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ALCARAZ LEON
MARIA
This article is concerned with the rational justification of aesthetic judgments.1 In the first section, I briefly characterize the experiential aspect
of making aesthetic judgments. In the following
section, I describe two different notions of justifyingor arguing foran aesthetic judgment, taking
into account the debate between aesthetic realists
and antirealists. For the purposes of this article,
what distinguishes a realist from an antirealist is
that the former regards aesthetic judgments as assertions with truth conditions, while the latter regards aesthetic judgments as quasi-assertions, expressing a beholders reaction to the work.2 When
it comes to the issue of aesthetic justification, realists tend to think that justificatory relationships
can only be rightly characterized by linking aesthetic properties to a more basic set of nonaesthetic properties. On the other hand, antirealists
hold that, strictly speaking, we cannot talk about
justifying an aesthetic judgment given that its content is not a property in the full sense of the word;
at most, they hold, we can aspire to persuade others to perceive an object in a certain way. In short,
the point of arguing about aesthetic judgments is
not to justify a given description of the object but
to persuade others to perceive it as the speaker
perceives it.
The central question at this point will be
whether, given an aesthetic judgment, we can
point to certain evidence in support of the judgment and whether the evidence provides rational
justification of the judgment. So the divergence
between realists and antirealists at this point goes
down to the ontological status of aesthetic properties. Hence, it looks as if accounting for aesthetic
judgments and their rational justification has some
relation with ontological debates about the status
of aesthetic properties and the way in which they
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of experiencing the objects in different ways. But
this view has the consequence of leaving any reference to aesthetic properties as the putative content of aesthetic judgment outside the pictureor,
at least, of reducing the notion of aesthetic property to the less objective notion of aspect. This
seems intolerable to some authors who have certain realist intuitions about aesthetic properties.
I will now introduce a couple of constraints on
aesthetic judgments that both realists and antirealists generally agree on.3 These constraints distinguish, in turn, aesthetic judgments from other
kinds of perceptual judgment, such as color judgments.
The first feature has come to be known as
the Acquaintance Principle (AP) and, following
Richard Wollheims formulation, it states that the
judgment of aesthetic value, unlike judgments of
moral knowledge, must be based on first-hand experience of their objects and are not . . . transmissible from one person to another.4 According to
some versions of this principle, the putative state
in which one assents to an aesthetic judgment cannot be achieved without experiencing the object
oneself.5 According to this principle, no matter
how many aesthetic descriptions I am provided
with by someone who has perceptual access to a
specific work, I cannot genuinely assent to them.
To genuinely assent to them I must experience
the work myself.6 AP, in turn, might be understood as denying two different things, or both at
the same time: (1) it may deny that aesthetic beliefs can be acquired by testimony; (2) it may deny
that aesthetic beliefs can be acquired by argument.
Though some have tried to challenge the idea that
aesthetic knowledge cannot be acquired by testimony, I will pay more attention to the second
case, for it seems directly related to the problem
I am interested in here, that is, the possibility of
aesthetic reasoning and justification.7
The second constraint has its roots in Kants
characterization of the autonomy of the judgment
of taste and its subjective character, and can be
named, following Philip Pettit, the Perceptual Elusiveness of Aesthetic Descriptions (PE). According to Pettit, [V]isual scrutiny of a picture, necessary though it may be for aesthetic knowledge,
is not always sufficient to guarantee it. One may
look at a painting and fail to come to a position
where one can sincerely assent to the aesthetic descriptions which are true of it. One may look and
look and not see its elegance or economy or sad-
Alcaraz Leon
The Rational Justification of Aesthetic Judgments
are cited in defence of ones aesthetic ascriptions
and also seems to lend metaphysical respectability
to aesthetic properties.11
It follows from accepting the supervenience
claim that no aesthetic difference will take place
without a change in the nonaesthetic base.12 However, this does not imply that a whole description
of the base can provide a justification of the applicability of a given aesthetic term to a given work,
nor that we can infer from the description alone
which set of aesthetic properties the object possesses. That is, it does not do the work of entirely
justifying an aesthetic judgment.
