A Defence of Experimental Philosophy in Aesthetics

Inquiry An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy

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A defence of experimental philosophy in aesthetics

Clotilde Torregrossa

To cite this article: Clotilde Torregrossa (2017): A defence of experimental philosophy in aesthetics, Inquiry, DOI: 10.1080/0020174X.2017.1385527 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2017.1385527

Published online: 08 Oct 2017.

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Download by: [2.126.27.182] Date: 09 October 2017, At: 00:16 Inquiry, 2017 https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2017.1385527

A defence of experimental philosophy in aesthetics

Clotilde Torregrossa

Department of Philosophy, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland

ABSTRACT Although experimental philosophy is now over a decade old, it has only recently been introduced to the domain of philosophical aesthetics. So why is there already a need to defend it? Because, as I argue in this paper, we can anticipate the three main types of objection generally addressed to experimental philosophy and show that none of them concern experimental philosophers in aesthetics. I begin with some general considerations about experimental philosophy and its, sometimes conflicting, characteristics. This framework is designed to help me situate the experimental practice in aesthetics within the general movement. I then present the objections and respond to them in turn. Their failure should convince aestheticians to embrace the practice early on and opponents of experimental philosophy to revise their usual objections before addressing them to experimental philosophers in aesthetics.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 8 March 2017; Accepted 21 August 2017 KEYWORDS Aesthetics; experimental philosophy; metaphilosophy; intuitions

1. Introduction In the last 15 years or so philosophers have witnessed, with mixed feelings, the

Downloaded by [2.126.27.182] at 00:16 09 October 2017 steady rise of a new method for philosophy: experimental philosophy (hence- forth X-Phi). The recently published A Companion to Experimental Philosophy (Systsma and Buckwalter 2016) lists contributions to philosophy of action and free will, moral and political philosophy, philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophy of science, logic and reasoning and metaphilosophy. One omission is the contribution of X-Phi to aesthetics. Possibly, this is because the implementation of X-Phi in aesthetics postdates the development of the volume. Nonetheless it cannot be ignored, as is shown in Cova, Garcia, and Liao’s (2015) overview of the subject.

It is then fair to say that this movement has taken many different direc- tions since its birth. Thus, defining X-Phi in precise terms, encompassing its numerous forms, is a challenge. One seminal definition is Knobe’s: ‘experimental philosophy focuses on many of the same types of intuitions that have long been at the center of philosophical study, but it examines those intuitions using the methods associated with contemporary cognitive science – systematic experimentation and statistical analysis’ (2007, 81). This early definition clearly states that philosophical intuitions are X-Phi’s primary objects of investigation.1 But as the discussions in this paper will show, X-Phi in aesthetics does not fit this definition. Another important feature of the X-Phi movement has been its classification between two different types of programmes: negative and positive. The distinction itself is debated. In a post from 2011 on the Experimental Philosophy blog entitled ‘Are There Two Kinds of Experimental Philosophy?’, Nadelhoffer argues that the distinction mainly serves a historical purpose, as the few papers that existed in the early days of X-Phi required a relatively coarse-grained classification system to be easily identified by outsiders to the literature. Nevertheless, the distinction has been widely adopted and discussed in the X-Phi literature.2 The majority of the discussion, though, has surrounded the negative programme, for obvious reasons. Its goal loosely, has been to undermine traditional philosophy by showing that its methods and practices, more often than not, rely on unjustified evidence. One observed strategy, for instance, has been to show that intuitions shared in philosophical community were in fact contrary to the intuitions of the folk or varied across cultures and gender.3 Thus philosophical intuitions became controversial when their purpose was precisely to provide uncontroversial evidence for certain claims. This would explain why most of the war between experimental philosophers and their opponents has raged over the negative

Downloaded by [2.126.27.182] at 00:16 09 October 2017 programme. However, more recently, Knobe (2016) showed that out of more than 400 X-Phi papers published between 2009 and 2013, only 1.1% made the negative conclusion about philosophical intuitions. So maybe it is now safe to say that we should shift our attention towards the potentially positive contributions of X-Phi to armchair philosophy. However, we can do this while retaining the strength of X-Phi’s negative programme. Weinberg argues that X-Phi, whatever’ the programme, can still be relevant and dangerous:

1For a recent overview of the methodology of intuitions and its issues, see Weinberg (2016a). 2See Alexander, Mallon, and Weinberg (2010). 3The most recognized example of this is Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich (2001), although it has failed replication multiple times. INQUIRY 3

The threat of x‐phi is thus best understood more methodologically than episte- mologically – it is not aimed at anything like the potential for intuitions to confer justification or not, but rather at the prospects of a methodologically autono- mous approach to philosophy that relies substantively on intuitions in anything like the manner of current philosophical practice. (2016b, 72) Thus, the role of X-Phi is not simply to deny the evidence of philosophers, but more importantly to look for and provide the additional evidence necessary to complete certain philosophical claims. In this paper, I will discuss how X-Phi in aesthetics positions itself in the general debate about positive and negative debate and show that it instantiates something of Weinberg’s claim. That is, X-Phi in aesthetics has the potential to highlight the shortcom- ings of certain armchair theories, as well as to provide the complementary information to build the adequate theory. The final characteristic of X-Phi I wish to mention is another, more recent, distinction, which in certain ways overlaps with the distinction between negative and positive programmes. I am referring to a distinction between ‘broad’ and ‘narrow’ X-Phi. Rose and Danks (2013) formally introduce the distinction and defend the former conception, but two entries from 2007 and 2012 on the subject can be found on Schwitzgebel’s blog, Splintered Mind. Schwitzgebel identifies intuition-based X-Phi, i.e. X-Phi as defined by Knobe, as narrow and not intuition-based empirical work with a view to inform philosophical theories as broad X-Phi. Rose and Danks are more condemning of narrow X-Phi, characterizing it as being exclusively concerned with the study of folk intuitions and guilty of ‘arbitrary disciplinary chauvinism’ (2013, 514). They favour broad X-Phi, as for them it is ‘simply an instantiation of the long tradition of philosophical naturalism – the view that empirical data are relevant to certain philosophical questions – coupled with actually conducting some of the relevant experiments, as necessary’ (515). One might point

