“…According to Kant, in aesthetics—in contrast to ordinary empirical matters—the judgments of others cannot serve as any kind of basis for my own judgments. Gorodeisky (: 55) describes the Kantian view as follows:[T]estimony may have an important role to play in our arriving at aesthetic judgement. For example, it can give me information that I need in order to make an aesthetic judgement, or help me see the beauty of the object more clearly.…”
Section: Aesthetic Testimonymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…So, given that unusability pessimists reject both unavailability pessimism (Gorodeisky : 58–61, Hopkins : 142–5) and optimism (Gorodeisky : 54; Hopkins : 154–5; 2006: 95), what alternative do they propose? As I stated above, unusability pessimists claim that, were I to form an aesthetic belief on the basis of testimony, I would violate some norm (or norms) but that the norm(s) violated would be non‐epistemic .…”
Section: Aesthetic Testimonymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…elegant or mawkish, you cannot place me in a strong enough epistemic position to share this knowledge through testimony alone. However, some (Hopkins 2006; 2011; Gorodeisky ) argue that a more promising way of being a pessimist is to embrace what Hopkins (: 140) calls ‘unusability pessimism’. This view holds that, while aesthetic knowledge is available to us via testimony, there is something illicit about our accepting the knowledge that is offered to us—that in forming our beliefs on the basis of testimony we would violate an important norm of belief formation .…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…The view is also notably defended by Gorodeisky (). Hills (), McGrath () and Hopkins () all defend at least somewhat parallel views with respect to moral testimony.…”
Unusability pessimism has recently emerged as an appealing new option for pessimists about aesthetic testimony—those who deny the legitimacy of forming aesthetic beliefs on the basis of testimony. Unusability pessimists argue that we should reject the traditional pessimistic stance that knowledge of aesthetic matters is unavailable via testimony in favour of the view that while such knowledge is available to us, it is unusable. This unusability stems from the fact that accepting such testimony would violate an important non‐epistemic norm of belief formation. In this article I present an objection to unusability pessimism and argue that Robert Hopkins, the view's most prominent defender, fails to motivate adequately the claim that there are such non‐epistemic belief norms. The cases which putatively legitimize usability norms can be explained by appeal to more familiar norm types: epistemic norms of belief formation, and non‐epistemic norms which govern action other than belief formation. The intent of this article is not primarily negative, however, and I will also argue that understanding why the unusability position fails helps us to identify a promising new direction for the pessimist's opponents who wish to defend the legitimacy of forming aesthetic beliefs on the basis of testimony.
“…According to Kant, in aesthetics—in contrast to ordinary empirical matters—the judgments of others cannot serve as any kind of basis for my own judgments. Gorodeisky (: 55) describes the Kantian view as follows:[T]estimony may have an important role to play in our arriving at aesthetic judgement. For example, it can give me information that I need in order to make an aesthetic judgement, or help me see the beauty of the object more clearly.…”
Section: Aesthetic Testimonymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…So, given that unusability pessimists reject both unavailability pessimism (Gorodeisky : 58–61, Hopkins : 142–5) and optimism (Gorodeisky : 54; Hopkins : 154–5; 2006: 95), what alternative do they propose? As I stated above, unusability pessimists claim that, were I to form an aesthetic belief on the basis of testimony, I would violate some norm (or norms) but that the norm(s) violated would be non‐epistemic .…”
Section: Aesthetic Testimonymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…elegant or mawkish, you cannot place me in a strong enough epistemic position to share this knowledge through testimony alone. However, some (Hopkins 2006; 2011; Gorodeisky ) argue that a more promising way of being a pessimist is to embrace what Hopkins (: 140) calls ‘unusability pessimism’. This view holds that, while aesthetic knowledge is available to us via testimony, there is something illicit about our accepting the knowledge that is offered to us—that in forming our beliefs on the basis of testimony we would violate an important norm of belief formation .…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…The view is also notably defended by Gorodeisky (). Hills (), McGrath () and Hopkins () all defend at least somewhat parallel views with respect to moral testimony.…”
Unusability pessimism has recently emerged as an appealing new option for pessimists about aesthetic testimony—those who deny the legitimacy of forming aesthetic beliefs on the basis of testimony. Unusability pessimists argue that we should reject the traditional pessimistic stance that knowledge of aesthetic matters is unavailable via testimony in favour of the view that while such knowledge is available to us, it is unusable. This unusability stems from the fact that accepting such testimony would violate an important non‐epistemic norm of belief formation. In this article I present an objection to unusability pessimism and argue that Robert Hopkins, the view's most prominent defender, fails to motivate adequately the claim that there are such non‐epistemic belief norms. The cases which putatively legitimize usability norms can be explained by appeal to more familiar norm types: epistemic norms of belief formation, and non‐epistemic norms which govern action other than belief formation. The intent of this article is not primarily negative, however, and I will also argue that understanding why the unusability position fails helps us to identify a promising new direction for the pessimist's opponents who wish to defend the legitimacy of forming aesthetic beliefs on the basis of testimony.
