Recommending beauty: semantics and pragmatics of aesthetic predicates

Salas, Javier González de Prado; Milić, Ivan

doi:10.1080/0020174x.2016.1238778

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 43 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…We are not performing conceptual analysis here. 11 See González Prado and Milić (2018) for the suggestion that aesthetic judgments are double speech acts involving an assertion (understood in contextualist terms as we've done here) and a recommendation to "exercise a sensibility" that would lead to a shared appraisal.…”

Section: Aesthetic Subjectivismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aesthetic Higher-Order Evidence for Subjectivists

Uidhir

Oliveira

2023

British Journal of Aesthetics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Aesthetic subjectivism takes the truth of aesthetic judgments to be relative to the individual making that judgment. Despite widespread suspicion, however, this does not mean that one cannot be wrong about such judgments. Accordingly, this does not mean that one cannot gain higher-order evidence of error and fallibility that bears on the rationality of the aesthetic judgment in question. In this paper, we explain and explore these issues in some detail.Aesthetic judgments seem to indicate something affective about the person who makes them. When I judge that my entrée was delicious, that your painting is beautiful, that tonight's movie was good, or that some new piece of music is great, I seem to be indicating something or other about my preferences, desires, emotions, feelings, and so on. 2 This is not simply because we can infer from these aesthetic judgments something about me, much like you can infer that I am having a certain kind of visual experience from my claim that there is an empty blue chair in the corner over there. Instead, there seems to be something in the very content of aesthetic judgments that makes them partly about my affective states and experiences.One common way of making sense of this apparent feature of aesthetic judgments is to accept that, indeed, there is not much more to them than some kind of truth-apt expression of our preferences, desires, emotions, feelings, tastes, and so on. On this view, in other words, there is no independent "fact of the matter" regarding the deliciousness of my meal or the beauty of your painting, and no objective standards by reference to which we can determine whether some movie is truly good or some piece of music truly great. There is no independent fact of the matter, that is, as to the deliciousness of Foie Gras Ice Cream, the beauty of a Thomas Kinkade cottage painting, the goodness of an Ingmar Bergmann psycho-analytic flick, or the greatness of Bob Dylan's tunes. That I judge these delicious, beautiful, good, and great speaks to my personal preferences -in some sense or another -and to nothing more. These aesthetic properties are not "in the objects," so to speak, such that you and I can succeed or fail to detect them. Call this view aesthetic subjectivism.In section 2 below, we will describe in some detail a response-dependence version of this view.1 For comments and discussion of previous drafts, we are grateful to Aaron Smuts, Chris Nagel, Josh DiPaolo, Nick Riggle, Justin Coates, Daniel Whiting, and two anonymous referees. 2 Ordinarily, the predicates 'good' and 'great' can be used in almost any context: good/great car, good/great game, good/great decision, good/great person, good/great inference, etc. We here assume there is an "aesthetic sense" of 'good' and 'great' without thereby committing ourselves to any particular view on how to draw the relevant distinctions. Following Riggle (2016), moreover, we are not hereby committed to the traditional view (c.f., Hume and Kant, e.g.) that aesthetic judgments per se are characteristically "disinter...

show abstract

Section: Aesthetic Subjectivismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aesthetic Higher-Order Evidence for Subjectivists

Uidhir

Oliveira

2023

British Journal of Aesthetics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Toward a pragmatic account and taxonomy of valuative speech acts

García

2019

PRAG

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper presents an account of value ascription as an illocutionary force, based on four claims: (1) that value ascription is a kind of illocutionary force, defining a specific kind of speech act, i.e. valuative speech acts (VSAs); (2) that the point of VSAs is ascribing an axiological value to a referent; (3) that VSAs create a weak, inside-oriented truth commitment; and (4) that they are therefore more about the valuating subject than they are about the valuated object. This illocutionary force is described using criteria taken from contemporary speech act theory as well as others that have proven informative. This description results in a rich taxonomy of VSAs. This shows the viability and fruitfulness of a pragmatic account of value ascription, and it contributes to the development of speech act theory, specifically with regard to the distinction between primary and secondary illocutionary points, and the speech act taxonomy itself.

show abstract

Legislating Taste

Walden

2023

The Philosophical Quarterly

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

My aesthetic judgements seem to make claims on you. While some popular accounts of aesthetic normativity say that the force of these claims is third-personal, I argue that it is actually second-personal. This point may sound like a bland technicality, but it points to a novel idea about what aesthetic judgements ultimately are and what they do. It suggests, in particular, that aesthetic judgements are motions in the collective legislation of the nature of aesthetic activity. This conception is recommended by its ability to explain some important but otherwise recondite features of aesthetic practice and, more importantly, by allowing us to ground the normativity of aesthetic judgement in the familiar normativity of practice. It also offers a more systematic way of understanding the rivalry between the ideals of aesthetic universality and diversity.

show abstract

Recommending beauty: semantics and pragmatics of aesthetic predicates

Cited by 3 publications

References 43 publications

Aesthetic Higher-Order Evidence for Subjectivists

Aesthetic Higher-Order Evidence for Subjectivists

Toward a pragmatic account and taxonomy of valuative speech acts

Legislating Taste

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About