Downloaded by [2.126.27.182] at 00:16 09 October 2017 out that under the broad conception of X-Phi, researchers in other disciplines, like psychology, could earn the title of experimental philosophers. I will show that, on this spectrum, X-Phi in aesthetics is a particularly good instantiation of the broad conception. This is good news for aesthetics as it looks like the broad conception is taking over as the current practice of X-Phi. Sytsma and Livengood (2015) precisely set out to gather empirical data from both armchair and experimental philosophers about their conception of X-Phi. On average, everyone neither agreed nor disagreed that X-Phi must be intuition-based, and they especially tended to disagree that X-Phi must be folk intuition-based. Moreover, the experimental philosophers were less likely to adopt this narrow conception. This evidence bodes well for X-Phi in aesthetics. 4 C. TORREGROSSA

What might become clear now is that X-Phi is far from being a unified practice with unified characteristics. We can observe certain departures from the original conception of X-Phi as well as interesting developments in specific areas of application. And given that the application of X-Phi in aesthetics is particularly recent, there are reasons to believe that what we will find there will instantiate the most contemporary forms of the experimental practice. The point of this paper is precisely to provide this contemporary treatment for X-Phi in aesthetics.

2. The objections I will now introduce what I take to be the three main strands of objection usually addressed to experimental philosophers, in order of strength. The most problematic is the objection that the methods of traditional philosophy and the methods of X-Phi are incompatible, the former being ‘from the armchair’ and the latter experimental. This incompatibility entails that whatever information X-Phi brings to a philosophical debate will be irrelevant. Tied in with this type of argument is an assumption about philosophical progress. If an opponent of X-Phi makes such an argument, it must be because she wants to preserve, if not all, at least some of the methods of armchair philosophy. And supposedly, if she wants to preserve these methods, it is because she believes they are successful for philosophy. At the very least, she might believe that armchair methods, if not perfect, are more successful than experimental methods for philosophy. One version of this argument I will discuss is the objection to Centrality. According to Weatherson, Centrality is the view ‘that intuitions (of a certain kind) are central to analytic philosophy, and in particular that they are a primary source of evidence for analytic philosophers’ (2014, 518). Following that, the objection

Downloaded by [2.126.27.182] at 00:16 09 October 2017 to Centrality argues that X-Phi results, which as we have seen are based on folk intuitions under the narrow conception, are irrelevant to philosophy because intuitions are not central to philosophical methods in the first place. In support of this objection, Williamson claims that: Experimental Philosophers did not invent the idea of ‘philosophical intuition’. It belonged to the ideology of one faction of the ancien regime. Against that faction, their use of it was dialectically legitimate. For constructive purposes, however, it has outlived its utility. The psychological and sociological study of philosophy will make more progress once it ceases to work within a framework of obsolescent epistemology. (2013, 474) Williamson (2004) believes that the attention experimental philosophers pay to folk intuitions is misguided, as whatever intuitions really are, we do not INQUIRY 5

need them in philosophy and in fact we should not use them as a source of evidence for our claims. And this is because, according to Williamson, we have better sources of evidence in philosophy, and limiting our sources of evidence to intuitions will lead to scepticism, as the burden of proving that a proposition p is true on the basis of my intuition that p is true, will be too heavy to carry. So the fact that X-Phi’s sole attack on armchair methods, on Williamson’s construal of X-Phi, relies on one ‘obsolescent’ method does not undermine the rest of armchair philosophy. In that, experimental methods are irrelevant for philosophy and armchair methods continue to be more successful, as long as armchair philosophers move on from intuitions as a source of evidence.4 I will address both the general incompatibility and irrelevance objection, as well as its less challenging version, the objection to Centrality for the case of X-Phi in aesthetics. Second comes the objection that experimental work in philosophy does not matter to philosophers. This objection differs from the first, although they are complementary, in that it does not concern the established methods of philosophy but rather the actual practices of these methods by philosophers and whether the practices aptly reflect the purposes of the methods. In that regard, the objection claims that the philosophical practice of an armchair philosopher is better than that of an experimental philosopher to the extent that it is more accurate, more effective, and so on, for the given purposes of philosophy. For instance, one popular response to X-Phi is what Weinberg et al. (2010) have called ‘the expertise defence’. Among the advocates of the expertise defence, we count Hales (2006), Ludwig (2007), Horvath (2010), Williamson (2011) again, among others. Their objection is based on the claim that philosophy is an expert’s domain. If that is the case, why should we rely on folk intuitions to build philosophical theories? Moreover, philosophical education trains philosophers to develop a fine-grained understanding of

