Margolis—The Importance of Being Earnest about the Definition and Metaphysics of Art

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[215]

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 68, No. 3 (SUMMER 2010), pp. 215-223

JOSEPH MARGOLIS

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The Importance of Being Earnest about the Definition and Metaphysics of Art

[SK's comments]

The philosophy of art may be doomed,
again and again
but always once and for all,
to define what it is to be
"a work of art,"
an "artwork,"
"art"
in the sense

best suited to "the fine arts."

Modern efforts seem to end
in exhaustion
or bafflement
or sheer scatter
or

a sort of bad faith

that assures us that it was never worth the bother in the first place.

But many are troubled by the nagging sense of failure that no mere dismissal seems able to dispel.

We are still caught in the puzzles of Morris Weitz's extraordinarily disturbing early essay, ...

published ... only a few years after the appearance of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953),

on which,

however inaccurately,

it claims to depend.

If Weitz's account is regarded
as
the original gauntlet analytic aesthetics took up so eagerly almost at once ...

it is equally plausible
to credit Arthur Danto's immensely influential essay,
"The Artworld," published in 1964,
with
having confirmed
(by the absence of explicit mention,
so to say)
the single most-discussed version
of
the great complication
that
baffled all efforts
at
defining art
in accord with
the new spirit of rigor
that had just taken hold
in
analytic aesthetics.

I mean,
of course,

the trauma

produced by

Duchamp's devilish jokes

(especially the notorious Fountain)

transfigured,

in Danto's hands,
into

the sober metaphysics

of Warhol's Brillo Box.

Haig Khatchadourian—Art-Names and Aesthetic Judgments

Haig Khatchadourian
Art-Names and Aesthetic Judgments
Philosophy, Vol. 36, No. 136 (Jan., 1961), pp. 30-48

[SK's comments]

[30]

I

IN an earlier paper
I have attempted to show,
among other things,
that the names (primarily) of

human artifacts

and

man-devised activities and processes

involve in their uses
the notion of
some

end-in-view,

function,

or use

(more or less different in the case of different names),
which partially regulates these uses.

In this paper I shall limit myself to a somewhat detailed discussion of one very important class of such common names which requires a separate treatment.

I mean art-names.

Haig Khatchadourian—Common Names and "Family Resemblances"

Haig Khatchadourian
Common Names and "Family Resemblances"
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Mar., 1958)

[SK's comments]

Maurice Mandelbaum:
"Haig Khatchadourian has shown that Wittgenstein is less explicit than he should have been with respect to the levels of determinateness at which these resemblances are significant for our use of common names."

This paper makes for utterly thankless reading. I think it's also completely wrong about the "determinateness" issue. Unfortunately, several art-philosophers of the day refer to it, including in the above case, where it serves as a means of reconstituting what Wittgenstein sought to dissolve. Hence we charge ahead at full-throttle.

[341]

COMMON NAMES AND "FAMILY RESEMBLANCES"

I

... we propose to give, first,
a brief analysis of Wittgenstein's notion ...

Next we shall try to show
that

whether or not "family resemblances" constitute a general feature of ordinary language so far as common names are concerned,

there are at least some common names
such that the things named by them

do have

one or more features in common,

though this feature or these features are not

a determinate or relatively determinate

quality or characteristic.

Whatsoever could be a

feature

without also being

a determinate

quality or characteristic

?

Whatsoever
could this "determinacy"
be

relative

to?

Maurice Mandelbaum—Family Resemblances and Generalization Concerning the Arts

[219]

AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Volume 2, Number 3, July 1965

V. FAMILY RESEMBLANCES AND GENERALIZATION
CONCERNING THE ARTS

MAURICE MANDELBAUM

[SK's comments]

In 1954 William Elton collected and published a group of essays under the title Aesthetics and Language.

As his introduction made clear,
a common feature of these essays was

the application to aesthetic problems

of

some of the doctrines

characteristic of

recent British linguistic philosophy.

... there have been a number of important articles which, in addition to those contained in the Elton volume, suggest the direction in which this influence runs.

...

"The Task of Defining a Work of Art"
by Paul Ziff,

"The Role of Theory in Aesthetics"
by Morris Weitz,

Charles L. Stevenson's
"On 'What is a Poem'"

and
W. E. Kennick's
"Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?"

In each of them one finds a conviction which was also present in most of the essays in the Elton volume:

that it is a mistake

to offer generalizations concerning the arts,

...

to attempt to discuss

what art, or beauty, or the aesthetic, or a poem,

essentially is.

In partial support of this contention, some writers have

made explicit use

of Wittgenstein's doctrine of family resemblances;

Morris Weitz, for example, ...

However, ... [he] made no attempt to analyze, clarify, or defend

the doctrine itself.