But, although supervenience alone cannot tell
us what justifies an aesthetic judgment, for it
merely determines the ontological status of aesthetic properties, it seems that it can at least provide a framework within which aesthetic ascriptions are taken as assertions and thus can be true
or false. This could also be expressed in a negative
way: without supervenience it may not be possible
to justify aesthetic judgments. As Bender puts it:
The second difficulty of a realist without supervenience comes in producing an adequate account of
the justification of aesthetic ascriptions. Supervenience relations help to explain why it is relevant
to cite certain of a works non-evaluative features
when justifying the assertions that the work possesses some aesthetic property.13
Supervenience accounts are compatible with
the response-dependent character of aesthetic
propertiesa feature nobody seems to denyand,
thus, allow that the same base properties yield different aesthetic properties in other worlds.14 They
rule out, however, the possibility of two different,
conflicting aesthetic descriptions of the same object in the same worldsomething that, as we have
already seen, fits perfectly well within the aspect
perception model embraced by some antirealists.
This implies that within the realist-supervenience
model there cannot be genuine disputes in aesthetics, or, at least, it is rather difficult to accommodate
them within the realistic framework.15 The expression genuine dispute might be confusing because it may be understood in two different senses.
It may be understood in a strong sense, such as
when two people judging a work offer two completely different aesthetic descriptions and neither
of them is able to see the work as the other does;
in this sense, aesthetic disputes are understood
as the output of PE. Normally, this is the sense
appealed to by an antirealist and that a realist
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that there is no matter of the fact that the aesthetic
judgment refers to.
However, Scruton does not defend the view
that any experience of an object fitting the logic
of aspect perception is an adequate one. For him,
only aesthetic experiences can provide the basis
for correct aesthetic judgments. He needs, then, to
provide a definition of aesthetic experience. But
even within the scope of aesthetic experiences it
is possible that disagreement about aesthetic descriptions of a work arises, and so the problem of
aesthetic justification will remain; for the antirealist there will be no further fact to appeal to in order
to show that a particular aesthetic judgment is true
while others are false. Scrutons answer does not
look very promising, for there seems to be no gap
between understanding an aesthetic description
and providing the conditions for its acceptance.
He writes: In aesthetics you have to see for yourself precisely because what you have to see is not
a property: your knowledge that an aesthetic feature is in the object is given by the same criteria
that show that you see it. To see the sadness in the
music and to know that the music is sad are one
and the same thing.18 It follows from this characterization that one cannot understand an aesthetic
judgment unless one has the corresponding experience, and this leaves a very narrow space either
for justifying the aesthetic ascription in question
or for rejecting it. An example might be useful
here. When I understand the aesthetic judgment
that Goyas portrait of Charles IV and his family
is ironic, then I must also have the experience of
the painting as being as the aesthetic description
characterizes it.
But, what happens if you do not perceive it as
ironic but, rather, as sympathetic? I might persuade you to perceive the painting differently by
pointing out other features of the painting that
are coherent with my judgment. However, can I
persuade you that your former experience was
wrong? What kind of reasons might I appeal to
in order to justify that the former experience was
wrong and that mine is right? I take it that as
long as the experience upon which the judgment
is based is an aesthetic one, there is no way to
show that the corresponding judgment is wrong.
I guess Scruton would say that if the experience
has been a truly aesthetic one, most of the viewers
will agree in seeing the irony in Goyas portrait,
but since aesthetic perception is framed in terms of
aspect perception, it is possible to find some other
Alcaraz Leon
The Rational Justification of Aesthetic Judgments
of the work. . . . There is a long tradition of pragmatist/rhetorical theories of aesthetic justification and it is
often said that a critics main function is to direct our
attention over a works features in such a way that we
come to see the work as the critic does, i.e., to agree with
his or her aesthetic ascriptions.21
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On the other hand, the antirealist view of aesthetic properties cannot offer but a pragmaticoriented account of aesthetic justification, where
the conditions for understanding an aesthetic
judgment and the conditions for its acceptance
are one and the same. Aesthetic judgments are
not, within this view, genuine assertions but quasiassertions and, rather than expressing a fact about
the object characterized, they aim at yielding a
certain experience of itthis being its pragmatic
feature. The nature of aesthetic justification remains, thus, a matter of agreement or consent
among the observers who experience the object
in the same manner. There is no space for arguing
for contrasting descriptions; at most we can aspire
to change the viewers perception, but changing it
does not mean justifying it. We have mentioned
Hopkinss proposal of critical perception as an alternative bias to account for the aspect perception that most antirealists embrace as partly responsible for the lack of justifying space within
aesthetic description. But his account will also be
linked to a realist stance and, so, will fall on one
of the sides of this ontologicalepistemological
debate.