Downloaded by [2.126.27.182] at 00:16 09 October 2017 philosophical concepts and theories and to develop accurate intuitions about these matters. Why should the intuition of someone who cannot achieve this degree of precision matter in philosophy? However, I mentioned in the introduction that intuitions only appear under the narrow conception of X-Phi. Thus, it would be an easy way out to simply claim that not all of X-Phi is concerned with this objection. But unfortunately, the expertise defence still holds if instead of philosophical intuitions, we talk about the general introspective practice of armchair philosophers. If that is the case, the expertise defence might even have a stronger base, as we are now targeting a broader philosophical practice than

4For other versions of the objection to Centrality see Cappelen (2013, 2014) and Deutsch (2010, 2015). 6 C. TORREGROSSA

the mere reliance on philosophical intuitions. The expertise defender can now say ‘never mind intuitions, philosophers are overall better at thinking about concepts and phenomena than the average person, therefore we do not need X-Phi in philosophy’. Moreover, there is some debate as to whom the burden of proof falls upon: should the armchair philosopher prove that her practice is positively informed by her expertise, or should the experimental philosopher prove that her opponent’s expertise is not a privilege? Naturally, Weinberg et al. (2010) claim that it falls on the armchair philosopher, while Williamson (2011) claims it falls on the experimental philosopher. I believe the expertise defence is defeasible without the help of aesthetics. Thus, I will present some general arguments against it, but I will still use examples from X-Phi projects in aesthetics to highlight the specificities of these cases in the context of expertise. The third, and least worrying, objection concerns the negativity of X-Phi. It claims that a substantial part of the X-Phi programme, or at least the part gathering the most attention, namely the ‘negative programme’, leads to scepticism and is of little significance to philosophy overall. Moreover, Williamson (2016) remarks, since the birth of X-Phi, its target has expanded, and experimental philosophers now try to undermine the ordinary judgements and general introspective investigations of armchair philosophers as well as their intuitions. As we will see, this is the case for aesthetics. On this conception of X-Phi, the objection goes, the negative programme is bound to lead to global scepticism because we are left in a situation where almost no armchair practice is safe from disqualifying effects. As I’ll show this worry is misguided and experimental philosophers in aesthetics are already amending the distinction between negative and positive X-Phi. Downloaded by [2.126.27.182] at 00:16 09 October 2017 3. Compatibility and relevance 3.1. Centrality To start, I will respond to Williamson’s comment about the irrelevance of intuition-based X-Phi. There are defences of intuition-based X-Phi,5 but this is not my response. In fact, I believe that Williamson has put his finger on a genuine issue with our philosophical methods. I just do not think that it entails the irrelevance of X-Phi for aesthetics. I will now introduce some of experimental work done recently in aesthetics. I will be brief for now, as I

5See for instance Alexander (2010). INQUIRY 7

am only looking to see if these experiments and studies are intuition-based, but I will discuss some of them again later. First comes Meskin et al.’s (2013) work on the mere exposure effect. The effect, whereby the more familiar we are with a stimulus, the more we like it, is well known in psychology and has been tested in different contexts. But in the case of art, the effect was highlighted by Cutting (2003) in a series of studies, which confirmed the effect with Impressionist paintings. This work challenged the assumption that our aesthetic judgements are justified by the aesthetic value of the artwork, thus the mere exposure effect can be considered a form of bias. Meskin et al. recreated Cutting’s studies, but included both notoriously bad art6 as well as relatively good art (on par with the Impressionist works) by John Everett Millais. The results demonstrated that exposure to bad art actually makes the spectator appreciate the artwork less. In this case, the participants were exposed to the paintings for different periods of time, at regular intervals, over a 7-week period, and then simply asked to rate the works on a 10-point scale. The experimenters did not appeal to the intuitions of their participants. Second comes Liao, Strohminger, Sripada’s (2014) work on imaginative resistance, i.e. the phenomenon of not engaging with a fictional scenario, usually on moral grounds, first written about by Hume. These studies did two things: prove that there is such a phenomenon as imaginative resistance in the first place and prove that the genre of the fictional scenario is a factor in the appearance of the phenomenon. In these studies, after having read short texts belonging to different styles and genres and containing a prompt for potential resistance, the participants were simply asked questions about their moral beliefs, their knowledge of literary genres and their imaginative capacities – not about their intuitions. Finally, there is Liao and Meskin’s (2015) work on aesthetic adjectives,

Downloaded by [2.126.27.182] at 00:16 09 October 2017 complemented by Liao, McNally, and Meskin (2016). They designed a series of experiments to understand how we use aesthetic adjectives (e.g. ‘beauti- ful’, ‘elegant’, etc.). They found that they do not behave like we would expect them to, that is like other gradable adjectives, which are usually categorized between relative and absolute adjectives. Surprisingly, aesthetic adjectives do not seem to be either relative or absolute and the explanation for this is still unknown. In this case, the statistical results were obtained by asking people to apply certain adjectives, both aesthetic and non-aesthetic in different contexts. Thus, this experimental work was not based on intuitions but on linguistic habits.

