estimable objections. But they are not decisive.

There is disagreement

about the attribution of aesthetic properties. But

this does not show that the properties are merely projections.

 

Good point. So, the fact that there is disagreement shows nothing, except perhaps . . . itself?

 

For two people may disagree about the best way to describe a color. ... The fact of disagreement is not explained by surmising that they are both projecting. There is a fact of the matter. But it hinges on subtle differences in shading which the disputants

fail to articulate with complete precision.

 

Ok, good. I was starting to wonder about the methods of recording and parsing people's aesthetic reports. I don't know how we'd be able to do that satisfactorily. This seems like a domain where it is necessary to coax people into revealing themselves unwittingly. Otherwise, how could you NOT expect to get mostly projections out of them? That is what I would expect. That said, this too is not a very good explanation, nor is the failure of articulation. The better explanation would be if we could explain why two people would not be able to "articulate" a reconcilable description of some truly "objective" stimulus? If not due to "projection," then why? There are many options in the vein of "projections" but which are not projection, at least not strictly speaking. I don't know if he means to subsume any and all possible 'biases' under that heading, or if he means the p-word in the very literal/technical sense of,
"the process where an individual unconsciously attributes their own unacceptable thoughts, feelings, or traits to someone else."
(Google, 21 August 2025)
He's hard to read so precisely, so I'm left to guess that because people generally don't see themselves as being grey or taupe (these examples are excised above) that these colors and the ostensibly subtle difference between them make for a case where whatever descriptions people do offer are very unlikely to be rooted in 'their own thoughts'. And by the same token you would think that grey and taupe also could not possibly mean anything terribly important to anyone; and here too perhaps words like 'semiotic' and 'semantic' and even just 'mean', perhaps these all are misleading in just the same way as "projection" is misleading. Hardly anyone will have strong associations of taupe with their domineering mother or with their military combat action or with their first love. Where then is the room for skepticism here? There does not seem to be much room for it. The skepticism I have in mind is more diffuse and more radical, and it is a skepticism of one of the very first tenets of this book, from way back within the first ten pages: what I am skeptical of is the very notion that "our practices" make sense. Rather, I wonder if the so-called 'hallucinations' of current AI are not actually the charcteristic of these models that is closest to the ideal of human intelligence, even though it is something that is deliberately excluded, more or less by definition, from any such 'ideal.' This is a very good explanation of 'failures of articulation,' provided of course that it really is viable in all of the ways that I am taking for granted here. If there were always a little bit of 'noise' even in the minds of erudite critics, academic specialists, and prolific practitioners, that would certainly explain why even tightly controlled "objective" situations rarely produce correspondingly tight verbal reports.

 

Disputes about aesthetic properties

[195]

also revolve around subtle differences. Nevertheless, there may be

a fact of the matter

which they cannot characterize with exactitude.

...

 

He's a bit hard to read! All that I can get out of this literally is: words fail us. Big news day there. He probably is not saying, but could maybe be saying: our experiences really are all totally unique, but only by tiny degrees; hence those tiny differences get magnified by language and thereby give a false impression of high degrees of difference.

I myself and my particular skepticism are both a bit hung out to dry by the above remark, because the inability to characterize with exactitude is an unavoidable externality of that skepticism. What he says above is precisely what I too would expect to be the case; I just wouldn't expect it to matter much at all, I wouldn't be asking it to do any work for me, I wouldn't worry about being able to compare given statements with internal psychological reality so as to verify positively that there really is an in-exactitude lying between the experience and the description.

As for Our Man, I look forward to learning just what our reference point is supposed to be when we say that someone cannot describe their aesthetic experience exactly. What is the object and method of our knowledge claim when we assert that such a description is inexact? If we can examine only the description and cannot examine the experience, then we actually have no idea just how (in)exact the fit might be. He seems rather to be comparing the descriptions to the "objective properties" of the object, and/or to whatever "convergences" he feels he can bank on; but the security of that connection is exactly what we're trying to decide.

 

Indeed, projection seems an unlikely hypothesis in the preceding color example. For

in order to be really disagreeing,

our two disputants must be

disagreeing about the same thing.

They are both

referring to the same color,

only

describing it differently.

If they weren't referring to the same color, there would be no genuine disagreement between them.

 

Solid logic here. But how do we establish that they are indeed referring to the same thing?

 

... Disagreement presupposes a background of agreement. ... The best hypothesis is that they are disagreeing about the same color—

 

So, this is as of yet indeed only a hypothesis??

 

which is an objective, response-dependent property of the object under observation. What point would there be to their disagreeing about their personal associations with the object?

 

Well, if they realize this, then yeah, they'd probably stop arguing. Give the skeptic a fair shot here: two people perfectly well can think they're arguing about the same object when in reality they have different objects in mind. If they don't know this, then the pure logic of the situation is irrelevant because one or both parties lack possession of the background info that would eventually lead them into reasoning out the truth.

