Abstract
There is something peculiar about aesthetic testimony. It seems more difficult to gain knowledge of aesthetic properties based solely upon testimony than it is in the case of other types of property. In this paper, I argue that we can provide an adequate explanation at the level of the semantics of aesthetic language, without defending any substantive thesis in epistemology or about aesthetic value/judgement. If aesthetic predicates are given a non-invariantist semantics, we can explain the supposed peculiar difficulty with aesthetic testimony.
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Notes
Thanks to Jon Robson for pointing this out.
Wollheim’s original statement of the acquaintance principle admits exceptions to the rule—that judgements of aesthetic value are not transmissible from one person to another—‘within very narrow limits’ (Wollheim 1980). However, it is not clear what these limits are and the exceptionless version suffices for my purposes.
For an objection to this view, see Robson (2013a).
I should note I don’t presume against the optimist—she who thinks that attaining knowledge of aesthetic properties based solely upon aesthetic testimony is relatively easy—as even they tend to think that testimony about matters aesthetic is more problematic than testimony in general (e.g., Laetz 2008; Meskin 2004; Robson 2013a, b).
In the following, I present four types of view. I don’t aim to decide which is the best vis-à-vis being able to provide a descriptively adequate semantic account of aesthetic predicates here. However, I suspect that a non-indexical assessor relativism is the most promising.
See MacFarlane (2014, pp.147–8) for a related discussion.
See MacFarlane (2014) for a developed exposition of these types of relativism.
A relativism of this broad type is considered by Matravers (2010).
I taxonomise these ‘relativist’ views in broadly the same way as MacFarlane (2014). I am simplifying somewhat for sake of clarity. In MacFarlane’s discussion of nonindexicalism, a proposition can be said to be true only relative to a context. It is then the accuracy of utterances which is said to be relative to the context of assessment (by the relativist) or the context of use (by the contextualist).
Obviously, this is a simplification. An agent may choose to defer to the tastes of others. The relevant standard of taste may be the taste of some contextually salient appreciator or set of appreciators. Nonetheless, it is still either the context of assessment or the context of use which determines whose tastes are relevant, even if it is not the tastes of the agent of the context.
I should note, for my wife’s sake, that I have no daughter (at the time of writing). I simply liked the idea of telling flagrant falsehoods in a paper on testimony.
Indeed, it is due to this that the problem with testimony arises. We do not think that a relativization of sentence truth causes problems in cases where the relativity is transparent to us, e.g., ‘here’, ‘now’, and ‘your mother’.
The conversation in which A says, ‘this is my mother’, and B (a non-sibling) replies ‘no this is not my mother’ involves a deep infelicity. But we detect no infelicity in the following conversation: A says ‘the tarantella is a lovely dance’, B replies, ‘No, it isn’t!’
The case is akin to that in which I call my wife, who is in the UK, upon my safe arrival in Australia, I say ‘I got here safe’, and my partner forms the belief that I am in the UK.
Or indeed some X of whom I know that if it is to X’s tastes it is to mine. (Consider the analogous case in epistemology of someone in a high stakes context testifying to someone in a low stakes context that someone knows.)
I take it that the pessimist concedes this point about intuitions, even if they think intuitions are misguided on this point. The intuition that testimony is insufficient for knowledge is much stronger in the case of a testifier about whom one knows very little.
There are other possibilities. Perhaps the quality of the film has been inferred from the quality of the plot line which has been communicated some other way, cinematography in the trailer, the actors, the quality of previous output by the director, etc. Note, however, that the relevant qualifications remove the infelicity of the assertions, e.g., ‘the film is superb, I have never seen it, but everything this director makes is superb’.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Greg Currie and Jon Robson for very helpful comments. Thanks also to members of an audience in Nottingham. Acknowledgment is also due to the support of an AHRC-funded studentship.
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Andow, J. A Semantic Solution to the Problem with Aesthetic Testimony. Acta Anal 30, 211–218 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-014-0238-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-014-0238-4