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Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Fri Jan 31 2014, NEWGEN Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind EDITED BY Gregory Currie, Matthew Kieran, Aaron Meskin, and Jon Robson 1 acprof-9780199669639.indd 3 1/31/2014 6:56:02 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Fri Jan 31 2014, NEWGEN 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Te several contributors 2014 Te moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2014 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2013954857 ISBN 978–0–19–966963–9 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, cr0 4yy Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. acprof-9780199669639.indd 4 1/31/2014 6:56:02 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Fri Jan 31 2014, NEWGEN Contents List of Contributors ix Introduction 1 Gregory Currie, Matthew Kieran, Aaron Meskin, and Jon Robson Part I. Method 1. Feckless Reason 21 Dominic McIver Lopes 2. Is Aesthetic Experience Possible? 37 Sherri Irvin 3. ‘Tis is Your Brain on Art’: What Can Philosophy of Art Learn from Neuroscience? 57 David Davies 4. Te Limits of Aesthetic Empiricism 75 Fabian Dorsch 5. Philosophy of Perception as a Guide to Aesthetics 101 Bence Nanay 6. Portrait of the Artist as an Aesthetic Expert 121 Christy Mag Uidhir and Cameron Buckner Part II. First-Order Issues 7. Seeing with Feeling 143 Jesse Prinz 8. Te Arts, Emotion, and Evolution 159 Noël Carroll 9. All Your Desires in One Box 181 Jonathan M. Weinberg 10. Physiological Evidence and the Paradox of Fiction 205 Kathleen Stock 11. Believing in Stories 227 Stacie Friend Index 249 acprof-9780199669639.indd 7 1/31/2014 6:56:02 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Fri Jan 31 2014, NEWGEN 4 Te Limits of Aesthetic Empiricism Fabian Dorsch 4.1 Introduction: Aesthetic Empiricism No sensible account of aesthetic appreciation can deny that empirical evidence is central to the understanding and appraisal of artworks. Tis remains true even if empirical access is broadly understood as to comprise not only sensory perception, but also emotional experience and scientifc observation, as well as their testimonial dissemination. We have to make use of our senses in order to get to know artworks, including works of literature or conceptual art. We have to pay attention to our feelings in response to artworks in order to assess whether they are moving or tragic. We have to determine the age of artworks and study the circumstances of their production in order to uncover their degree of originality and imaginativeness. And our aesthetic appreciation of art always involves the empirical interaction with concrete entities—even in the case of literature, music, or conceptual art, say. Accordingly, our knowledge of aesthetic properties is invariably empirical in the sense that it is at least partially based on our empirical access to the artworks concerned. Tis concession to empirically minded views in aesthetics leaves, however, room for legitimate disagreement about the concrete extent of the epistemic role of empiri- cal evidence in aesthetic appreciation. Roughly speaking, while aesthetic empiricism maintains that empirical evidence may—and ofen does—sufce to provide defeasible justifcation for our frst- or higher-order aesthetic judgements, aesthetic rationalism denies this.1 More specifcally, three particular empiricist claims—which difer pri- marily in the kind of judgement that they take empirical evidence to possess the power to ground—are the subject of controversy: (E1) Empirical evidence can be sufcient to defeasibly justify aesthetic judge- ments (e.g., ‘the painting is beautiful’). 1 Aesthetic empiricists also sometimes defend the stronger claim that empirical evidence is the canon- ical or even the sole source of justifcation. But what they typically have in mind when making this claim is frst-personal experience, rather than scientifc or otherwise third-personal evidence—see, for instance, Sibley (1965/2001) and Budd (1999) on judgements about aesthetic qualities, or Goldman (1995) and Budd (1996) on judgements about aesthetic values. I object to this stronger empiricist claim in Dorsch (2007) and Dorsch (2014). acprof-9780199669639.indd 75 1/31/2014 6:56:13 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Fri Jan 31 2014, NEWGEN 76 Dorsch (E2) Empirical evidence can be sufcient to defeasibly justify judgements about the adequacy of our aesthetic judgements (e.g., ‘I am justifed in