 

Similarly, where one critic says that the drawing is delicate and the other says that it is bland, the most reasonable hypothesis is that they are

disagreeing about the best description

of a property of an object that they are both experiencing.

 

" . . . , a problem which rarely arises for people who do not constantly describe things to other people, when those other people can perfectly well see for themselves . . . "

 

Thus, the fact of disagreement, which is so important to the skeptic's case, need not compel us to adjudge cases of aesthetic experience to be mere projection. Disagreements about aesthetic properties are more intelligible when understood as pertaining to

shades of difference

in

objective properties

whose best description

is open to debate

and, often, to

negotiation.

 

" . . . I'll give you Schubert if you give me Wolpe . . . "

There are shades of difference in the properties and in the description, but there are no "shades" in the experiences? He names every variable here except for the experiences, because in fact we are using the "properties" and the "descriptions" precisely to decide what kind of experience there has been. That seems backwards.

 

...

... disagreements about aesthetic properties presuppose something in common between disputants. It cannot be their personal associations, since presumably there is no disputing personal associations. So it must be something else. ... If it were simply a matter of projection, then the disagreement would not be real.

 

" . . . , and to be sure, the disagreement simply must be real, for if the disagreement were not real, then art would not afford us the opportunity to exercise our powers of discrimination. Indeed, we enjoy clarifying the impression that the artwork has made on us, both during the experience and afterwards in recollection, and we delight in purverying descriptions to whoever might be nearby. Perhaps some of us "enjoy" all of this a little too much. Perhaps for some of us the mere experience of art is only a means to this end . . . "

 

Thus, inasmuch as the skeptic points to genuine disagreement as an important consideration, he seems driven to admit that the supposition that aesthetic properties are indeed objective offers the best general account of such disagreements. Rather than

[196]

counting towards the projection theory,

genuine disagreement counts more in favor of the view that aesthetic properties are objective.

 

Well, I'm obviously out of my depths here. This seems insane. So-called genuine disagreement is itself the smoking gun of subjectivism. But we seem now to have broken the process into so many of its constituent parts that "objective" and "subjective" have become euphemistic or figurative. If we can confirm that everyone is in fact seeing and talking about the same physical object (say, because we have convened in the same room with an object chosen for its "property" of being previously unseen by any of us), then there is a certain strictly logical sense in which 'objectivity' has been imposed. But now we are each of us offering our descriptions, and now objectivity (in a slightly different sense!) is back in question. If the 'object' of debate/negotiation is an "aesthetic property" or even (I guess?) a "color property", then we have (re)introduced (conventionally speaking) a certain 'subjectivity'. We have introduced no new physical objects, certainly, not in the material-object sense; but we have introduced new "objects" in the conceptual-ecological sense, and these (for now let us make nothing of this) just so happen to be non-material 'objects' called "aesthetic properties." And now "disagreements" arise, and now Our Man attributes these disagreements to . . . what exactly? To the necessarily verbal nature of "description"? That is supposed to be . . . the best explanation? That is the most comforting explanation, but I'm not convinced that it is the best.

 

Among the things that must be shared for disputants to have a genuine disagreement about the aesthetic properties of an artwork is

a common conceptual framework.

 

THAT'S ALL?? How trifling! Alright Jeeves, bring me such a framework at once, and then let's go to lunch!

 

If the rival viewpoints are using different sets of concepts, they will be talking past each other. If you mean "loose" where I mean "powerful," then we are not really having an argument. ...

Yet if this is correct, then at least some aesthetic qualities have to be objective properties of things. For

how else

could we learn

to use aesthetic property-terminology consistently, unless this were so?

 

Well, Sibley gave a throwaway hypothetical as to how this could work. He seemed to expect that it was indeed nothing more than a throwaway, but I'm not so sure. If I'm understanding him, basically he says that MAYBE WE COULD, in theory, learn to do this inductively WITHOUT knowing what our terms mean (without giving quote-unquote cognitive content to our terms?). It seems to me that the reason we don't actually see this phenomenon has nothing to do with it being more difficult than he thinks. I'd say it's even easier than he thinks, but that there are innumerable countervailing forces working against our ability to locate examples: foremost among them, the fact that if you care enough to give descriptions at all, then probably you are already immersed in Our Man's common conceptual framework; but if I may conjecture a bit wildly, the reason Sibley could think up something like this in the first place is because it began to seem ever more plausible, given the general run of things mid-his-century, that someone could be at once a conceptual outsider and a phenomenological insider, to a hitherto unimaginable degree. Dare I say that all of us 'professional' artists nowadays know at least one person of this type. But until we put them under the microscope of some credentialed expert, we can't prove that they exist at all, and Sibley's hypothetical remains only a hypothetical. (Hmm, do I really know someone that I can point to unequivocally? As McLuhan says, everyone is a patchwork of occupied and unoccupied territory. Speaking in the broadest possible terms, it seems obvious, to me at least, that people often learn by ostension what to say when and to whom without really understanding what they are saying (without really understanding the 'conceptual content' of what they are saying). Sibley's hypothetical, necessarily, was total. It's hard to find real-life examples of that. But I think that incremental examples should be easy to find, i.e., I think we all can find examples of people we know (and failing that, of ourselves) falling up by way of induction and ostension into certain forms of elevated speech that they/we don't really possess conceptually.)