6American ‘Painter of Light’, Thomas Kinkade. 8 C. TORREGROSSA

X-Phi in aesthetics is simply testing people’s sensitivity and reactions to certain aesthetic phenomena, as well as the circumstances that provoke these reactions. It seems that Williamson’s wish is granted, as X-Phi in aesthetics has outgrown a practice focused solely on intuitions. My opinion, as it is Cova, Garcia, and Liao (2015), is that this may explain the late introduction of X-Phi in aesthetics. Maybe, intuition-based X-Phi, as described by its early proponents and as Williamson considers it, was not applied to aesthetics because it simply was not an appropriate tool for this particular domain. X-Phi as experimental aestheticians have practised it is thus not concerned with the objection to Centrality, because, X-Phi in aesthetics does not take intuitions as a central element of investigation. And this specific project seems to be less limited in terms of its observable phenomena. This also goes to show that X-Phi in aesthetics is practised under the broad conception, which precisely gives experimental philosophers more investigative freedom, as they are not limited to folk intuitions. A potential objection could come up at this point. One might say that aesthetic preferences, linguistic habits, imaginative capacities and the other psychological phenomena investigated in the studies mentioned above could be interpreted as intuitions, despite the researchers not calling them so. After all, even philosophers are not entirely clear about the nature of intuitions and might unknowingly track the intuitions of their participants when conducting experimental work. If that is the case, then these studies would be instances of intuition-based X-Phi and would also be subject to the objection to Centrality. My response is twofold. First, the experimental work presented here differs in some important ways from the usual target of the objection to Centrality, i.e. ‘traditionally’ intuition-based X-Phi. This latter type of X-Phi explored famous philosophical intuitions, that is intuitions that were explicitly used as evidence for philosophical claims, such as Gettier,

Downloaded by [2.126.27.182] at 00:16 09 October 2017 Truetemp or trolley problem intuitions.7 I believe that the main point of the Centrality objection was to downplay the importance of these intuitions. On the other hand, the phenomena tracked in the aesthetics studies did not play the same role in philosophical theories before experimental philosophers turned their attention to them. Second, I worry that if we were to consider the phenomena tracked in the aesthetics studies to be purely intuitions, we would be overgeneralizing intuitions. To maintain the objection to Centrality, one would have to admit that psychological phenomena such as preferences, imaginings and beliefs are also not central to philosophy. But as I will argue later in my response to the expertise defence, these phenomena

7See for instance Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich (2001), Ahlenius and Tännsjö (2012) or Liao et al. (2012). INQUIRY 9

are important at least for aesthetics. Thus, reducing them to intuitions and dismissing them as such would be problematic. This being said, X-Phi in aesthetics can test folk intuitions. One instance is Cova and Pain (2012) who tested folk intuitions about aesthetic realism. However, in that instance their goal was to challenge the philosophical argument that aesthetic realism is a common-sense view. Thus, they provided empirical evidence about folk intuitions against an argument already based on folk intuitions, supposedly. This is not a classic case of opposing folk intuitions to philosophical intuitions, which is problematic as argued by the ‘intuition deniers’.8 Now, there are less successful examples of empirical work in aesthetics based on folk intuitions, for instance Kamber’s (2011) work on intuitions about definitions of art. It has been shown that Kamber’s work itself was flawed,9 but there is a larger issue about the limits of X-Phi concerning certain issues in aesthetics. The definition of art seems to be one of these out- of-reach issues. But this does not imply incompatibility between armchair and experimental methods. It just implies that X-Phi is not meant to replace all armchair methods in aesthetics.

3.2. Progress I mentioned that this objection against the compatibility of X-Phi and armchair philosophy was rooted in an assumption about progress in philosophy, namely that armchair methods yield progress on their own. If we take a look at the current state of aesthetics, do traditional methods yield progress, or at least more progress than experimental methods? Maybe not. In his presidential address to the American Society of Aesthetics, Walton (2007) is puzzled by the disunity in the historical progress for aesthetic theories.

Downloaded by [2.126.27.182] at 00:16 09 October 2017 According to him this is due to the fact that sometimes, philosophers try to apply a certain model of investigation unsuited to the reality of aesthetic phenomena. He observes as follows: Aesthetics, then, seems hardly to be a unified field of inquiry. What is wrong with not being unified? Nothing, unless an illusion of unity or an unfounded presup- position that there must be such distorts the investigations occurring under this name. Unfortunately, that sometimes happens. (2007, 150) Fortunately, there is a simple solution to this issue: change the methodological paradigm. Walton’s suggestion is a ‘theory construction’ paradigm. As

8The expression was coined by Nado (2016) to refer to those like Williamson, Cappelen and Deutsch who defend the objection to Centrality. 9For a discussion of this see Annelies Monseré (2015, 2016). 10 C. TORREGROSSA

opposed to spelling out the meaning of aesthetic terms and the concepts they are referring to, theory construction picks out the aesthetic phenomena in the world and then goes on to build theories that make sense of those phenomena. A prominent example of this approach can be found in Weinberg and Meskin’s investigation of the imagination. And, as they suggest ‘philosophers interested in the imagination [should] shift their methodology from the traditional paradox‐and‐analysis model to a more empirically oriented phenomena‐and‐explanation model’ (2006, 177). X-Phi then seems like the perfect candidate to implement this model. So, some agree there is room for improvement and change in philosophical methods. Let’s see how this works for aesthetics, with one example among the empirical work mentioned so far: Liao, Strohminger, and Sripada’s (2014) experiments on imaginative resistance. Before their work, some had doubted the existence of the phenomenon itself.10 Moreover, the doubters criticized the different explanations of the phenomenon for not taking into account the contexts in which the phenomenon occurs. But the experimenters managed to track the phenomenon, prove its moral basis as well as its variations across different contexts, i.e. literary genres. With their work, certain unpromising views have been eliminated and the grounds for a theory of the phenomenon have been established. This should be considered progress. On the other hand, armchair methods on their own do not achieve the same results. From the armchair, we can see how we personally might resist a classic scenario of the literature and provide potential explanations on these grounds, but we cannot be sure that this resistance is systematic and that our explanation fits every case of imaginative resistance. Thus, the phenomenon is not quite proven. Moreover, we cannot be certain that the moral aspect of the scenario is the cause, or the only cause, of the resistance as is

