Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics

Florian Cova, Sébastien Réhault, Florian Cova, Sébastien Réhault

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781350163843
• eBook ISBN: 9781350038851
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Experimental philosophy has blossomed into a variety of philosophical fields including ethics, epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language. But there has been very little experimental philosophical research in the domain of philosophical aesthetics. Advances to Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics introduces this burgeoning research field, presenting it both in its unity and diversity, and determining the nature and methods of an experimental philosophy of aesthetics. Addressing a wide variety of empirical claims that are of interest to philosophers and psychologists, a team of authors from different disciplines tackle traditional and new problems in aesthetics, including the nature of aesthetic properties and norms, the possibility of aesthetic testimony, the role of emotions and moral judgment in art appreciation, the link between art and language, and the role of intuitions in philosophical aesthetics. Interacting with other disciplines such as moral psychology and linguistics, it demonstrates how philosophical aesthetics can integrate empirical methods and discover new ways of approaching core problems. Advances to Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics is an important contribution to understanding aesthetics in the 21st century.

Part One

The Nature of Aesthetic Judgment

1

Beyond Intersubjective Validity: Recent Empirical Investigations into the Nature of Aesthetic Judgment

Florian Cova

1.Introduction: Aesthetic judgment and intersubjective validity

Understanding the nature of aesthetic judgment and the norms that apply to it is one of the main tasks of philosophical aesthetics. In fact, according to some, it is the main task of aesthetics. This suggests that there is something problematic about aesthetic judgments—something that requires particular investigation. But what exactly?

According to most philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgments, the most puzzling feature of aesthetic judgments, the one that calls for an explanation, is their apparent intersubjective validity (Budd 2007). By intersubjective validity, here we simply mean the fact that aesthetic judgments seem to claim validity not only for the one who utters them but also for others. To put it otherwise, it seems that when I judge that something is beautiful or ugly, I thereby judge that those that do not agree with me are wrong. As Kant puts it:

When [a man] puts a thing on a pedestal and calls it beautiful, he demands the same delight from others. He judges not merely for himself, but for all men, and then speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things. Thus he says that the thing is beautiful; and it is not as if he counts on others agreeing with him in his judgment of liking owing to his having found them in such agreement on a number of occasions, but he demands this agreement of them. He blames them if they judge differently, and denies them taste, which he still requires of them as something they ought to have; and to this extent it is not open to men to say: Every one has his own taste. (Kant 1790/1928: 52)

As such, intersubjective validity is not a puzzling feature; most of our judgments do seem to share it. For example, if I claim that “it rains outside,” then it seems that this judgment has intersubjective validity—because this judgment is about the world, I expect it to be valid (in this case: true) not only for me, but also for others. Judging that “it rains outside” commits me to judge that those who do not share this judgment are wrong.

However, not all judgments have intersubjective validity. For example, if I claim that some cake I just ate is “yummy,” I might only be expressing a particular experience (such as when I say “yuk!” or “ouch!”), or describing some fact that is relative to me (e.g., that the cake is yummy to me). In this case, I might be perfectly okay with others expressing a different judgment; I do not expect from others that they share my judgment, nor do I fault them when they don’t.

The problem with aesthetic judgments, according to most philosophers, is that they look like typical judgments that do not have intersubjective validity: as the judgment that something is yummy, they seem to express a particular personal experience of a natural or artificial object. As such, we would expect them not to demand agreement from others. But, contrary to this expectation, it seems that we impose norms on aesthetic judgments: we argue about the aesthetic qualities of objects, we distinguish between good and bad taste, and we rank works of art according to their aesthetic merits. Thus, aesthetic judgments seem to be both subjective (i.e. expressing a particular personal experience) and intersubjectively valid (i.e. demanding that other agree with them, and as such susceptible to be right and wrong) (see Schellekens 2009).

This tension is perfectly illustrated by the following YouTube comment, which I extracted from a dispute about the quality of a given videogame:

Well I’ll be goddamned. You’re actually, legitimately, literally 100% objectively wrong about a subjective thing. This is like dividing by 0. How’d you fucking do this?

Though I guess that Zangwill (2010) might have a more rigorous way to characterize it:

In respect of normativity, judgments of taste are like empirical judgments and unlike judgments of niceness or nastiness, but in respect of subjectivity, judgments of taste are unlike empirical judgments and like judgments of niceness or nastiness. So we have a three-fold division: empirical judgments, judgments of taste, and judgments of niceness or nastiness. And judgments of taste have the two points of similarity and dissimilarity on each side just noted.

As Kant recognized (more or less following Hume), all this is a point from which to theorize. The hard question is whether, and if so how, such a subjectively universal judgment is possible. On the face of it, the two characteristics are in tension with each other. Our puzzle is this: what must be the nature of pleasure in beauty if the judgments we base on it can make claim to correctness? This is the Big Question in aesthetics. Kant set the right agenda for aesthetics.

So, how are we to account for the apparent intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgment? Are we going to suppose that aesthetic judgments indeed are intersubjectively valid and try to explain why and how (e.g., Goldman 1995, Zangwill 2005)? Or are we going to claim that this appearance is only an illusion and try and develop an appropriate error theory (e.g. Genette 1997)? Both options are tempting but in this chapter I will argue that there is a third way: to simply reject the problem, rather than trying to solve it.

2.Intersubjective validity revisited

2.1.Cova and Pain (2012)’s studies

As we just saw, explaining the apparent intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgments is considered by some to be the “Big Question” of aesthetics. This means that the apparent intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgment is more often than not considered as the starting point from which all account of aesthetic judgment must develop (even if the conclusion is that this apparent subjective validity is merely an illusion). Indeed, that aesthetic judgments seem to have intersubjective validity is often taken as a datum, something that would be part of common sense:

When one is touched by the beauty of a sunset, a Beethoven string quartet, a novel by James Joyce, or a painting by Giorgio Morandi, one cannot help thinking that the experienced feeling of pleasure ought to be shared by others. Notwithstanding its logical singularity, the pure judgement of taste—i.e. the judgement of beauty—requires or “demands” everyone else’s agreement. Yet the demand for universal agreement is very peculiar, since it cannot be based on conceptual arguments or proofs and is only determined by one’s own feeling of pleasure or displeasure. (Vandenabeele 2008: 410)

But is that the case? Is it true that most of us spontaneously perceive our aesthetic judgments as being intersubjectively valid? This is the question Nicolas Pain and I asked ourselves. To answer it, we probed people’s beliefs about the intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgments through three studies (Cova and Pain, 2012). In the first two studies, we gave French undergraduates fifteen vignettes describing several kinds of disagreements betwe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1  The Nature of Aesthetic Judgment
• Part 2  The Ontology of Art
• Part 3  Emotion and Imagination
• Part 4  The Languages of Aesthetics
• Part 5  Metaphilosophy
• Index
• Copyright Page