 

If aesthetic property terms were just free-floating personal projections, how could anyone ever learn them in a way that

permits communication

with others? But

we do use them

to communicate with others, including in cases of disagreement. So projection seems unlikely.

 

Well, communication is different yet. It is different from everything else we have namechecked so far: it is different from (or at least a subclass of) experience, description, reference, convergence, disagreement, projection, etc., etc., . . .

I'm sure the response to the "skeptic," once again, would be: but it just is not "communication" if there is no "common framework," because in that case, logically and in reality, there can be no communication! Of course that is all true, but it has never stopped anyone from thinking otherwise; and once they think (really, truly believe and behave) otherwise, then the purely logical case doesn't matter at all, not for present purposes at least. If you want to understand what's happening, you really do have to look at what people do, not at what they say.

 

That is, if you say "x is powerful" and I say it is not, we only disagree where we mean the same thing by "powerful." ... But how do we

acquire

this concept of "powerful" and its

intersubjective criteria of application

in a way that explains our consistent usage of it?

Undoubtedly, we learn it

by ostension.

 

How wonderfully implicit!

 

People

point to certain examples

of powerful things, or we listen to pieces of music that

are described as

powerful, and we

get the hang of

the term. Yet in order for us to do this, people need to be

picking out

the same kind of thing

by the concept;

we need to be attending to the same feature of the relevant objects that our tutors are.

 

Reading strictly and literally, it doesn't follow necessarily from the given notion of learning by ostension that everyone is attending to the same feature. Presumably they are at least attending the same object, and that is certainly not a negligible consideration. But we are putting a lot of trust in people this way: we are trusting people who point to or describe something as powerful, i.e. trusting them to be correct in all the ways required by the "aesthetic realist" view; and that seems like too much trust.

(And if there is nothing "correct" or "incorrect" about the application of any given aesthetic concept to any given aesthetic feature, well, then . . . ??)

 

If they were all simply projecting idiosyncratically, we would not acquire the concept. We'd simply be confused.

 

This is to make it seem as if even modest intersubjective agreement indicates robustness of concepts? What if it just means we all learned our "concepts" from the same dirty projectors?

 

But we are not. ... a more likely hypothesis is that we both have access to the relevant property of the object. A better account ... of how we come to acquire the concept and its consistent intersubjective usage is that the concept refers to an objective property ...

We cannot debate with others unless we are talking about the same thing. ... the possession of shared concepts for the relevant aesthetic properties indicates that the concepts must refer to real, objective properties of objects, since

[197]

otherwise it is difficult to explain how we come to share these concepts. ...

That is,

idiosyncratically projected properties

would not explain

the possession of the shared concepts

required for genuine disagreement.

 

I too would like to think so, but suddenly the goalposts are moving. There's nothing about ostension that necessarily indicates a sharing of concepts. It seems only to guarantee a sharing of words. Lakoff, e.g., has insisted that irreconcilable "concepts" can attach to the same word, and can persist in attaching to it, in parallel, quite robustly. Meanwhile, Our Man the capital-P simply declares that there is no discourse at all in absence of shared concepts. I'm not sure if Lakoff meant to suggest that there are two discourses of "democracy" or just two "concepts," but it seems to me an obvious-if-unstated takeaway from his short article that many of us have indeed been talking past each other, only thinking that we share a "concept" when in fact we share only a "word." If so, then there can be a discourse, of sorts, in absence of conceptual agreement. What Our Man means to suggest, of course, is that this discourse is, in that case, a fruitless and incoherent one . . . which describes most discourses of "aesthetic concepts" pretty well, in spite of myriad concurrent and undeniable cases of conceptual "agreement."

To play the skeptic here we don't need to find very many examples of discourse persisting in absence of conceptual agreement, i.e. in absence of the realization that that there is no such agreement. By certain analytic standards we need find only one. This is how I understand Lakoff's article. I could be misunderstanding it.

