Beauty, Art and Testimony: Subjectivity and Objectivity in Aesthetics by Erica Diane Klempner a Dissertation Submitted in Partia
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Beauty, Art and Testimony: Subjectivity and Objectivity in Aesthetics by Erica Diane Klempner A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Hannah Ginsborg, Co-chair Professor Barry Stroud, Co-chair Professor John MacFarlane Professor Line Mikkelsen Spring 2018 Copyright © 2018 by Erica Diane Klempner All rights reserved Abstract Beauty, Art and Testimony: Subjectivity and Objectivity in Aesthetics by Erica Diane Klempner Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy University of California, Berkeley Professor Hannah Ginsborg and Professor Barry Stroud, Co-chairs We acquire beliefs on the basis of what others tell us all the time. If you tell me that your house is painted red, chances are that I will simply believe you without question; and if someone asks me what color your house is, I will simply tell her that it is red. Yet we do not seem to accept others’ testimony about beauty and art in the same way. If you tell me that the Taj Mahal is beautiful, or that Middlemarch is a great novel, it would be strange for me simply to adopt your view, even if I have a lot of confidence in your judgment. In order for me to be in a position to believe or to claim that the Taj Mahal is beautiful, or that Middlemarch is a great novel, I must experience these things myself—by going to Agra, or by reading the book. My dissertation explains this apparent resistance to aesthetic testimony. I argue that aesthetic claims carry what is known in linguistics as ‘evidential’ information, to the effect that they are made on the basis of the subject’s firsthand experience. I locate aesthetic claims amongst a slew of other kinds of claims—including personal taste claims, perceptual appearance claims and moral claims—that all carry evidential information of this kind. These claims are loosely connected by having content that is essentially subjective or perspectival in some way, even when, as in the aesthetic and moral cases, there is also some claim to objectivity in play. I offer a detailed explanation in the aesthetic case—specifically for claims about beauty—of how their content comprises both subjective and objective elements. I argue that the evidential information carried by aesthetic claims and the other ‘perspectival’ claims I mention is communicated as conversational implicature, in spite of initial appearances to the contrary. Our apparent resistance to aesthetic testimony thus turns out to be an artifact of the evidential implications of aesthetic language: we often do accept aesthetic testimony, but we must describe our beliefs in a way that does not convey misleading evidential information. 1 To my family, to PG Tips, and to Stanley Chen, with whom I began this conversation a long time ago. i TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 Introduction to the problem 1 2 Previous attempts to solve the problem 4 2.1 Emotivism (and other expressivist views) 4 2.2 Subjectivism 5 2.3 An epistemic problem? 11 2.3.1 Lack of ‘full understanding’ 11 2.3.2 Is aesthetic testimony unreliable? 15 2.4 Other solutions 19 2.4.1 Aaron Meskin’s ‘reverse error theory’ 19 2.4.2 Robert Hopkins and ‘Unusability’ 23 3 Evidentiality 28 3.1 Conveying evidentiality 28 3.2 Must 29 3.3 Must, aesthetic claims and evidentiality 39 4 Multiple dimensions of content 46 4.1 Conversational implicature 46 4.2 Presupposition and conventional implicature 51 4.3 The ‘Direct Evidentials’ and conversational implicature 55 5 Content and calculability: some non-aesthetic examples 57 5.1 Presumption of evidential source 57 5.2 The role of perspective: some examples with ‘looks’ (and one or two other things) 60 5.3 The role of perspective: personal taste 68 6 The content of beauty claims: first pass 71 6.1 The normativity of beauty 72 6.2 An objectivist view for beauty? 