How to Be an Optimist About Aesthetic Testimony

McKinnon, Rachel

doi:10.1017/epi.2016.4

Cited by 11 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…Elsewhere, I have argued that that recommendations pass information about aesthetic merit(Nguyen 2017). The argument of this paper is compatible with all of these approaches.3 This expression of the acquaintance principle is intended to be suitably minimal so as to be compatible with a wide swath of the literature on testimony and acquaintance, and to avoid commitment to any of the disputed details about the best articulation of the principle(Budd 2003;Livingston 2003;Meskin 2004 Meskin , 2007Laetz 2008; Hopkins 2011;Konigsberg 2012; Whiting 2015; Lord 2016;McKinnon 2017;Ransom 2019).…”

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confidence: 88%

Autonomy and Aesthetic Engagement

Nguyen

2019

Mind

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There seems to be a deep tension between two aspects of aesthetic appreciation. On the one hand, we care about getting things right. Our attempts at aesthetic judgments aim at correctness. On the other hand, we demand autonomy. We want appreciators to arrive at their aesthetic judgments through their own cognitive efforts, rather than through deferring to experts. These two demands seem to be in tension; after all, if we want to get the right judgments, we should defer to the judgments of experts. How can we resolve this tension? The best explanation, I suggest, is that aesthetic appreciation is something like a game. When we play a game, we try to win. But often, winning isn’t the point; playing is. Aesthetic appreciation involves the same flipped motivational structure: we aim at the goal of correctness, but having correct judgments isn’t the point. The point is the engaged process of interpreting, investigating, and exploring the aesthetic object. When one defers to aesthetic testimony, then, one makes the same mistake as when one looks up the answer to a puzzle, rather than solving it for oneself. The shortcut defeats the whole point. This suggests a new account of aesthetic value: the engagement account. The primary value of the activity of aesthetic appreciation lies in the process of trying to generate correct judgments, and not in having correct judgments.

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confidence: 88%

Autonomy and Aesthetic Engagement

Nguyen

2019

Mind

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“…In light of these concerns, much recent philosophical work has been directed at revising, adjusting, and further qualifying (i) and (ii) in order to render the concomitant problems less severe. On the one hand, we find suggestions of how to amend the perceptual requirement so as to accord a limited role to testimony in the formation of certain aesthetic beliefs (McKinnon 2017;Meskin 2004), allow for some degree of inferential reasoning in aesthetic judgement (Dorsch 2013), and extend what may be conceived as our perceptual resources in appreciating conceptual art (Shelley 2003). On the other hand, we find work attempting to broaden certain definitions of aesthetic pleasure (Gorodeisky 2019) as well as mitigating specific aspects of the hedonist approach in relation to aesthetic expertise, agency, and response-dependence (Davies 2003;Levinson 2002b;Lopes 2015Lopes , 2018Shelley 2019;Watkins and Shelley 2012).…”

Section: IImentioning

confidence: 99%

Aesthetic Experience and Intellectual Pursuits

Schellekens

2022

Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume

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The main aim of this paper is to examine the practice of describing intellectual pursuits in aesthetic terms, and to investigate whether this practice can be accounted for in the framework of a standard conception of aesthetic experience. Following a discussion of some historical approaches, the paper proposes a way of conceiving of aesthetic experience as both epistemically motivating and epistemically inventive. It is argued that the aesthetics of intellectual pursuits should be considered as central rather than marginal to our philosophical accounts of aesthetic experience, and that our views about the relation between the aesthetic and cognitive domains should be reconfigured accordingly.

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“…Acceptance is active -it is a decision to treat p as true. She suggests that coming to believe, passively, from testimony is permissible, but that actively accepting that p on the basis of testimony is wrong (McKinnon 2016). But McKinnon's account doesn't fit the cases, either.…”

Section: New Cases Versus Old Theoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Uses of Aesthetic Testimony

Nguyen

2017

The British Journal of Aesthetics

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The current debate over aesthetic testimony typically focuses on cases of doxastic repetition -where, when an agent, on receiving aesthetic testimony that p, acquires the belief that p without qualification. I suggest that we broaden the set of cases under consideration. I consider a number of cases of action from testimony, including reconsidering a disliked album based on testimony, and choosing an artistic educational institution from testimony. But this cannot simply be explained by supposing that testimony is usable for action, but unusable for doxastic repetition. I consider a new asymmetry in the usability aesthetic testimony. Consider the following cases: we seem unwilling to accept somebody hanging a painting in their bedroom based merely on testimony, but entirely willing to accept hanging a painting in a museum based merely on testimony. The switch in intuitive acceptability seems to track, in some complicated way, the line between public life and private life. These new cases weigh against a number of standing theories of aesthetic testimony. I suggest that we look further afield, and that something like a sensibility theory, in the style of John McDowell and David Wiggins, will prove to be the best fit for our intuitions for the usability of aesthetic testimony. I propose the following explanation for the new asymmetry: we are willing to accept testimony about whether a work merits being found beautiful; but we are unwilling to accept testimony about whether something actually is beautiful.Suppose that I have never seen Van Gogh's Irises for myself, but my art teacher tells me that it's an extraordinarily beautiful painting. Intuitively, something seems to have gone wrong if I were to simply to acquire, on the basis of testimony and testimony alone, the belief, "Van Gogh's Irises is a very beautiful painting." It may be more palatable if we imagine my acquiring a more qualified belief from testimony: say, the belief that the painting was probably beautiful, or that I was likely to find it beautiful when I finally saw it for myself. But the naked repetition of the claim, to another or to myself, seems wrong. We seem to think such unqualified aesthetic judgments should come from direct experience, and not be acquired second-hand.Let's call this sort of case "doxastic repetition" -when, on the basis of received testimony that p, an agent believes that p. What's especially fascinating here is that doxastic repetition seems entirely acceptable in all sorts of non-aesthetic contexts. There is nothing wrong with acquiring, via my mechanic's testimony, the unqualified belief that my car needs a muffler. Thus, there seems to be an asymmetry between aesthetic and non-aesthetic testimony. Other kinds of cases also seem to support the existence of such an asymmetry. Suppose, for example, that another person were to describe to me, in exquisite detail, particular visual details of Van Gogh's Irises. It seems entirely unproblematic for me to acquire second-hand knowledge about those details -say, the fact that the...

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How to Be an Optimist About Aesthetic Testimony

Cited by 11 publications

References 68 publications

Autonomy and Aesthetic Engagement

Autonomy and Aesthetic Engagement

Aesthetic Experience and Intellectual Pursuits

The Uses of Aesthetic Testimony

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