(An obvious conjecture here, if all of this is indeed the case, is that agreement is not interesting. Those of us who delight in churning over experiences in memory and discours-ing on this with others, in the vein suggested by Our Man a few pages back, are apt to latch onto precisely the "interesting" aesthetic cases, the ones ripe for and rife with this kind of "conceptual disagreement." Like artists themselves, critics of all stripes have a way of sniffing these out. And then, the old Kantian notion that we seek "agreement" with our aesthetic judgments is not contradicted but in fact completed by the thoroughly Freudian accounts of projection and inversion: we seek agreement precisely where we sense (unconsciously) that it is absent. This "disagreement" with our "judgment" offends our deepest sense of self-worth, and so we set about bringing our judgment back into alignment with our social world. The uniqueness of the "aesthetic" version of such machinations, if there is any uniqueness there at all, is that our judgment has, indeed, come attached to a discrete object whose existence and presence is, yes, intersubjectively verifiable-and-verified. We exercise "judgment" all the time, but seldom is its "object" of this kind. That is the unitary side of the question, the closed circle. But of course "objects" are no more monolithic than people are; that is the spiral path. Anyway, this is a conjecture.)

 

...

At this point, the skeptic may say that he agrees that there is convergent application of aesthetic predicate terms, but that this is to be explained by social conditioning. ... However, how will enculturation proceed, if the objects used to introduce the relevant concepts do not possess common, objective properties?

 

Well . . . perhaps certain people tend to do more than their share of pointing to certain examples; and perhaps certain others do more than their share of learning by ostension; and perhaps (big rhetorical leap here) no one is perfect but some imperfect people are very popular?

 

That is, how can we be trained to use aesthetic concepts consistently ... unless there is something about them, and not merely about us, that remains constant from case to case?

Moreover, it cannot be by virtue of only the properties in the physicist's vocabulary, since the relevant properties are not reducible to that idiom. They are supervenient. So cultural conditioning itself must presuppose that at least some of aesthetic properties are properties in the object that enable us to apply aesthetic concepts with intersubjective consistency. And if at least some aesthetic properties are objective properties, aesthetic experience need not be generally described as projection.

 

My grand conjecture above would explain why most of the talk is about the projections, even if a majority of aesthetic properties really are quite unremarkably supervenient upon real, objective qualities-of-objects.

Subsequently, this could underwrite a consequentialist prescription of as little talk as possible.

 

...

The enculturation hypothesis also has difficulty explaining what we might call the phenomenon of aesthetic revelation. Someone brought up in one culture may be moved immediately by artworks from an alien culture about which she has no relevant background training. Reference to cultural conditioning is of little use in such instances, ...

The supposition that aesthetic properties are objective also explains better

how we talk about them

than does the projection theory. ... people involved in disputes over aesthetic properties

act as

[198]

though

they think that they are disagreeing about the real properties of objects. They

behave as though they think

that there is a fact of the matter to be determined. They speak as if one side of the disagreement is right and the other wrong. So, they, at least,

must believe

that aesthetic properties are objective.

 

Or perhaps they are fighting for their life. Perhaps they are "as good as dead" (Becker) if they are forced to concede this kind of dispute. Perhaps they are "serving" in one or the other critical "hero-system" in order to "earn a feeling of primary value." Perhaps by then there can be no expectation of conceptual coherence and dialogical rationality.

Perhaps conceptual coherence and dialogical rationality have any chance at prevailing only where primary value is not at stake?

 

... if disputants are simply trading projections, we would have to say that their behavior is ultimately irrational.

 

🤔 🤔 🤔

 

And it is far from clear that the skeptics' arguments are compelling enough to warrant such wholesale suspicion of irrationality.

 

" . . . oh No-ELLL . . . time for your explanatory inversion, No-ELLL . . . "

 

Of course, the skeptic is right that there is disagreement ... Sometimes

one critic

will claim that an artwork is delicate, whereas

another

says it is insipid, and the debate may persist ... Isn't this at least somewhat odd?

 

Well, if it really is somewhat odd, then who's explanation is best now? Explaining something "odd" cannot be quite like explaining something which hardly requires explanation at all.

If you think that, e.g. 'there's no accounting for taste,' then what is 'odd' for you is the supposition that taste can be accounted for. Our Man, meanwhile, thinks he has accounted for taste to the extent at once necessary and possible; and against that backdrop, any residual/irreducible disagreement can only appear as "odd." But the delicate/insipid divergence seems on its face to be about experience and about honest testimony. I for one would find it quite "odd" if it ultimately proved to be entirely about description.

 

If aesthetic properties are objective properties, why do debates about aesthetic property ascriptions often seem more stubborn than debates about color attributions?

There are several ways of accounting for the persistence of critical debates over aesthetic properties that are compatible with the hypothesis that, generally, aesthetic qualities are objective properties of things. Let us look at two. The first calls attention to the fact that aesthetic property terms

can be used

in

different contexts.