Downloaded by [2.126.27.182] at 00:16 09 October 2017 initially assumed. For instance, among the existing, armchair explanations of imaginative resistance, Liao Strohminger and Sripada mention Yablo’s (2002) diagnosis which states that moral rightness is a ‘grokking’ concept, which means that when the concept appears in a particular situation, our reaction to it only depends on how the situation strikes us and not on how we are invited to react to it. Thus, we can resist the fictional application of the concept. This diagnosis, which was probably the result of an introspective investigation on the part of Yablo, seems quite intuitive, but it does not necessarily exhaust the explanation of the phenomenon. They also mention Walton (2006), who explains imaginative resistance as an audience rejecting

10A recent example being Cain Todd (2009). INQUIRY 11

a particular supervenience relation, in this case between the claim of moral rightness and a morally wrong act. This explanation also seems intuitive. However, Yablo and Walton neither prove the existence of imaginative resistance beyond their own experience of it, nor consider factors such as genre to explain the phenomenon. If it were not for an empirical investigation of the phenomenon, its very existence would be uncertain, and variables, such as genre, would not be part of the theory of imaginative resistance. So, in this case, not only did X-Phi provide first-order information and explanation of an aesthetic phenomenon, but also a way of complementing introspective methods like Yablo’s and Walton’s. If we are looking for a complete theory of any aesthetic phenomenon, which we should be if we are looking for progress in aesthetics, then, according to Liao, Strohminger and Sripada, ‘explanatory cosmopolitanism’ (2014, 353) is the answer. Their argument is simple: we should assume that aesthetic phenomena are complex things, of which we cannot provide a full explanation by presenting only one factor. If intuitively only one factor comes to mind, then we must have recourse to something else to explore other possible explanations. In fact, even if intuitively several factors come to mind, there is no way to be sure if these factors truly explain a phenomenon or if they exhaust the explanation. X-Phi, as a systematic tool in the phenomenon-and-explanation model, can figure out both of these things. I would like to elaborate on the nature and strength of aesthetic explanations. We cannot think of the principle of explanatory cosmopolitanism simply as a way of making sure we do not forget any possible explanatory factor when building an aesthetic theory. In fact, even with this principle, we cannot be certain that no other factor will ever come up and force us to reshape our theories. Instead, we need to think of it as a way of making theories about aesthetic phenomena as informative and robust as possible

Downloaded by [2.126.27.182] at 00:16 09 October 2017 given the evidence available at a certain time. In a paper where he advocates Weinberg and Meskin’s phenomena-and-explanation model, Liao (2014) also advocates a pragmatic and pluralist view of aesthetic explanations, which directly resonates with explanatory cosmopolitanism. He appeals to this prominent view of scientific explanations and applies it to aesthetic explanations precisely because it can assert the informativeness of the phenomena-and-explanation model for aesthetics. Explanatory pluralism offers a way of studying one phenomenon in different ways, thus providing different explanations, which are all informative in regard to different interests. And although the whole point of the new paradigm is to have a methodology for aesthetics akin to that of the sciences, aesthetic phenomena still differ in some ways from scientific phenomena and their measuring tools will appeal 12 C. TORREGROSSA

mostly to the social sciences as opposed to the natural sciences. Therefore, having an explanatory principle that allows for a phenomenon to be informative on several levels is preferable for our aesthetic model to a view that requires a fundamental law as the sole explanation of a phenomenon. So, the fact that people’s moral beliefs determine whether or not they will resist an imaginary scenario contradicting these beliefs would be a higher level explanation because it appeals to a generalization. On the other hand, the fact that the genre of an imaginary scenario, as well as our knowledge and expectations of said genre, affects the occurrence of imaginative resistance is a lower level explanation because it will explain the phenomenon in individual cases. Depending on what we want to know, both explanations will be informative. Note that this is not a complete replacement of traditional method, but rather a paradigm in which traditional and experimental methods are compatible. As a form of disclaimer, I would like to add that the statistical details of the experiments and studies are not the focus point here. Rather, it is the methodological goals these experiments are set to achieve, whether or not their results reflect them. Surely, some experiments will be more interesting for our aesthetic theories than others. Some will even fail to track any real phenomena and be proven insignificant by further replications. However, this does not change the fact that the methodological goals set by the phenomena-and-explanation model have the overall potential to yield more progress than traditional methods on their own.

4. Philosophical practice and expertise 4.1. The expertise defence I now turn to the second objection, namely that armchair philosophy is an Downloaded by [2.126.27.182] at 00:16 09 October 2017 expert’s practice, unconcerned with folk judgements about philosophical issues. So, on what grounds would experts in aesthetics, philosophers and critics alike, be in a better position to theorize on the basis of their introspective findings? One might say they have more precise concepts and understanding of these concepts because, thanks to their theoretical (or artistic) education, they have the skills to access these concepts. However, many philosophical areas that do rely on introspection also involve ordinary concepts, like free will, personal identity, knowledge, and so on. The philosophical problems bound to these concepts did not reveal themselves through technical discussion but through common-sense thinking, and this is what motivate contemporary ethics and epistemology for instance. And the same can be said of contemporary aesthetics and its concepts, if not more so. INQUIRY 13