judging that the painting is beautiful’). (E3) Empirical evidence can be sufcient to defeasibly justify sceptical judge- ments about our capacity to form adequate aesthetic judgements (e.g., ‘I am an unreliable critic and should refrain from forming aesthetic judgements’). In this chapter, I would like to argue that none of these three empiricist claims is true. With respect to (E1), it makes a diference whether the kind of justifcation concerned is assumed to be non-inferential or inferential. I have elsewhere argued against the idea that perceptual, emotional, and other frst-personal experiences can provide non-inferential justifcation for aesthetic judgements (see Dorsch 2007 and 2014). Accordingly, my present consideration of the non-inferential reading of (E1) is exclu- sively focused on the possibility of non-inferential justifcation through third-personal empirical evidence, as it is provided by the natural sciences, the examination of histori- cal sources, or sociological or psychological studies. My arguments against the infer- ential reading of (E1), as well as against the other two empiricist claims, are largely neutral on whether the empirical evidence concerned is frst- or third-personal. But since (E2) and (E3) are generally more plausible if applied to third-personal evidence, my discussion of aesthetic empiricism in this chapter is primarily concentrated on evi- dence provided by scientifc or similar studies.2 4.2 Grounding Aesthetic Judgements: (E1) Let us begin with the issue of whether (E1) is true: whether empirical evidence can pro- vide epistemic support for the ascription of aesthetic properties to artworks. In fact, empirical research may lead to the discovery of properties of a certain kind in a direct or in an indirect way. Te empirical detection of properties is direct if the empirically gained evidence informs us about their presence without the need to engage in any type of inference or reasoning. For example, we can directly see the colour of material objects, or use instruments to directly measure (i.e., read of) their length or size. With respect to aesthetic appreciation, the idea is that we can see or measure the symmetry of a build- ing, or discover the value of a piece of music by feeling the pleasure that it gives us (see, e.g., Sibley 1965/2001, McDowell 1983, and Kieran 2010). In such cases, the empirical evidence grounds our aesthetic judgements in a non-inferential way. 2 It has been proposed that there are higher-order epistemic feelings which refect the good (or bad) epistemic standing of frst-order states (see Proust 2008). While I am generally sympathetic to this idea (see Dorsch 2009b and Dorsch 2013), I am not sure whether these feelings can provide justifcation for the relevant higher-order judgements. In any case, a positive answer would concern the truth of (E2) just for frst-personal—but not for third-personal—evidence. acprof-9780199669639.indd 76 1/31/2014 6:56:13 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Fri Jan 31 2014, NEWGEN The Limits of Aesthetic Empiricism 77 Te empirical discernment of properties is indirect, on the other hand, if the respec- tive experiments and studies merely enable us to infer their presence by registering features of another kind and by establishing suitable specifc principles of inference. Spectrophotometry, for instance, provides us with indirect access to surface colours by directly measuring refectance profles and by recording correlations between such profles and colour experiences (see Hardin 1988, Byrne and Hilbert 2003, and Dorsch 2009a). Applied to aesthetic judgement, the thought is that we can infer the aesthetic value or qualities of artworks on the basis of the empirical discovery of both their non-aesthetic features and the metaphysical connections between the two sets of properties. In such cases, the empirical evidence provides us with inferential justifca- tion for our aesthetic judgements. 4.2.1 Non-inferential grounding According to a standard picture, aesthetic values are realized by aesthetic qualities, which are again realized by non-aesthetic properties (see, e.g., Sibley 1965/2001 and 1959/2001, Budd 1999, and Zangwill 2001). On the assumption that realization is tran- sitive, aesthetic values are also realized by the non-aesthetic features. But, due to the hierarchical structure of realization, the realization by non-aesthetic features occurs on a lower level than the realization by aesthetic qualities.
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