 

Hard to imagine that this can explain "delicate"/"insipid."

 

In this section, we have been talking about the

descriptive use

of aesthetic property terms. When we say that a piece of music is powerful, we are

reporting

its aesthetic properties; we are not

commenting on whether or not we like it.

 

Dubious! One cannot describe an artwork as "insipid" without saying, also, that one does not like it. To insist that the term "insipid" carries no value judgments is truly "odd" and contrary to myriad "practices." Further insisting, 'metacritically' as it were, that this ought not be what criticism does is a similarly flimsy bulwark.

 

However, aesthetic terminology also often figures in statements of personal preference.

 

Indeed. Ostensibly this really is a different context, but that much can be granted without touching the question of whether this change of "context" really does account for the divergence it is being asked to account for.

 

...   Often when people appear to be disagreeing about aesthetic property ascriptions, they are really staking out personal preferences.

 

Of course. The question is, can "context" alone render a term like "insipid" as a purely "descriptive" term with no valence of preference? (Really the question is: If a "critic" or metacritic claims that the use of such a term is purely descriptive and not valuational, what would/could compel us to believe them?)

 

Disagreements about color ascriptions less frequently involve covert differences in preferences than do attributions of aesthetic properties. This is why disagreements about colors are not generally as unyielding as some exchanges of opinion about aesthetic properties.

 

But those differences of sheer "preference" regarding color ascriptions are every bit as unyielding?

 

But the intractability of such exchanges only shows that people can be obstinate about their preferences, not that aesthetic property terms, used descriptively, do not refer to objective properties.

 

Well . . . who cares about these objective properties if "preference" is such a big deal to people? At minimum, we seem no longer to be "analysing our practices" but rather prescribing ideal practices. In other words: Who is to say that the descriptivist critic is not the obstinate one here? The effort to neutrally deploy the term "insipid" (and to insist against all appearances that this has indeed been achieved by way of "context") certainly counts as "obstinate" in my book, if by this we mean "stubbornly refusing to change one's opinion or chosen course of action, despite attempts to persuade one to do so" (Google, 16 Oct 2024). Dare I conjecture that those "attempts" at "persuasion" can be readily found in the more rigorous and well-established branches of Analytic Philosophy, though neither I nor Our Man Here seem to be familiar enough with them to bring them to bear here. Local context may be powerful, but I fail to see how it can turn an insult into a compliment.

 

Some skeptics might challenge this sort of explanation of aesthetic disagreement by alleging that there is no descriptive use of aesthetic property terminology—that every attribution of an aesthetic property

[199]

entails a preference, and, therefore, involves subjective projection. ...

 

I have tried to avoid making the acquaintance of this strawman by sticking to an example given by the author himself. A different example would not lend itself so readily to precisely that skepticism he now wishes to quash.

 

But this seems extravagant. There is no contradiction in saying that "x is unified, however, it is not to my taste,"

 

Is this said?

Or, do we tend to say something else? Qualifications aside, do we tend not to bestow unified in any but honorific terms?

That is one skeptical question to be answered.

More basically:
I fail to see
how there is not a contradiction
in saying that
"x is insipid, however, I quite like it."

 

while a critic, commenting on a postmodernist pastiche, can say without inconsistency, "It's marvelously garish, and I love it."

 

Obvs. But this an equivocation of the baldest sort. "Marvelously garish" and "garish" are different enough terms as to sink the argument that the one somehow deploys the other honorifically. We need an example of unqualified deployment of "garish" that is somehow honorific . . . and besides ditching the modifier, it means ditching the card-carrying postmodernists too. (Although, tbh, the 'discourse of postmodern irony' really is a new and exciting window in on precisely this branch of Philosophical Aesthetics; I just think it means precisely the opposite of what Our Man thinks it means . . . as the Pomos themselves have tried very hard to tell us.)

 

Perhaps some aesthetic property terms can only be used preferentially rather than descriptively. But most can be used descriptively and, where they are, the prospects for utterly intractable exchanges are vastly diminished.

 

Hmm. So, if one of us loves and the other loathes all things garish, this is cheerily tractable so long as both of us agree beforehand to deploy "garish" strictly descriptively? This adds up logically, but it's just not believable. It's not even a good explanation, let alone the "best."

Remember kids, postmodernism

can be considered an "anti-aesthetic" because it challenges traditional notions of beauty by emphasizing meaning and critique over visual pleasure

("postmodernism as an 'anti-aesthetic'", Google AI Overview, 16 Oct 2025)

In other words, to find examples which support Our Man's thesis, we have to smuggle in some crucial "context" without anyone noticing: only then can "garish," e.g., appear as a strictly descriptive term, corroborated intersubjectively; and so it is . . . except that our Pomo and our Aesthete have different reasons for their values, i.e., "meaning and critique" in the first case, and "visual pleasure" in the the second. And that's not exactly, context . . . it's more like genuine disagreement. And in that event, we need an account of "genuine disgreement" which includes 'reasons-for-values', not just "preference".