Some philosophers writing on the possibility of faultless disagreement have argued that the only way to account for the intuition that there could be disagreements which are faultless in every sense is to accept a relativistic semantics.In this article we demonstrate that this view is mistaken by constructing an absolutist semantics for a particular domain -aesthetic discourse -which allows for the possibility of genuinely faultless disagreements. We argue that this position (Humean absolutism) is an improvement over previous absolutist responses to the relativist's challenge and that it presents an independently plausible account of the semantics of aesthetic discourse.In recent years philosophers have paid a great deal of attention to the putative phenomenon of faultless disagreement. Some have argued that there are certain domains in which there are (or at least could be) instances of genuine disagreement in which neither party is (in some important sense we will explicate later) at fault.1 Popular candidate domains include disagreements concerning ethics and aesthetics, those involving epistemic modals (e.g. 'he might be in the car'), and, perhaps most prominently debates surrounding so called 'predicates of personal taste' such as 'fun' and 'tasty'. Such claims are, of course, controversial and some have expressed scepticism as to whether there could ever be disagreements which are faultless in any theoretically interesting sense.2 Others, though, have not only accepted these appearances at face value but have put them to work in the service of various theoretical goals, invoking the phenomenon of faultless disagreement as, among other things, a mandate for endorsing relativistic semantic theories. In this article we will have very little to say concerning the general debate over whether faultless disagreement -in the sense we will explicate belowis, or even could be, a genuine phenomenon. (Though we hope that the view we sketch will address some reservations which might arise regarding the phenomenon.) Rather we will focus on the claimed link between faultless disagreement and relativism. Arguing that, appearances to the contrary, an attractive non-relativist theory can be sketched which captures both the intuition that the disputes in question are genuine disagreements and the intuition that they are completely faultless. 4 Further, we will not attempt to establish that the view we will outline below provides the correct account of the semantics of the relevant disputes but merely argue that it manages to present an independently plausible non-relativist account of the semantics while also capturing the alleged phenomenon of faultless disagreement. Since the view of faultless disagreement we sketch below takes its inspiration from some of Hume's work in aesthetics our discussion will primarily focus on disputes concerning matters of aesthetic taste but the lessons we will draw are intended to be equally applicable to disputes in other domains where faultless disagreement may be present.In §1 we...
Making an adequate aesthetic judgment about an object or an aesthetic property requires first-hand experience of that object or property. Many have suggested that this principle is a valid epistemic norm in the epistemology of the aesthetic. However, some recent philosophers have argued that certain works of conceptual art and other counterexamples disprove the principle in question, even suitably modified. In this paper, I argue that these philosophers are mistaken and that, when properly qualified, the acquaintance principle (in some of its versions) is not threatened by their examples and arguments.
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