Now, one could still object that if philosophy is concerned with ordinary concepts, then philosophers might still be better at understanding these concepts than the folk, because of their methodological skills. But as Knobe and Nichols (2008) respond, this does not undermine the relevance of empirical investigation in philosophy. It is precisely the role of X-Phi to investigate how intuitions vary across different groups of individuals, and why not pursue this across philosophers and non-philosophers? Although such experiments have not yet been conducted, Knobe and Nichols predict that the obtained patterns will be more complex than we might think. My guess is that these results would be particularly interesting for aesthetics. The concepts and phenomena aestheticians study, like appreciation, cre- ativity, imaginative empathy and imaginative resistance, are prevalent in a lot of people’s lives. Everybody has aesthetic preferences, opinions and beliefs, which can sometimes be deeply entrenched. While not everyone has ever investigated their own intuitions about Gettier cases, a lot of people have thought about whether they prefer comedies to dramas, whether they usually root for the hero or the villain, and so on, and have provided reasons for these preferences. In the case of aesthetics, it would be very limiting for philosophers to claim that all these folk beliefs about aesthetic phenomena are not as valuable as their own, or as those of art experts. Note that Knobe and Nichols’ point about the methodological skills of armchair philosophers concerns intuitions. And their response is determined by their conception of X-Phi, which is intuition-based. Thus, while I am currently addressing the expertise defence on its own territory, intuition-based philosophy, my aim is to show that X-Phi is useful to the general practice of philosophers. Further, the argument that philosophical education ensures theoretically valuable intuitions is based on the assumption that philosophical education, as it actually occurs, is unbiased and does not arbitrarily promote certain

Downloaded by [2.126.27.182] at 00:16 09 October 2017 intuitions rather than others. But Weinberg et al. (2010) worry that established philosophical intuitions, i.e. the ones we learn during philosophical training, lack external verification and thus, might be sensitive to arbitrary effects and biases, like ‘overgeneralization, overconfidence, cognitive disso- nance, attribution error, belief bias, belief perseverance, and so on’ (Weinberg et al. 2010, 341). If we believe that as students, we learn by checking our own intuitions against established philosophical intuitions, what guarantees us that these established intuitions were correctly certified in the first place? And if we believe that we learn by checking our own philosophical intuitions against established theories, and philosophical intuitions remain a substantial tool in establishing these theories, how could we possibly be sure that the established theories we are learning from were correctly certified in 14 C. TORREGROSSA

the first place? It seems that there is no way philosophical intuitions can be an independent source of evidence for our claims. Therefore, philosophical expertise does not make philosophers immune to bad intuitions, nor does it make their intuitions theoretically more valuable than folk intuitions. And the same reasoning can be made for art experts. The education they receive, whether it is institutionalized or autodidactic, is not immune to unjustified preferences, which can be of a sociological, political or personal nature. Ironically enough, there is experimental support for this phenomenon.11 And given that aesthetic theories are based on what aestheticians and art experts say, the expertise defence doubly fails. The armchair practice is then messier that we thought.12 But what about the experimental practice? Is there reason to believe that experimental philosophers will be immune to the issues facing armchair philosophers? Strickland and Suben (2012) have shown that experimenter bias, i.e. the bias of unconsciously designing an experiment to guarantee the desired outcome, does affect X-Phi. However, the point of their work is precisely to bring our attention to this issue, just as one of the main goals of X-Phi has been to show the unreliability or messiness of armchair introspection. They also provide two ways of avoiding experimenter bias. The first way is to rely on the review process and the second, and more promising, way is to make sure the hypothesis tested is unknown to the experimenters. As such they will create the stimuli blindly and will not let their hopes and expectations influence the design of the experiment. Strickland and Suben give instances where this strategy has been successful. So all in all, experimental philosophers are better off than armchair philosophers when it comes to biased practices, precisely because they have the tools, and the will, to check on these potential biases. Downloaded by [2.126.27.182] at 00:16 09 October 2017 4.2. Calibration Essentially, my response to the expertise defence is to deny the fact that armchair philosophers are better off on their own. So not only are X-Phi and armchair philosophy compatible, as established in Section 3, but they need each other. What it really amounts to is calibration. A calibrated practice is a kosher practice in that its efficacy has been externally verified. As I have shown, the philosophical practice of armchair philosophers is not calibrated

11For instance, see Brochet (2001) and Hodgson (2008, 2009) on the unreliability of wine experts. 12Weinberg (2016a) offers an interesting discussion of the notion of reliability of evidence in armchair philosophy and concludes that one of X-Phi’s main contribution is to show how messy the armchair practice truly is. INQUIRY 15

as it can fall prey to disqualifying effects without notice.13 Without a form of calibration, there is no way to be sure that our philosophical practice is not the victim of one, or several, of these effects. However, this has been more exclusively the concern of intuition-based practices, and I have established that X-Phi in aesthetics is not intuition-based. But this does not mean that other types of armchair methods do not need calibration. When we think of calibration, we think about its use in scientific practices. And I have indeed compared analogically the phenomena-and-explanation model for aesthetics to scientific models. But there is a fundamental difference between aesthetic phenomena and scientific phenomena, in that the former can only be tracked subjectively, while the latter are tracked objectively. In order to track an aesthetic phenomenon, we rely on sub- jective reactions to the phenomena (that is, an individual’s, or a group of individuals’ reactions). The challenge is to find an external tool that can verify the results of ordinary human capacities used in tracking and explaining aesthetic phenomena. On the other hand, the appropriate tool to track a scientific phenomenon such as temperature for instance would be, depending on the circumstances, a thermometer, an infrared sensor, a pyrometer, and so on. In this case, the tool is designed to directly measure a certain object, whether it be surface temperature, thermal radiation, and so on. Whatever the measuring tool indicates is significant enough not to require, in most cases, another tool designed to calibrate the results of the first tool. However, this is not the case for aesthetic phenomena. When investigating a specific aesthetic phenomenon, an armchair philosopher will most likely examine her own reaction to the phenomenon and, through introspection, look for the sources of this reaction (this need not involve philosophical intuitions). What will make the most sense to her will be whatever factors are the most psychologically salient. She will then suggest a theory to explain