...

a husserlian interlude within a contemporary introduction (cont. #3)

 

PHENOMENOLOGY, ROLE, AND REASON:
ESSAYS ON THE COHERENCE AND DEFORMATION OF SOCIAL REALITY
By
MAURICE NATANSON
(1974)

[SK's comments]

---

Because the detonator on this discussion was the Institutional Theory of Art, and because I spent the second half of 2025 dabbling in Phenomenology, I can't resist bringing Schutz's sociological notion of "typification" into the current discussion of concept formation, just to see what (if anything) can be gleaned from it. This did open up plenty of new ground, far too much of it.

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[33]

Chapter III

Alfred Schutz on Social Reality
and Social Science

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.—Alfred North Whitehead

I

It has taken American philosophers and social scientists thirty-five years to catch up with the early work of Alfred Schutz.

His Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie was first published in 1932. ... It is clear that [this work] was closely studied by some of the ablest minds of the 'thirties and 'forties ...

[34]

...

Philosophy is inescapable for the social scientist who seeks clarity and rigor in his work, ...

Nor is it solely a question of interest in the logic of scientific inquiry, ...

Philosophy is rather concerned with

the phenomena of the social world:

men acting in the context of an intersubjective reality, shared and sustained by temporal beings aware of themselves no less than of one another.

...

In its historical focus, The Phenomenology of the Social World is an attempt to vindicate and deepen Max Weber's theory of social action by providing for it a philosophical grounding which derives from some of the central ideas of Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson.

In its systematic aspect, the Phenomenology is an effort to establish the outlines of a conception of meaning whose constitutive character is grounded in the reality of inner-time consciousness.

In its programmatic dimension, the Phenomenology is an adumbration of

a philosophy of social reality,

[35]

not simply a methodology but

an anatomy of man's existence with his fellow-men in the midst of everyday life,

within what Husserl called

the "natural attitude."

The axis on which this threefold movement turns is phenomenology itself, ...

The social world is primarily the world of everyday life as lived and appreciated and interpreted by common-sense men carrying on the cognitive and emotive traffic of daily life.

"Common-sense men" includes all of us insofar as

we act in the world

rather than

observe it formally as disinterested scientists.

...

Philosophy is, in fact, a reversal of the underlying attitude of common-sense life,

a primordial glance at what the mundane eye has simply accepted without even the intimation of serious question.

It is possible to be swept up and thrown headlong into this

reversal

without asking for it.
In this sense, it is not the

eye

that is

mundane

(or not)
but rather that which is seen.

Just as our purported morals can be broken by constructing ever more outlandish hypothetical choices, so can our

common-sense

views be broken by encountering evermore outlandish situations wherein certain questions are forced upon us.

(For left-identified transplants like me, the homelessness situation in Los Angeles is an excellent example.)

Among those not asking for it, as among those who veritably beg, there must be a full gamut of (in)susceptibility. Still, desire and susceptibility are sold separately, and every man has his price.

Blogspot Bingo: Family Resemblance

google query, 11 dec 2025:
wittgenstein family resemblance site:blogspot.com

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Philosophical Perspectives in Clinical Psychology
Essences and Family resemblances

perhaps even Wittgenstein - but certainly those who have taken his ideas to warrant talk of types of concepts called 'family resemblance concepts' - stray too far towards equating essences and necessary/sufficient conditions. Just because various instances of a phenomenon may have no one thing in common apart from their being instances of that one phenomenon - no one further thing in common, one might say - does not, I contend, imply that the phenomenon has no essence.

A worthy insight.

I think I know what necessary/sufficient conditions are. What is an essence? If I try to define it in a way that allows me to agree with the above, I can conjure only fanciful metaphors.

e.g. It's possible (likely, even) that the 'average' of a set of numbers does not itself appear in the set.

Here as always, the 'truth' of the average is a matter of what you're trying to do with it. So with essences, I would think.

In this metaphor of 'averages', essences are reductive. Is there a constructive version? I don't think so.

"It is far easier to analyze [someone] than to synthesize him."

(E.O. Wilson, Consilience, p. 83)

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Find posts labeled 'Wittgenstein' here.

a wittgensteinian interlude to a contemporary introduction (cont. #2)

[SK's comments]

[These are the two papers mentioned by Bambrough (1961) in a footnote: "Of recent writings on this topic I believe that only [these] show a complete understanding of the nature and importance of Wittgenstein's contribution" to "the problem of universals".]

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JOHN WISDOМ
PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHO-ANALYSIS
(1964)

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[51]

METAPHYSICS AND VERIFICATION
(Reprinted from Mind, Vol. XLVII, N.S., No. 188, 1938)

a wittgensteinian interlude within a contemporary introduction (cont. #1)

 

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY 7, 573-605 (1975)
'Family Resemblances: Studies in the Internal Structure of Categories'
ELEANOR ROSCH AND CAROLYN B. MERVIS
University of California, Berkeley

Six experiments explored the hypothesis that the members of categories which are considered most prototypical are those with most attributes in common with other members of the category and least attributes in common with other categories. In probabilistic terms, the hypothesis is that prototypicality is a function of the total cue validity of the attributes of items.
...