 

Of course, there is still disagreement even where aesthetic property terms are used descriptively. One major source of this is that the attribution of aesthetic property terms is often

genre (and/or tradition) relative.

What counts as "reserved" and "sober"

with reference to a horror novel

may seem nevertheless "excited"

in a less intense genre.

 

Intentionalism!

 

Determining precisely which aesthetic properties an artwork possesses hinges upon

situating the work

in

the right

genre or category.

 

If so, this seems more like a body blow to Aesthetic Realism, not proof of it. The task of siutating the work in the right genre or category is an "objective" matter only in a way that is irrelevant to the matters at hand. I can understand "objectively" what the horror genre is and how and why a given work must ultimately be "categorized" there and not somewhere else; but I remain almost wholly ignorant of any experience of the genre, and because of this ignorance I am incapable of experiencing a "reserved" horror scene as anything other than excited. Now, if I insist on disputing someone else's ascription of reservedness, we then indeed have a sticky dialogical situation on our hands. But I fail to see why it's reasonable that I must simply accept the argument from category-dependence. I fail to see how that resolves anything at all. What it does is to permit maximally frictionliess critical dialogue, as if that were some kind of enduring virtue or existential necessity. It allows everyone to move on without becoming further entangled in pointless disputation. There is something to be said for that. But the fact remains (and I suspect it is a fact in my case, given how mainstram entertainment tends to strike me nowadays in my almost total insulation from it) that I am quite literally incapable of experiencing the category-dependent property, because I, so to speak, lack the category; I do not possess the category; and at that point, given myriad remarks that Our Man has made throughout this Contemporary Introduction, I suspect we must simply agree to disagree about the prospects of synthesizing "possession" of the category by way of, e.g., on one hand, formal criticism and appreciation classes led by experts, and, and the other (but also the same) hand, informal ostention from things experts say and do when they aren't necessarily performing for public consumption. It seems obvious that the ostension by way of which category-dependent qualities are "properly" experienced must come from . . . well, from the experience of artworks, not from thinking or talking about them, perhaps not from making them either.

As it happens, Sibley takes pains to anticipate this possibility and to try to say precisely why this particular kind of aesthetic "objectivity" is not aesthetic at all.

"someone who, knowing he lacked sensitivity in aesthetic matters, did not want to reveal this lack might by assiduous application and shrewd observation provide himself with some rules and generalizations; and by inductive procedures and intelligent guessing, he might frequently say the right things. [i.e. He might learn inductively to identify the horror scene as "reserved" although he does not experience it as such.] But he could have no great confidence or certainty;... He would, for himself, have no more reason to choose tasteful objects, pictures, and so on, than a deaf man would to avoid noisy places. He could not be praised for exercising taste; at best his ingenuity and intelligence might come in for mention. In "appraising" pictures, statuettes, poems, he would be doing something quite different from what other people do when they exercise taste."
(pp. 37-38)

If category is indeed determinative, then I fail to see why this is not precisely what I would be doing in avowing the hypothetical scene to be "reserved" although I experience it as "excited." For me in this hypothetical, the way towards "exercising taste" is to trust my own experience; the way toward failing to do so is to accept the word of some authority that the scene just is, in some overriding sense, of some other quality than that which I perceive it to be.

The more important point, though, is that I really, really have trouble seeing why there is anything wrong with my experience of the scene as against anyone else's. What is the problem? The problem seems to begin when I open my big fat mouth and declare that the scene just is "excited." We can dispose of that problem rather easily. (Or perhaps with great effort by way of the Grand Conjecture above!)

 

...

Two ways, then, of explaining disagreements over aesthetic properties which are compatible with regarding aesthetic properties as objective are to attribute such exchanges to

differences in preferences

and/or to

differences in categorization.

Though these go a long way toward undercutting the skeptic's interpretation of aesthetic disagreement, undoubtedly

some aesthetic disputes may remain.

But, of course, this should be expected, since aesthetic properties are often subtle, and our language is not always equal to their shades of difference.

 

This too could work against Aesthetic Realism, not for it. What do people do, what are we to do, in the face of subtle stimulus and coarse language, but to fill in the gaps with our own "projections"?

What better way to elicit projections than this?

(What better way to preempt the problem of projection than to stop talking about artworks and start experiencing them?)

 

... physicists also disagree, ... but skeptics do not take this to show that physicists are not referring to objective properties.

 

Great. So what is an objective property if disagreement about its supervenient properties is a perfectly normal consequence of it??