Downloaded by [2.126.27.182] at 00:16 09 October 2017 the phenomenon on the basis of these factors. An instance of this is the case of Yablo and Walton on imaginative resistance described previously. But this philosophical practice is not calibrated, which means there is no external way of verifying if the highly salient psychological factors truly explain the phenomenon in question. For instance, Yablo and Walton provided different explanations for the moral component of the phenomenon. If these are both psychologically salient explanations, how do they relate to each other in an accurate theory of imaginative resistance? Is one of them false and the other true? Or are they both false? From the armchair, deciding which is more plausible will again be an introspective affair. But, for all we

13For a more elaborate discussion on the lack of calibration for philosophical intuitions, see Weinberg (2012). 16 C. TORREGROSSA

know, another factor with a lower degree of psychological salience would be a better explanatory candidate. And it cannot even be considered in the first place because of the lack of calibration and maybe the presence of psychological mechanisms like cognitive distortions or cognitive biases.14 Thus, X-Phi does matter to aestheticians as it can point out to the flaws in their practice, but more importantly provide solutions for these flaws. This is two-tier type of calibration, which works for both philosophical intuitions and other philosophical methods. I should add that calibration does not just operate at the theoretical level. On a more practical level, X-Phi is a calibrated practice because, in its ideal form, it pairs philosophers and scientists to develop a practice acceptable to both domains. Admittedly, whether this is currently the case is debated, especially by the scientific community. But one thing is for certain: experimental philosophers are more than willing to reflect on their own practice and appeal to external sources of verification to calibrate their findings. This was the point of X-Phi to begin with.

5. Scepticism 5.1. Aesthetic scepticism Now on to the last objection. What might be considered a negative programme in aesthetics has challenged the rational basis of aesthetic responses and judgements, both for the average appreciator and for art experts, who we assume are capable of a higher degree of rationalization, and provided evidence for the claim that more often than we think, critical reasoning cannot warrant these responses and judgements.15 But why does this evidence suggest that the sceptical worry is particularly salient in the case of aesthetics? Kieran (2011) believes that part of Downloaded by [2.126.27.182] at 00:16 09 October 2017 the explanation is that aesthetic judgements are inseparable from pleasure, in that one’s judgement of an artwork is necessarily, to a greater or lesser extent, going to be influenced by one’s pleasure taken in the artwork. The issue is, according to him, that ‘pleasures derived for aesthetically irrelevant, social reasons can easily be confused with or dressed up as pleasures derived from proper and indeed more expert aesthetic appreciation’ (2011,

14To understand the extent of possible cognitive biases, I recommend taking a look at the Wikipedia entry ‘List of cognitive biases’, which counts a surprisingly high number of different biases, divided in decision-making, belief and behavioural biases, social biases and memory biases. 15There is not an official negative programme in X-Phi in aesthetics. However, there is a large body of empirical evidence coming mostly from psychology, on which aestheticians like Kieran rely to make certain sceptical claims. For a detailed overview and discussion of this evidence, see Kieran (2010, 2011). INQUIRY 17

36). Unsurprisingly, it turns out that we are more likely to be biased when it comes to art than when it comes to knowledge. Although he has somewhat retracted it, Kieran issued elsewhere the sceptical conclusion that if ‘for any given aesthetic response or judgement, we do not know whether it is justified, nor whether we can legitimately claim that things are as it lays down […], the reasonable course of action seems to be to withdraw aesthetic claims’ (2010, 252). Even if this might not be Kieran’s current feeling, this is exactly what an opponent of X-Phi, particularly a critic of the negative programme, will want to say about X-Phi in aesthetics.

5.2. From negative to positive So why cannot we let the opponent of X-Phi arrive at this conclusion about aesthetics? Dorsch (2014), one of these opponents, argues against the significance of negative projects in aesthetics. But interestingly enough, Dorsch addresses Kieran’s sceptical conclusion by arguing that the tendency we have of being biased in our judgements certainly does not warrant the complete withdrawal of aesthetic claims. In fact, the knowledge of this tendency could help us recalibrate our judgements. Although Dorsch believes that this undermines the negative programme, I still believe he has a point here and that Kieran has not drawn the right conclusion about the importance of negative projects. We did not need X-Phi’s negative projects to tell us that we are often bad at making aesthetic judgements and at detecting whether or not we are biased in a particular instance. We have been warned against being biased judges ever since philosophers suggested criteria for ideal aesthetic judgements, as did Hume (aesthetic judgements must result from knowl- edgeable comparisons, be unbiased, and so on), and as did Kant (aesthetic judgements must aim to be universally acceptable, be disinterested, and so

