Aesthetic judge-dependence and expertise

Kölbel, Max

doi:10.1080/0020174x.2016.1208917

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…In effect, this position indexes all aesthetic values to an individual at a time, thereby denying the intersubjective reality and temporal stability of aesthetic value: every appreciator sets their own standard; there is no beauty except in the beholder's eye; the customer is always right. This is less a solution than a rejection of the problem of taste, and not many in aesthetics have found it an attractive position, though some (such as Melchionne, , Kölbel, ) have dabbled with views in the vicinity. A much more popular option lies near the other, universalist end of the spectrum.…”

Section: Fault Lines In the Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

Aesthetic hedonism and its critics

Berg

2019

Philosophy Compass

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This essay surveys the main objections to aesthetic hedonism, the view that aesthetic value is reducible to the value of aesthetic pleasure or experience. Hedonism is the dominant view of aesthetic value, but a spate of recent criticisms has drawn its accuracy into question. I introduce some distinctions crucial to the criticisms, before using the bulk of the essay to identify and review six major lines of argument that hedonism's critics have employed against it. Whether or not these arguments suffice to refute hedonism decisively, I argue that its privileged status, as the sole contender in aesthetic value theory, is detrimental to downstream research on aesthetic phenomena. The essay concludes with an overview of current work and promising avenues of inquiry into non-hedonic alternatives.

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Section: Fault Lines In the Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

Aesthetic hedonism and its critics

Berg

2019

Philosophy Compass

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“…The worry about the consistency—or rather the in consistency—of justification relating to epistemic frameworks is rarely made explicit; most authors only discuss consistency objections in relation to truth relativism (see, e.g., Hales , Boghossian , and Kölbel ). Despite this, it's still the first objection (in my experience) that comes to people's minds.…”

Section: Objections To the Relational Aspectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking Epistemic Relativism

Ashton

2019

Metaphilosophy

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“Relativism” is often treated as a dirty word in philosophy, but relativistic theories are not entirely unappealing—they have features that might be tempting if they weren't thought to be outweighed by problematic consequences. The aim of this paper is to rethink both our attitude to epistemic relativism and the basic features of the view itself. The paper discusses four objections and uses them to isolate five constraints on a more plausible epistemic relativism. It then sketches out a view that meets all of these constraints. This stratified epistemic relativism offers a complex, socially informed picture of justification that accounts for the many different kinds of roles that epistemic agents act, and think, in accordance with each day, and can serve as a starting point for constructing a more detailed epistemic relativism, which could secure its appealing benefits without incurring the costs traditionally associated with relativist views.

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“…In more recent writings, Wright's focus is much narrower; now the key concern is with so-called 'basic taste' . The homing in on 'basic taste' is common ground between Wright, Max Kölbel and John MacFarlane; the central paradigms for thinking about semantic relativism nowadays are disagreements over the deliciousness of rhubarb, or the tastiness of liquorice (Wright 2012;Kölbel 2016;MacFarlane 2014). Wright's motivation for this narrowing of focus is the thought that if relativism fails in the case of basic taste, it has no chance anywhere else (Wright 2015).Note however that Wright does not claim that it is the situation of disagreement itself that motivates relativism.…”

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confidence: 99%

De-idealizing Disagreement, Rethinking Relativism

Kinzel

Kusch

2017

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

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Relativism is often motivated in terms of certain types of disagreement. In this paper, we survey the philosophical debates over two such types: faultless disagreement in the case of gustatory conflict, and fundamental disagreement in the case of epistemic conflict. Each of the two discussions makes use of a (largely) implicit conception of judgement: brute judgement in the case of faultless disagreement, and rule-governed judgement in the case of fundamental disagreement. We show that the prevalent accounts work with unreasonably high levels of idealization. We defend two claims. First, philosophical discussions of disagreement need to be de-idealized. Second, once a less idealized account of disagreement is available, both our conception of judgement and our understanding of relativism need to be revised. Our example is a case study in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's classic Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985). This case study gives a less idealized account of disagreement that conceptualizes judgements as situated (rather than brute or rule-governed). We argue that this conception can and should be applied to cases of gustatory and epistemic disagreement. The payoff will be a reformulation of relativism in terms of rationally resolvable yet contingent disagreements. KEYWORDS relativism; disagreement; sociology of scientific knowledge; idealization Faultless DisagreementRecent work in relativist semantics has focused on so-called 'disputes of inclination' in general and gustatory disagreements in particular. 2 In early work in this area, Crispin Wright contrasted 'disputes of inclination' with 'disputes of fact ' . Wright (2006a, 46-47) thinks that disagreements over the following claims are disputes of inclination: Snails are delicious. Cockroaches are disgusting. Marital infidelity is alright provided nobody get hurt. A Pacific sunset trumps any Impressionist canvas. (Perhaps:) Philosophy is pointless if not widely intelligible. The belief that there is no life elsewhere in the universe is justified. Death is nothing to fear. This list thus includes issues of moral conduct, aesthetics, metaphysics, and epistemology. In more recent writings, Wright's focus is much narrower; now the key concern is with so-called 'basic taste' . The homing in on 'basic taste' is common ground between Wright, Max Kölbel and John MacFarlane; the central paradigms for thinking about semantic relativism nowadays are disagreements over the deliciousness of rhubarb, or the tastiness of liquorice (Wright 2012;Kölbel 2016;MacFarlane 2014). Wright's motivation for this narrowing of focus is the thought that if relativism fails in the case of basic taste, it has no chance anywhere else (Wright 2015).Note however that Wright does not claim that it is the situation of disagreement itself that motivates relativism. As Wright (2012, 437) has it, already prior to our detailed philosophical investigations we have something of a 'proto-philosophical theory' concerning disputes of inclination. And it is ...

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Aesthetic judge-dependence and expertise

Cited by 8 publications

References 18 publications

Aesthetic hedonism and its critics

Aesthetic hedonism and its critics

Rethinking Epistemic Relativism

De-idealizing Disagreement, Rethinking Relativism

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