77 6.3 Critical standards 79 6.4 A problem with the objectivist view 81 7 The content of beauty claims: a hybrid model 86 7.1 Judgments based on pleasure: tastiness 88 7.2 Judgments based on pleasure: beauty 90 7.3 The structure of beauty claims 94 ii 7.4 Negative judgments of beauty 105 7.5 Disagreement about beauty 107 7.6 Calculability for aesthetic claims 111 7.7 Wrapping up aesthetic content and calculability 116 8 Cancelability 118 8.1 Extremely robust conversational implicatures 119 8.2 Aesthetic and other Direct Evidential implicatures 124 8.3 Aesthetic implicature and aesthetic belief 128 References 130 iii 1. INTRODUCTION TO THE PROBLEM Many people think that there is something wrong with acquiring aesthetic beliefs on the basis of the testimony of others. If a friend tells me that Middlemarch is a great novel, but I have never read it, it would be strange for me simply to adopt my friend’s view, even if I have a lot of confidence in her judgment. In order for me to be in a position to believe that Middlemarch is a great novel, I must read it myself. And, it’s thought, because I am not in a position to believe that Middlemarch is a great novel if I haven’t read it myself, I am also not in a position to claim that Middlemarch is a great novel. The most I will say on the basis of testimony is that I’ve heard Middlemarch is a great novel, or that it’s supposed to be a great novel, or that my friend Margot says it’s a great novel. I will not simply say, “Middlemarch is a great novel.” Kant holds this view for judgments of beauty; he maintains, for instance, “that the approval of others provides no valid proof for the judging of beauty, that others may perhaps see and observe for [someone], and that what many have seen in one way what he believes himself to have seen otherwise, may serve him as a sufficient ground of proof for a theoretical, hence a logical judgment, but that what has pleased others can never serve as the ground of an aesthetic judgment.” (Kant 2000: §33, 5:284.)1 As Kant here notes, the phenomenon at issue does not extend to many other kinds of beliefs. If there is something wrong with acquiring beliefs about beauty, and other aesthetic beliefs, on the basis of testimony, this makes aesthetic beliefs very different from other kinds of beliefs, even other kinds of perceptual beliefs, as we often acquire such beliefs on the basis of testimony. If Margot tells me that her house is red, I may easily believe that her house is red. As Kant also suggests here, I may do so even if I have previously seen her house myself and on that basis thought it was orange (possibly because I saw it under yellow streetlights). Beliefs based on testimony often, in fact, amount to knowledge. I come to know that Margot lives in a red house when she tells me so. Moreover, I can on this basis tell someone else that Margot’s house is red. I would not have to qualify my claim by saying, “Apparently, Margot’s house is red,” or “Margot told me that her house is red.” The comparison with color seems apt because both color beliefs and aesthetic beliefs are acquired, in the first instance, on the basis of a kind of subjective response. For aesthetic beliefs, this is most obvious in the case of judgments of beauty (Kant’s focus), which are based on a particular kind of pleasure felt in the experience of the beautiful thing. However, the connection with subjective response is arguably there with other kinds of aesthetic belief as well—e.g. that a novel is good or a vase graceful—and in any case whatever issue there is concerning aesthetic testimony has generally been taken to apply to any kind of aesthetic belief. The comparison with color raises the question of why the aesthetic domain is different. Note that the issue does not seem to be that, for some reason, unqualified aesthetic beliefs acquired on the basis of testimony never amount to knowledge. The issue, if real, is prior to this: it is that there is something strange about acquiring such beliefs at all. I do think the issue is real, in that there is a genuine strangeness here that needs an explanation. We do not think of ourselves as having unqualified testimony-based aesthetic beliefs, and we do not make sincere, unqualified aesthetic claims on the basis of testimony. This is presumably not just an accident: there is presumably some norm that governs this aspect of our aesthetic practice. If the norm is epistemic—if, that is, testimony is for some reason an insufficient epistemic ground for aesthetic beliefs, barring testimony-based aesthetic beliefs from fulfilling the conditions necessary for 1 Henceforth, Kant’s Critique of Judgment will be referred to as CJ. 1 knowledge—then this norm has been embodied by that practice, to the extent that we do not acquire unqualified aesthetic beliefs on the basis of testimony at all. In this work I will investigate the problem of aesthetic testimony: why, that is, we do not acquire unqualified aesthetic beliefs on the basis of testimony, or make unqualified testimony- based aesthetic claims. The question has to date received many kinds of answer. The phenomenon is important to Kant, as I’ve indicated. There has not been agreement even on what kind of explanation we are looking for: an epistemological explanation, or some other kind.