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This paper offers a critical analysis of Robert Stecker's account of aesthetic experience and its relation to aesthetic and artistic values. The analysis will demonstrate that Stecker's formulation of aesthetic experience as it stands is incompatible with his arguments for nonaesthetic artistic values. Rather than multiplying the values associated with aesthetic experience, a deeper understanding of that experience will best serve to clarify problems at the core of the discipline.During a session at an American Society for Aesthetics conference a couple of years ago, a speaker quipped, 'I don't even understand the difference between aesthetic and artistic value!' and I thought, neither do I. The question of what makes an experience a particularly aesthetic one cuts to the heart of the discipline at its most complex. Not only are there competing approaches to locating the aesthetic -in the properties of objects on the one hand, or the felt pleasures of our experiences on the other -there is also a great deal of disagreement about what values arise from, or are involved in, these experiences, and whether they differ according to the objects to which we give our attention. Our confident and often facile use of such notions as aesthetic experience, aesthetic value, artistic value, and so on, in fact belies a great deal of confusion about what they mean, or what we mean when we use them. That a philosopher would voice that confusion was refreshing, for we have generally taken for granted that we understand what aesthetic experience is, or what aesthetic and artistic values amount to, when in fact we often do not. And lest the heart of our endeavours prove hollow, we need to sort this confusion out.To this end, I turned to the recent work of Robert Stecker, who, in a series of papers since 1997, has been developing an account of aesthetic experience and the relation of this experience to both aesthetic and artistic value. And while the details of his formulation of artistic value in particular have been the subject of some cogent criticism by Dominic McIver Lopes and Julian Dodd, 1 his broader account of the relation of these values to our experiences has not yet been I am grateful for suggestions made on an earlier draft of this paper by Beth Savickey, Lars Aagaard-Mogensen, and James Young, as well as for the incisive comments made by two anonymous reviewers for this journal.

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At the intersection of aesthetics and epistemology lies the idea that works of art can convey knowledge of a kind/ and can enrich our understanding of the world. The many theories that have devolved from this central notion include those seeking to explain art in terms of a theory of metaphor: if art can be shown to be metaphorical/ art can therefore generate new meaning/ and so lay claim to epistemic legitimacy. This approach can be found in the work of Arthur Danto/ Mark Johnson, and Carl Hausman, but more recently in articles by A. T. Nuyen and Kirk Pillow/ who claim that the notion of artas-metaphor can be traced in nascent form to Kant's Critique of Judgment 1 Nuyen writes that "it is the Kantian theory that gives epistemologicallegitimacy to the visions of poets and artists .... [I]t is the Kantian theory that places those visions at the center of human rationality" (KM, 108). Both he and Pillow wish to find in Kant an early/ and bona fide, articulation of the epistemological function of art. I will argue that they cannot do so, and that their contentions rest on an incomplete reading of, particularly, sections 49 and 59 of the Third Critique. 2 Kant's goal, I will claim, is more modest than they allow. His conceptions of beauty and the aesthetic ideas of genius function not as metaphors providing new insight/ but as symbols serving to represent rational ideas we already have, enabling us to demonstrate and concretize concepts for which no direct intuition is possible. While Kant does provide insight into how artworks come to have meaning for us, he is not, in the end, breaking ground for a theory of art as metaphor or for a defense of art's function in the acquisition of knowledge. My purpose in this paper is twofold: first, I seek to correct what I regard as an overly ambitious reading of sections of the Third Critique; second/ I shall use Kant's discussion of art to explore what happens in the interaction between a spectator and a work/ and to make some (very modest) proposals about the nature of interpretation. These proposals will emerge largely through an analysis of Nuyen's and Pillow's arguments/ and a reading of Kant's text. I will begin with Nuyen's article, which presents the weaker of the two arguments for a Kantian theory of metaphor. He focuses on §59 of the Critique of Judgment, entitled "Of Beauty as the Symbol of Morality." Here Kant makes a number of observations on symbolism. Symbols are one of three types of "hypotyposis"-presentations, or what Paul Guyer defines as the "rendering of concepts in terms of sense." Concepts must be connected to something we can experience in order to have real meaning; intuitions are just what establish the objective reality of our concepts. Yet the