Peter Geach's distinction between logically predicative and logically attributive adjectives has become part of the technical apparatus of philosophers, but no satisfactory explanation of what an attributive adjective is has yet been provided. Geach's discussion suggests two different ways of understanding the notion. According to one, an adjective is attributive just in case predications of it in combination with a noun fail to behave in inferences like a logical conjunction of predications. According to the other, an adjective is attributive just in case it cannot be applied in a truth-value-yielding fashion unless combined with a noun. The latter way of understanding the notion yields both a more defensible version of Geach's arguments that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are attributive and a more satisfactory explanation of attributivity.
There is a widely held view, due to the work of Jerome Stolnitz, that the concept of a distinctively aesthetic mode of perception, one defined by the characteristic of disinterestedness, originated with such writers as Shaftesbury, Addison, Hutcheson, Burke, and Archibald Alison. I argue through a detailed examination of the texts that this view is a complete misrepresentation. Those of the writers under discussion who employ the concept of disinterestedness (which not all of them do) do not give it the so-called "perceptual" meaning that Stolnitz does, and none of them use it to define a specifically "aesthetic" mode of perception, attention, pleasure, or anything else. The governing concept of their aesthetic thought was neither "disinterestedness" nor "the aesthetic" but (with the exception of Shaftesbury) "taste." I conclude with an analysis of what the differences are, and why they matter.
Three remarks: (i) Kant also allows for aesthetic judgements based on displeasure (Unlust), but for the sake of simplicity I shall consider only those based on pleasure. (ii) In § 1 Kant defines an aesthetic judgement as a one 'whose determining ground cannot be other than subjective ' (p. 89, Ak. 5:203), while in the cited passage in the First Introduction, he defines it as a judgement 'whose predicate can never be cognition (concept of an object)'. He apparently considers these two characterizations to be equivalent. (iii)
OF THE PAPERMany commentators have supposed that when Kant speaks of the claim of judgments of taste to subjective universal validity, he means a claim about how people will or would respond to a given object under certain conditions. Others have held that he has in mind a claim, to be justified by the connection of taste with morality, that people should respond to the object in a certain way. I argue, against both interpretations, that Kant understands the universality claim in judgments of taste to be a normative requirement shared with ordinary empirical judgments, and therefore one to be justified by epistemological considerations alone, without any reference to morality. This, however, raises a problem: why should the universal agreement required by a judgment of taste consist in the sharing of a feeling, rather than simply in the sharing of a thought? Kant's answer is that in a judgment of taste, a feeling assumes the role of predicate. But such a solution, I observe in conclusion, presents a problem as serious as the one it purports to solve.2M ILES RIND 2. Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). All citations for Guyer, unless otherwise indicated, are to this book. Incidentally, the sense in which I, following Guyer, employ the phrase "claim of taste" is not the sense in which Kant himself, in one place, uses it. What he refers to as "the claims and counterclaims of taste [den Ansprüchen und Gegenansprüchen des Geschmacks]" ( § 57, 5:341) are not judgments of taste, but judgments of reason as to the nature of taste. See § 55, 5:337 and § 57 Rem. II, 5:344.
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