I think that the lack of support that these models can bring to any justificatory relationship is
based upon the supposition that a certain metaphysical condition must be met in order to allow
certain justificatory relationships to hold. The difference between the realist and the antirealist is
not, then, in their view about what ontological
demands must be satisfied in order to grant justificatory relationships, but in that the antirealists
do not think that the ontological conditions are
available for the aesthetic case.
Moreover, I think both realists and antirealists misconstrue aesthetic justification partly because they misunderstand the subjective character of aesthetic experience. We have already
seen that aesthetic properties are typical examples of response-dependent properties, that is,
properties whose identification cannot be rightly
brought about without referring to a subjects being affected by them. This phenomenal character
of aesthetic properties (but also of what is usually called secondary properties, such as, colors,
sounds, or smells) has been understood as implying that they are not objective properties. If
these are subjective properties, then they cannot
have truth conditions, for only objective ones have
them.
Alcaraz Leon
The Rational Justification of Aesthetic Judgments
iii. does a proper characterization of
aesthetic justification require a commitment
to an ontological view about aesthetic
properties?
Maybe a possible solution to this debate could be
precisely to give up the ontological dispute that
backed each of the positions I have delineated and
concentrate upon the kind of reasons that are usually taken to be justificatory in aesthetic debates.
Is this possible? Can we offer an explanation of
what it is for an aesthetic judgment to be justified without getting involved into disputes about
the ontological nature of aesthetic properties? I
do not think that simply paying attention to the
canonical reasons usually put forward in aesthetic
disputes can help much in solving this question.
Rather than being a true solution to the problem,
it leaves it unresolved; for the dispute over the possibility of justifying aesthetic judgments cannot be
settled just by listing the usual reasons we bring
in our aesthetic disputesthese practices are acknowledged both by those who hold the possibility of aesthetic justification and by those who deny
it. That we argue about our aesthetic judgments is
not disputed; what is under discussion is the justificatory force of these arguments. And it seems to
me that the only way to fully acknowledge the justificatory relationship between an aesthetic judgment and the reasons that allegedly support it is
to provide an explanation of the conditions under
which we take aesthetic judgments to be true; and
this, in turn, brings us back to the issue of objectivity in aesthetics.
Relations of justification cannot, I think, be
properly settled without taking into account the
nature of the content of our judgments; for what
counts as evidence for asserting one judgment
rather than another must be linked to the nature of our discussion. So we still need to provide
some such account for the case of aesthetic propertieswhich I take to be the putative content of
aesthetic judgments. Considering the alternatives
mentioned so far, I think I am more confident in
my rejection of the antirealist model of aesthetic
justification than in my finding persuasive the realist account based on supervenience. I have already
provided some reasons for this, but I will try to offer some more and to tentatively introduce what I
think a plausible realist account can be.
I have rejected the antirealist view of aesthetic
justification because, as it is, it cannot, in my view,
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satisfy any of the conditions we usually expect justifications to meet. If what gives content to an
aesthetic judgment coincides with what justifies
it, we lack the typical distancebetween asserting something as true and providing reasons for
it to be suchrequired for a justificatory relationship to take place. This distance is something I will
come back to later.
So, when is an aesthetic judgment justified?
First of all, it must be noticed that a picture of
aesthetic justification need not guarantee that a
justified judgment is totally immune to possible
new aesthetic descriptions that enrich an objects
aesthetic description. As well as the fact that our
sensory capacities may be more sensitive when
trained and thus can provide us deeper access to
aspects of the objects we experience, our aesthetic
sensibility can also develop so that we can eventually aesthetically redescribe an object.