 

If the preceding arguments are convincing, then the skeptic is wrong. ... Such attributions are not projections. They are,

when true,

 

🤷

 

reports about the aesthetic properties we have detected in the relevant artworks. ...

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We value artworks, in part, because they afford the opportunity for us to exercise our sensibilities, to recognize and to distinguish different qualities in the appearance of things.

 

Well, exercising our sensibilities is one thing, "exercising" our mouths is something else. If we can't have the latter, do we still value the former?

Just this morning . . .

We ... conducted trials in which combinations of rather complex movements of colored patches served as a schematic representation of human or animal actions, ... the result was negative as long as I studied observers who were unaware of the purpose of my research; the perceived chain of events seemed purely mechanical.

As soon as they were given the slightest hint that human actions were being represented, however, finalistic interpretations were elicited from them, and these interpretations naturally showed themselves to be predominantly independent of the systematic variations made to the system of stimulation. The significance of the responses of the observers was therefore quite different from that in the experiments on causality; this case evidently involves "extrinsic meanings."

Of course, this conclusion is restricted to the context of our own experiments; but, in any case, it would seem that they serve to show that if there really is a phenomenal character of intentionality inherent in the perception of certain activities, then it must occur under thoroughly different conditions from those that give rise to the impression of causality. Furthermore, one can appreciate the need for caution in these matters and the care needed to distinguish by adequate criteria what is a phenomenal character, in the proper sense, from an extrinsic meaning. This may be especially difficult in the present case, since such intentional significance could probably often arise from a process of projection that will only be detected with difficulty.

('Autobiography of Professor A. Michotte Van Den Berk,' in Michotte's Experimental Phenomenology of Perception, ed. Thinès, Costall and Butterworth, pp. 41-42)

 

The aesthetic properties of artworks alert us to the qualitative dimensions of the world at large and improve our capacities for discovering them. Aesthetic properties enliven experience.

 

What about description? Description of properties doesn't have quite the same enlivening potential as 'experience' of "properties," no? (If you think that it does . . . ??)

 

We are also interested in the aesthetic qualities of artworks ... because

we too

invest

our own activities with aesthetic qualities,

 

Hmm. That's not quite projection but it's more than halfway there.

 

and are thus fascinated by superlative displays of aesthetic prowess which enable us to

reflect upon

the nature, limits and possibilities of

our own performances.

 

Here comes the Boomer Institutionalism. It's all about introspection, the dictionary opposite of "projection." But ya gotta admit, the first is the best preparation for the second; and with that prep work accomplished, "description" of "aesthetic" objects is projection's ideal outlet.

 

...

Aesthetic experience and the
experience of art

There are many different ways of responding to or experiencing artworks. We can call these, generically, art responses. ...

In this respect, aesthetic experience is an art response, one that involves either

detecting and discriminating

the aesthetic properties of a work and/or

contemplating the relation

of the form of an artwork to its point. However, ... aesthetic experience is neither the only kind of art response, nor the only appropriate form of experiencing art.

There is a popular tendency to use the notion of aesthetic experience as a synonym for experiencing art in general. ... But ... Here, the notion of aesthetic experience is restricted to only certain types of art responses:

the detection of aesthetic properties

and/or

design

[201]

appreciation.

Undeniably, these responses are among the most important experiences to be derived from artworks in general. However, they are not the only ones, nor the only legitimate ones, nor are they even the most important ones with respect to every single artwork.

 

We have plenty of hints from prior chapters as to what might confer legitimacy and importance on a response, from the top down as it were . . .

 

Moreover, it is crucial to emphasize explicitly and unambiguously the limited scope of the concept of aesthetic experience, ... in the past, people have often used the notion of aesthetic experience ambiguously ... they have often disenfranchised many legitimate art responses with arguments like this one:

1. x is a legitimate response to an artwork if and only if x is an aesthetic experience.
2. Responding to the representational content of an artwork and reflecting on its moral message are not aesthetic experiences.
3. Therefore, responding to the representational content of an artwork and reflecting on its moral messages are not legitimate responses to artworks.

But this kind of argument ... proceeds by equivocating on the concept of aesthetic experience. If the first premise is acceptable, then that is because "aesthetic experience" is obviously functioning as the name of any art response. But in the second premise, the meaning of aesthetic experience is much more narrow ...

 

This parsing of the argument is stranger than the argument itself. If (1) and (2) simply mean exactly what they say, then there is no equivocation.

The problem with (1), then, is straightforward . . . but perish the thought that someone might actually try to build a properly Philosophical case that "aesthetic experience" really is the only legitimate response to artworks!

 

Arguments like this—dismissing all sorts of legimate art responses—have been frequent in the philosophical and critical literature.