Downloaded by [2.126.27.182] at 00:16 09 October 2017 on). However, unlike Dorsch, I believe the real value of negative projects is to tell us the circumstances under which we produce biased judgements. By building on negative projects, which can identify circumstances in which our judgements are influenced by psychological, cognitive, social or emotional effects, we cannot only avoid these circumstances but also try and identify the optimal circumstances for aesthetic appreciation and judgements. This type of empirical research has been developed in behavioural economics for instance, where researchers are investigating the underly- ing factors influencing economic decisions. Their findings are gathering increasing attention as economic behaviours have real consequences on the economic world (e.g. how people invest their money, take financial risks, allocate resources, and so on). The initial goal of behavioural economists was 18 C. TORREGROSSA

to challenge the assumptions of neoclassical economics, such as the idea that people are rational economic agents, who make choices on the basis of their preferences and the relevant information in order to maximize utility.16 This assumption is exemplified by the rational choice theory, which is used to predict human behaviours not only in economics, but also in sociology, political science and unsurprisingly, philosophy. I suggest that X-Phi in aesthetics can provide the same valuable contribution to aesthetic theories, as behavioural economics to economic theory. I would say that the only disanalogy between behavioural economics and X-Phi is that a discrepancy in a neoclassical theory manifests itself by certain unexplained economic phenomena in the world, and thus might be more visible to behavioural economists than a discrepancy in a philosophical theory to experimental philosophers. But this only makes the need to implement X-Phi in our philosophical methodology more pressing.

5.3. Refinement Moreover, this point also questions the relevance of the positive and negative taxonomy for experimental projects in aesthetics. If we consider negative projects as a platform for further positive projects to be developed, it does not make much sense to hold a strong distinction between the two. In aesthetics, we can witness what I call ‘refinement projects’, i.e. projects which use the findings of negative projects to test hypotheses and further our philosophical theories. For instance, Lopes (2014) and Kieran (2011) both considered Cutting’s (2003) work on mere exposure as part of a negative programme, as it challenged the rationality of aesthetic judgements. However, Cutting’s studies left two hypotheses unresolved: either exposure merely facilitates appreciation and only a positive aesthetic value can increase liking

Downloaded by [2.126.27.182] at 00:16 09 October 2017 by exposure, or exposure directly increases liking and it does not matter if the artwork is good or bad. To know which hypothesis was correct, further experimental work was needed, which was the purpose of the experiment led by Meskin et al. (2013). As mentioned, they showed that exposure is not a determining factor for the phenomenon of aesthetic appreciation as exposure to bad art actually decreases liking. This is an instance of experimental work putting forward hypotheses and determining which one we should hold as grounds for aesthetic theorizing. Thus, it cannot be considered a purely negative project.

16Utility here refers to the concept used in economics to measure the consumer’s gain in a transaction. INQUIRY 19

From these results, we could put forward another hypothesis: could exposure be a test for our aesthetic judgements? In the Meskin et al. study, what was considered as bad art was drastically different, and some might argue drastically worse, than what was presented as the good art. But what happens when the difference is not so drastic and our judgement is unsure? Either exposure could help us determine our judgements or we could dis- cover that the exposure effect only occurs when our judgements are already determined. This goes to show that experimental work in aesthetics is often subject to refinement and that empirical conclusions can be pushed further in order to produce results that positively inform aesthetic theories. In fact, refinement projects could also make a whole body of evidence on aesthetic phenomena available to philosophers, if we were to apply X-Phi’s methodology to it. I am referring here to the psycho-aesthetics literature, to which Cutting’s work belongs, and perhaps and with more caution, to the neuro-aesthetics literature, which does not currently constitute a direct contribution to philosophical theories of aesthetic phenomena. However, I suggest that if we pair this body of literature with X-Phi, we could further our current theories tremendously. If we tread carefully, we might be able to fill in quite a few gaps in our aesthetic theories with existing empirical findings. I believe this is where experimental philosophers should start if they want to further the positive impact of X-Phi on philosophical theories. Finally, this further indicates that X-Phi in aesthetics belongs to the broad conception. For Rose and Danks (2013), the second charge against the narrow conception was professional chauvinism. This will not be an issue, at least in aesthetics, when we start refining the results of other domains like psycho-aesthetics and neuro-aesthetics. In fact, I believe it has never been a serious issue, even in non-experimental aesthetics, as specialized areas of aesthetics, like philosophy of film for instance, have often included the

Downloaded by [2.126.27.182] at 00:16 09 October 2017 judgements of art historians, critics and other theorists in their own investigations. This was sometimes done out of necessity as the philosophical literature on specific artforms was not as abundant as in other academic disciplines, but it has also been done out of interdisciplinary interest; hence, the relevance of the broad conception of X-Phi for aesthetics.

6. Conclusion The goal of this paper was twofold. First, I discussed the application of the classic objections against X-Phi to the domain of aesthetics, which, respec- tively, concerned the method of aesthetics, the practice of aestheticians and the negative programme of X-Phi in aesthetics. I have shown that out 20 C. TORREGROSSA

of these three main strands of objection, none of them would concern X-Phi in aesthetics. In fact, X-Phi and aesthetics are compatible, aestheticians need X-Phi to calibrate their theories and the negative programme does not lead to aesthetic scepticism. But by doing this, I have also shown the specificities of the experimental practice in aesthetics. The first specificity is that X-Phi in aesthetics does not need to rely on intuitions, and thus, if we follow Williamson, becomes a more reliable epistemic tool. The second is the importance of refining our experimental results, as this allows X-Phi to be systematically constructive and avoid any objection from scepticism. The third, which can be derived from the first two, is that experimental work in aesthetics very much belongs to the broad conception of X-Phi. Overall, X-Phi in aesthetics is possibly the most up-to-date instantiation of the practice. This should make experimental philosophers curious and aestheticians optimistic.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Berys Gaut for his generous advice and support at the different stages of this manuscript, as well as to my friends and colleagues Quentin Pharr, Lewis Ross and Stefano Lo Re for their comments. I also thank the participants of the 3rd BSA Postgraduate Conference and anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions on previous drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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