As speakers of our language and members of our culture, we know that a chair is a more reasonable exemplar of the category furniture than a radio, and that some chairs fit our idea or image of a chair better than others.

However, when describing categories analytically, most traditions of thought have treated category membership as a digital, all-or-none phenomenon.

That is, much work in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and anthropology assumes that categories are logical bounded entities, membership in which is defined by an item’s posses-

[574]

sion of a simple set of criterial features, in which all instances possessing the criterial attributes have a full and equal degree of membership.

In contrast to such a view, it has been recently argued that some natural categories are analog and must be represented logically in a manner which reflects their analog structure.

Rosch (1973, 1975b) has further characterized some natural analog categories as internally structured into a prototype (clearest cases, best examples of the category) and nonprototype members, with nonprototype members tending toward an order from better to poorer examples.

While the domain for which such a claim has been demonstrated most unequivocally is that of color there is also considerable evidence that natural superordinate semantic categories have a prototype structure. Subjects can reliably rate the extent to which a member of a category fits their idea or image of the meaning of the category name , and such ratings predict performance in a number of tasks.

Carroll—A contemporary introduction—Chapter 5—Part II

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

 

[SK's vitriol]

 

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[224]

Part II
Two contemporary
definitions of art

The Institutional Theory of Art

...

[225]

...

Institutional Theorists like [George] Dickie were

impressed

by a certain criticism of the family resemblance method ... Suggested by Maurice Mandelbaum,

the objection

scrutinizes

the central metaphor of Neo-Wittgensteinians

—family resemblance—

and finds it wanting.

Carroll—A contemporary introduction—Chapter 5—Part I

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

 

[SK's vitriol]

 

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[206]

5
Art, definition and identification

Part I
Against definition

Neo-Wittgensteinianism: art
as an open concept

... we have examined successive attempts to define art. ... each of them appears inadequate in turn. Undoubtedly, this has led some readers to suspect that maybe one cannot define art at all; ... Or, perhaps some of you thought this from the very beginning; ... you may feel reassured to learn that [this] is also a philosophical position, sometimes called Neo-Wittgensteinianism.

...   Probably one reason that Western philosophers have been preoccupied with defining art for the last century or so is that it is during this period that we have found ourselves confronted with a dazzling array of different kinds of art ...

And, ... during the same period, Westerners grew more and more familiar with the art of other cultures, ...

[207]

... Whereas for centuries art developed slowly and smoothly ... , by the twentieth century matters were getting confusing. ...

It is at least plausible to suppose that if we had assembled a group of informed art lovers at some imaginary point around the middle of the eighteenth century and paraded a selection of objects before them ... they would have been able to agree, to a surprising extent, about which of the objects were art and which were not. ... They possessed a shared, though often unarticulated, understanding ...

Artists, too, shared in this common understanding, ...

...

Identifying art became a pressing issue;

 

Not really. I mean, those few who did care, cared intensely. That is one way to measure pressingness. But if we also find that many of these people had something more riding on this issue, so much more than the comfort of shared understanding or the general human hatred of confusion, then the "pressing" quality of their discourse on the matter is more plausibly explained by self-interest than by anything more cosmic. But, do expect the case for the cosmic importance of x to be made in a book devoted to x!

 

...

MORRIS WEITZ—The Role of Theory in Aesthetics

Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)

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[143]

The Role of Theory in Aesthetics

MORRIS WEITZ

[Pub. 1956, tho' a prizewinner in '55]

Theory
has been central
in aesthetics and
is still the preoccupation
of
the philosophy of art.

Its main avowed concern remains the determination of the nature of art which can be formulated into a definition of it.

It construes definition as the statement of the necessary and sufficient properties of what is being defined, where the statement purports to be a true or false claim about the essence of art, what characterizes and distinguishes it from everything else.

Each of the great theories of art—Formalism, Voluntarism, Emotionalism, Intellectualism, Intuitionism, Organicism—converges on the attempt to state the defining properties of art.

Each claims
that it is
the true theory
because
it has formulated correctly
into a real definition
the nature of art;

and that the others
are false
because
they have left out
some necessary or sufficient property.

"This looks reads like a setup, Jim Morris."

By now, with several decades of shockingly robust pluralism in the rear view mirror, those -isms look more like affirmative declarations of intent, whether before or after the fact, than they do like negative boundary-drawing maneuvers. We've moved on to using art, and we dare any purported definitions to try to catch up to us and our using; we use art in whatever way feels correct to us in a given moment, this rather than casting about for some necessary or sufficient property that has been left out.

It turns out that art, seemingly, has infinite uses. It has too many uses to be amenable to a real definition. But that doesn't matter, because the outcomes of the uses are clear as day, and because we human beings are, for better and worse, moral creatures. That's why we actually do need to hear everyone's opinion, and it's alright if some of those opinions seem too moralistic and not sufficiently aesthetic. Here, for once, bad opinions are more valuable than good definitions!

No one would/could expect philosophers of art to be any but the last to notice. Our Man here is among the more acute. First, though, he has to set us up.