Abstract
Descriptivism in the ontology of art is the thesis that the correct ontological proposal for a kind of artwork cannot show the nascent ontological conception of such things embedded in our critical and appreciative practices to be substantially mistaken. Descriptivists believe that the kinds of revisionary art ontological proposals propounded by Nelson Goodman, Gregory Currie, Mark Sagoff, and me are methodologically misconceived. In this paper I examine the case that has been made for a local form of descriptivism in the ontology of art: a form that does not quarrel with the possibility of revisionism in matters of ‘fundamental metaphysics’, but which argues that special features of the arts make descriptivism in this particular sphere obligatory. David Davies, Andrew Kania and Stephen Davies are local descriptivists in this sense. I argue that the burden of proof lies with the local descriptivist, but that this burden is too heavy for him to carry. Specifically, it emerges that the only way in which the local descriptivist can motivate his position is by arguing that our artistic practices determine the art ontological facts: a thesis that local descriptivists typically appeal to, but have not been able to argue for successfully. My conclusion is that the methodological debate in the ontology of art should now proceed by focussing on the case for global descriptivism: i.e. that form of descriptivism that opposes the possibility of revisionism in ontological matters across the board.
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Notes
An object is temporally inflexible just in case it is insusceptible to intrinsic change over time. An object is modally inflexible just in case it could not have had different intrinsic properties from those it has actually.
Metaontological realism goes under various names. Sider (2009) and Jenkins (2010) call it ‘ontological realism’, whilst Amie Thomasson calls it ‘the discovery view’: something she characterises, within the ontology of art, as the thesis that its knowledge claims are ‘presented as discoveries of fully determinate, mind-independent facts about the ontological status of works of art of various kinds, about which everyone may be ignorant or in error’ (Thomasson 2005, p. 221). We may wonder about the commitment to full determinacy here but, that aside, this captures the key commitment of metaontological realism.
Mentioning Collingwood’s idealist conception of artworks at this point is instructive, since it nicely demonstrates that metaontological realism is consistent with first-order ontological proposals of an idealist stripe. If Collingwood is right, works of art depend for their existence upon figuring in human consciousness; but taking this particular first-order mind-dependence claim to be true is compatible with regarding this truth as objective in the manner claimed by metaontological realism. For it may yet be a discoverable fact—that is, a fact not determined by our judgments on this question—that artworks are mind-dependent in the way Collingwood believes. (Indeed, our critical and appreciative practices seem to embody the tacit belief that works of art are not mind-dependent in the way Collingwood supposes; so if Collingwood’s thesis is true, it could only be an objective, discoverable truth in the sense that the metaontological realist insists upon.)
Further establishing the difference between metaontological and first-order realist claims, Theodore Sider points out that metaontological anti-realism is compatible with the adoption of first-order realist positions (Sider 2009, p. 387).
This metaphor is borrowed from Wright (1992, pp. 1–2).
This conceptual link between realism and the possibility of widespread error is recognised by, for example, Joyce (2007, p. 3).
As Sider puts it, with typical vigour, the answers to such questions ‘are “objective” … and “out there”, just like the answers to questions about the nature of electrons’ (Sider 2009, p. 409).
This conception of metaphysics as quasi-scientific is not undermined by the fact that most metaphysics can be done from the armchair. Mathematics and geometry have a methodology that is similarly a priori in this sense, but the questions they address have objective answers. As Timothy Williamson insists, [is]f mathematics is an armchair science, why not philosophy too?’ (Williamson 2007, p. 4).
Stage theory is also defended along similar lines by Hawley (2004).
The Russellian phrase, ‘the metaphysics of the Stone Age’, is culled from Daly and Liggins (2010, p. 217).
Robert Stecker agrees that these explananda are legitimate (Stecker 2009, p. 377).
I presume that Kania here takes ‘is dependent on’ to express the same relation as that expressed by ‘is determined by’. For the rest of this paper I will not question this assumption, although Grimes (1991, p. 83) has denied it.