Moreover, and as it is usually emphasized
within aesthetic discourse, aesthetic ascriptions
are not law governed, though this need not prevent any hope of the possibility of aesthetic justification; for, unless we think that only law-like relationships can count as justificatory relationships,
there is no reason to think aesthetic justification
depends on law-like relationships.26 What justifies
a particular judgment may be a matter of experiencing the object in a certain way together with
some beliefs about the object judged, though these
do not need to have the form of generalizations.
Aesthetic justification needs, then, to be framed
in terms that respect these two conditions. When
we say that a work is comic because it is, in a
particular case, X and F, we are not claiming that
anytime a work is X and F then it is also comic,
but that in that particular case X and F amounts
to the works being comic. Why can this relationship not be a justificatory one? A possible answer is that X and F could have amounted to a
different aesthetic property, such as ironic, for
example. So, on what grounds do we assert that
X and F are responsible for the comical aspect
of that work? It is true that X and F can figure
in many objects and that their presence can contribute to an objects being comic, anothers being
ironic, and maybe to some others other properties. Thus, a red background in a painting might be
used in many different ways and with many different purposes. This, however, does not imply that
we cannot explain some aesthetic property of the
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representation of a landscape (for example, that
it is threatening) through that particular feature.
Besides, some other properties, not merely perceptual ones, can enter into our justification of a
particular characterization of a work. For example, we can justify our attribution of originality to
a work and not to its copy when we know them to
be the original work on one side and the copy on
the other. Thus, historical information about the
object is also relevant in determining the aesthetic
description that it deserves.
As we can see with these examples, aesthetic
judgment departs from the logic of perceptual
judgments, such as color judgments, in that in
the latter it is usually held that the experience
of seeing red explains and justifies our judgment
of something as red. However, when it comes to
aesthetic attribution, the mere experience of seeing an object as comic is not enough to justify it.
If it were, we could never be wrong in attributing a comical aspect to a work when we perceive
it as comic. But we can be if we historically misplace the work, for example. This does not mean
that aesthetic judgments are not based upon perceptual experiences. They are indeed, but when it
comes to justifying them, we cannot simply rest
content with reporting our experience; we might
need to make reference to some other features,
and some of them might be nonperceptual ones.
I think that if we understand aesthetic ascriptions as not only dependent upon perceptual features of the object but also as determined by its
historical identity, we can get closer to a characterization of the aesthetic value that leaves room
for a justificatory relationship.27 This does not involve, as it might appear to, giving up the perceptual character of aesthetic value identification.
It merely requires that we understand aesthetic
properties as three-place relations: an aesthetic
property is one that (1) an object possesses in
virtue of (2) its appearance for (3) a subject who
is well informed about the historical conditions
within which the object was produced and the intentions that governed its production.
I said before that for a justificatory relationship
to take place in the case of aesthetic judgments,
we need to characterize a certain tie between the
experience that we want to justify and the alleged
reasons that can indeed justify it. I talked then
in terms of a certain distance between the aesthetic experience and the aesthetic judgment, a
distance color judgment does not seem to require
iv. conclusion
I have tried to offer an overview of some approaches to the problem of aesthetic judgments
justification. Aesthetic judgments seem to involve
a special challenge as far as their justification is
concerned partly because of the peculiar nature
of aesthetic properties. In order to characterize
aesthetic experience and the corresponding aesthetic judgment, I have introduced AP and PE
as typical principles that are commonly acknowledged as proper to aesthetic experience. Both realists and antirealists have tried to offer a picture of
what an aesthetic judgment is and a corresponding
view about aesthetic justification. I have also tried
to argue that both misconstrue the nature of this
problem partly because of the ontological claims
embraced by each. While the realist guarantees
the ontological respectability of aesthetic properties by establishing a supervenient relationship
between them and what are called base properties,
the antirealist thinks that the response-dependent
nature of aesthetic qualities deprives them of their
objectivity.
