Matravers—Representational vs. Expressive Qualities

Matravers and Levinson
"Aesthetic Properties"
(2005)

[196] Many terms that have an aesthetic use, also have a use in what I shall call 'central cases'. For example, in the central cases 'sad' refers to a particular mental state, or objects and events reasonably connected to such a state. There is an aesthetic use in which it refers to representations of situations which, if the situations were actual, the term would be appropriate... However, there is also an aesthetic use where it does not refer to the propositional content of objects (broadly construed), but to their expressive quality. Most
[197]
familiar from the literature, some pieces of purely instrumental music...are sad. Although this case is the most familiar a little reflection shows that a vast range of predicates have both central and aesthetic uses. The overwhelming aesthetic feature of Liverpool Cathedral, after all, is that it is big. Here is [Roger] Scruton's argument.

Consider the application of an emotion term —such as 'sad' — to a work of art (or, for that matter, to an event, or a letter, or anything that cannot literally be in the emotional state of sadness). To understand the word 'sad' is to know how to apply it to people in order to describe their emotional state. The criteria for the application of the term 'sad' concern the gestures, expressions and utterances of people on the basis of which I describe them as sad, and to grasp the concept of sadness is to know how to apply it on the basis of these criteria. When we apply the concept to art, however, it is arguable that these criteria are not, or need not be present. Does this mean that the term 'sad' is ambiguous?

Scruton points out that if the term were ambiguous, it would follow that someone could grasp fully what was meant in applying 'sad' to a work of art, whilst having no grasp at all of what it meant in the central case. This he rightly takes to be impossible. Hence, any view which entailed such ambiguity would be in trouble.

[emailed to self, 26 April 2021]