Notice that this conclusion is consistent with holding that makers’ intentions are partly constitutive of artefacts. Let us grant that ‘for an individual object to be a chair, it must itself have been intended to be a chair’ (Thomasson 2007b, p. 58). It follows from this that something indistinguishable from a particular chair will not itself be a chair unless it was the product of such an intention; and it will be tempting to see examples of this sort as illustrating that the maker of an artefact cannot but have a substantially correct conception of what kinds of features something must have in order to be an artefact of that kind. But all this I can grant. It remains the case that we can all be wrong (makers included) about the ontological category an artefact falls under (e.g. endurant, perdurant, temporal stage, etc.), and this for the reasons given in the main body of the text.
Further considerations of this kind emerge below in the context of a brief discussion of Thomasson’s account of artefacts. (I thank a referee of an earlier draft of this paper for encouraging me to think about this issue.)
As philosophers, we are familiar with such error-theoretic claims. The error theorist about moral discourse believes that no sentence of this discourse is non-vacuously true, and this because there do not exit the objective moral values required to make moral sentences non-vacuously true. According to him, objective moral values would have to be objectively prescriptive, and such properties are too peculiar to be plausibly found in the world (Mackie 1977, p. 38). We may dispute the details of this ‘argument from queerness’, but there is nothing methodologically misconceived about it. For a defence of error theories against common objections see Daly and Liggins (2010).
This conclusion presumes that there can be kinds of artefact that are constitutionally incapable of performing their intended function: something I take to be illustrated by the dreamcatchers case. But my description of this example might be disputed. An alternative such description—one that does not have the anti-descriptivist consequences that I draw—goes as follows. (I thank a referee of a previous draft for this suggestion.)
Nothing can be a dreamcatcher unless it can catch dreams. Consequently, if we all thought that the things called ‘dreamcatchers’ could actually catch dreams, our mistake would concern, not the nature of dreamcatchers, but whether the things we believe to be dreamcatchers really are dreamcatchers. We would be right about what dreamcatchers are, if there are any: they are decorated nets that that catch dreams. What we would be wrong about is whether there exist such things; for in fact, the concept’s extension is null.
The implication for artworks, if artefacts, should be obvious. As in the redescribed dreamcatchers case, we might be wrong in thinking that there is anything that corresponds to our concept of, say, a musical work; but we cannot be wrong about the ontological standing of musical works, if there are any.
However, the principle that this response relies on—namely, that something can be a thing of artefactual kind K only if it can fulfil the purpose intended for Ks—looks false. The patina of plausibility attaching to this principle is, perhaps, the result of the fact that many artefacts, dreamcatchers included, have names that directly encode their intended function. The idea that something can be a power generator that does not generate power, or a motor that does not succeed in converting energy into mechanical motion, has a paradoxical ring about it. But, in fact, the way in which we commonly talk about unworkable devices belies this initial appearance. Indeed, magnetic motors and gravity driven power generators have been patented under these names despite the fact that they are incapable of serving their respective intended functions.
Plausibly, something can only be a dreamcatcher if it is intended to serve as a dreamcatching device, and only if it has a sufficient number of the manifest physical properties presumed by its maker and consumers to enable a thing to fulfil this function. (This second condition is designed to accommodate the fact that an incompetent potter may intend to make a pot, but succeed only in making a mess (Thomasson 2007b, p. 59).) Since the gaily decorated nets of my example meet both of these conditions, I as yet see no reason to deny that they are dreamcatchers. They are just dreamcatchers that cannot do what they are meant to.
Kania agrees with me on this, but for different reasons (Kania 2008b, p. 439).
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Acknowledgments
I gave a talk based on this paper at the American Society for Aesthetics (Eastern Division) conference in Philadelphia in April, 2012. I am grateful to all those who took part in the subsequent discussion. I’d also like to thank an anonymous referee for this journal for extremely helpful comments on an earlier draft.
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Dodd, J. Adventures in the metaontology of art: local descriptivism, artefacts and dreamcatchers. Philos Stud 165, 1047–1068 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9999-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9999-z