I think that we will likely get a correct picture
of aesthetic justification if we achieve an adequate
ontological characterization of aesthetic properties. Although their relational character is undeniable, this need not amount to a rejection of their
objectivity. Hence, if we come to accept this, it
is likely that the supervenience strategy loses its
appeal. Moreover, that there are no law-like relationships governing aesthetic terms need not be a
problem unless we assume that a justificatory relationship can only hold when a law-like relationship is involved. But I think many examples from
our current reasoning and arguing practice confirm the dispensability of this relationship. My suggestion is that we can perfectly well guarantee the
possibility of justifying our aesthetic judgments
once we get rid of some previous misconceptions
about the nature of aesthetic properties. Besides,
a necessary picture of the justificatory relationship within aesthetic discourse needs to take into
account the fact that simply having an experience
of an object as having certain aesthetic properties
Alcaraz Leon
The Rational Justification of Aesthetic Judgments
is not enough to ensure the truth of the corresponding description. Since an object can surely
support more than one aesthetic description, we
need to appeal to features other than aesthetic
ones in order to support one description rather
than another.28
JOSE
ALCARAZ LEON
MARIA
Department of Philosophy
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, United Kingdom S10 2TN
internet : alcaraz.mariajose@gmail.com
1. This article has been possible thanks to the finan y Ciencia
cial support from the Ministerio de Educacion
de la subjetividad en
to the research project La expresion
las artes HUM200502533 and the postdoctoral research
scholarship EX-20061137.
2. Thus, Philip Pettit writes: What does it mean to regard aesthetic characterizations realistically? At a first level
it means two things: that one believes that under their standard interpretation, under the interpretation which respects
speakers intentions, they come out as assertions; and further
that one believes that the standard assertoric interpretation
is unobjectionable. For the purposes at hand assertions may
be taken as utterances which are capable of being true or
false. Philip Pettit, The Possibility of Aesthetic Realism,
in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition: An Anthology, ed. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom
Olsen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 158171; quote from
p. 160.
3. Although there are some authors who reject some of
them.
4. Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects (Cambridge
University Press, 1980), p. 233. As far as I know, the first
explicit formulation of this principle was given here. For
some criticisms of this principle, see Malcolm Budd, The
Acquaintance Principle, The British Journal of Aesthetics
43 (2003): 386392; and Paisley Livingston, On an Apparent Truism in Aesthetics, The British Journal of Aesthetics
43 (2003): 260278.
5. For other formulations of this principle, see Roger
Scruton, Art and Imagination: A Study in the Philosophy of
Mind (London: Methuen, 1974). He derives an antirealist
interpretation of aesthetic judgments out of this principle
together with the frequent employment of metaphorical expressions in aesthetic characterizations. See also Pettit, The
Possibility of Aesthetic Realism, pp. 158171, for a realist
version of aesthetic attributions compatible with AP.
6. A contrast with the color case is usually called upon
to clarify this principle. While if someone tells me that the
car parked in front of the Arts Tower is white, I may acquire
this knowledge and know what experience will be obtained
if I look out and see the parked car, but no similar situation
obtains if someone comes back from the gallery and says
that the painting he or she saw was beautiful.
7. For a rejection of AP, see Livingston, On an Apparent Truism in Aesthetics, and Budd, The Acquaintance
Principle.
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employed in aesthetic ascriptions and that, if we assume
Donald Davidsons view about metaphoric meaning, we
have no reason to think that aesthetic properties are captured by these ascriptions. For a criticism of this argument,
see Nick Zangwill, Metaphor and Realism in Aesthetics,
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49 (1991): 5762.
18. Scruton, Art and Imagination, p. 54.
19. The fact that aesthetic perception is understood in
terms of aspect perception also explains why the antirealist can easily accommodate PE, for there is already in the
Wittgensteinian literature a notionaspect blindnessthat
does exactly the work PE requires.
20. B. R. Tilghman, Reflections on Aesthetic Judgment, The British Journal of Aesthetics 44 (2004): 248260,
quote from p. 257.
21. Bender, Realism, Supervenience, and Irresolvable
Aesthetic Disputes, p. 377. He is not merely referring to
the antirealist but also to the realist proposal put forward by
Marcia Muelder Eaton in The Intrinsic, Non-Supervenient
Nature of Aesthetic Properties, The Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism 52 (1994): 383397.
22. Hopkins, Critical Reasoning and Critical Perception.
23. I take Hopkinss acceptance of realism to be partly
based upon his criticism to quasi-realism in Kant, QuasiRealism, and the Autonomy of Aesthetic Judgment, European Journal of Philosophy 9 (2001): 166189.