 

Does Our Man have to defend his own ascriptions of legitimacy of response? Or is that cross borne only by aestheticism-in-the-narrowest-sense?

 

The results have been to reduce our conception of art and the experience thereof.

 

Well, you could say in the same vein that pan-response-ism has 'expanded' that conception and that experience, but you'd be saying just as little (nothing at all) about what is good or bad, gained or lost, produced or destroyed, this (or that) way. Of course reduce does have a negative valence for Our Man, and this does track quite closely with "our practices." We always want more. Boomer Institutionalists want as many as possible to have as much as possible. But what we actually need is "the right amount of the right quality in the right time and the right place for the right purpose," and it's impossible to achieve this socially unless we're allowed to dismiss certain "responses" as illegitimate, and to present (what we think are) good reasons for doing so. Obviously, if we jump straight to syllogistic premises without giving any reasons, no party to the controversy is going to get very far. Better to present Aestheticism that way, then, if you don't want it to look philosophically viable!

 

...

Strictly speaking, aesthetic experience is comprised of the

detection and discrimination

of

aesthetic properties,

on the one hand, and

design appreciation,

on the other. In this regard, standing back from a picture by Delacroix and noting its turbulence is a paradigmatic example of aesthetic experience, ...

 

Sounds more like criticism. Why should "aesthetic experience" per se involve any noting? Why should the noted property be noted so explicitly and specifically? Why should this "aesthetic property" simply have to be supervenient upon some "objective property"? What is so wrong with being prompted to invent something for yourself to appreciate? There's nothing at all wrong with this, except perhaps that you cannot socially transact in self-invented currency; rather, you must deal in the coin of the realm. The road closed by aesthetic subjectivism is the road of transaction, but the road of experience remains wide open.

 

... the notion of aesthetics has been perennially associated with

perception.

That is why a large part of what is called aesthetic experience concerns

noticing,

detecting

and

discriminating.

 

"Perception is the initial sensory experience of stimuli, while apperception is the process of understanding that stimulus by linking it to existing knowledge and experiences. In essence, perception is the "what" (e.g., seeing a dog), and apperception is the "so what" (e.g., recognizing it as a poodle, which reminds you of your neighbor's dog).

(Google AI Overview, 'perception vs. apperception,' 17 Oct 2025)

 

[202]

Aesthetic experience also involves

the constructive powers of the mind.

This is especially evident in design appreciation, where the

challenge of comprehending

the diverse elements of an artwork is joined by

relating them to the point

of the whole.

 

If you think you know someone who can achieve all of that (at once!) without a whiff of "projection," then you might be friends with a bot.

 

Aesthetic detection and design appreciation attend very closely to the internal properties and relations of the artwork. Sometimes this centripetal attention has been misdescribed affectively as disinterestedness. But it is better to think of it as attention with a certain dedicated focus or delimited content—aesthetic properties, and forms.

 

" . . . and if these, in a given instance, just so happen to be the properties and forms of your own deceased pet or lost lover, then you'll just have to focus harder . . . "

 

... Aesthetic experience is of overwhelming importance to art. ... But we derive more from artworks than only aesthetic experience, including knowledge, moral insight and transformation, a sense of allegiance, an emotional workout and other things as well. ...

Chapter summary

...

[203]

...

Annotated reading

... a useful, though adversarial, overview is George Dickie's Art and the Aesthetic ... Noël Carroll, "Beauty and the Genealogy of Art Theory," ...

[204]

...

Important statements of the aesthetic definition of art include: Monroe Beardsley, "An Aesthetic Definition of Art," in What is Art?, ... ; Harold Osborne, "What is a Work of Art?," ... ; and William Tolhurst, "Toward an Aesthetic Account of the Nature of Art," ... See also: Bohdan Dziemidok, "Controversy about the Aesthetic Nature of Art," ...

For discussions of aesthetic experience consult: Monroe Beardsley, The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected Essays, ... The characterization of the affect-oriented account of aesthetic experience in this chapter was derived from Jerome Stolnitz, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Criticism ...

For a broad introduction to the topic of aesthetic properties see Göran Hermerén, The Nature of Aesthetic Qualities ... Skepticism about the objectivity of aesthetic properties is defended by Alan H.Goldman in his "Realism about Aesthetic Properties," ... Representations of the realist viewpoint are available in: Philip Pettit, "The Possibility of Aesthetic Realism," in Pleasure, Preference and Value, edited by Eva Schaper ... ; and Eddy M.Zemach, Real Beauty ...

One much-debated issue concerning aesthetic properties that is not discussed in this chapter concerns whether or not aesthetic concepts are condition-governed. For an introduction ... Frank Sibley, "Aesthetic Concepts," ... For a critical engagement with Sibley's views, see: Peter Kivy, Speaking of Art ...