Aaron Meskin

The analogy between gustatory taste and critical or aesthetic taste plays a recurring role in the history of aesthetics. Our interest in this article is in a particular way in which gustatory judgments are frequently thought to be analogous to critical judgments. It appears obvious to many that to know how a particular object tastes we must have tasted it for ourselves; the proof of the pudding, we are all told, is in the eating. And it has seemed just as obvious to many philosophers that aesthetic judgment requires first-person experience. In this article we argue that, despite its initial appeal, the claim that gustatory and critical judgments are analogous in this way is mistaken. The two sorts of judgments are, as a matter of fact, similar in their epistemology, but earlier theorists have got things entirely backward—neither gustatory judgment nor aesthetic judgment requires first-hand acquaintance with their objects. Our particular focus in this article is on arguing that first-person experience is not required to know how an item of food or drink tastes. In fact, there are a wide variety of ways in which we can acquire this knowledge

Recent theorists suggest that our capacity to respond affectively to fictions depends on our ability to engage in simulation: either simulating a character in the fiction, or simulating someone reading or watching the fiction as though it were fact. We argue that such accounts are quite successful at accounting for many of the basic explananda of our affective engagements in fiction. Nonetheless, we argue further that simulationist accounts ultimately fail, for simulation involves an ineliminably ego-centred element that is atypical of our experience of fiction. We then draw on recent work in philosophical psychology to articulate a more psychologically plausible account of our emotional engagement with fiction.

One aim of this essay is to contribute to understanding aesthetic communication—the process by which agents aim to convey thoughts and transmit knowledge about aesthetic matters to others. Our focus will be on the use of aesthetic adjectives in aesthetic communication. Although theorists working on the semantics of adjectives have developed sophisticated theories about gradable adjectives, they have tended to avoid studying aesthetic adjectives—the class of adjectives that play a central role in expressing aesthetic evaluations. And despite the wealth of attention paid to aesthetic adjectives by philosophical aestheticians, they have paid little attention to contemporary linguistic theories of adjectives. We take our work to be a first step in remedying these lacunae. In this paper, we present four experiments that examine one aspect of how aesthetic adjectives ordinarily function: the context-sensitivity of their application standards. Our results present a prima facie empirical challenge to a common distinction between relative and absolute gradable adjectives because aesthetic adjectives are found to behave differently from both. Our results thus also constitute a prima facie vindication of some philosophical aestheticians’ contention that aesthetic adjectives constitute a particularly interesting segment of natural language, even if the boundaries of this segment might turn out to be different from what they had in mind.

Berys Gaut has recently articulated and defended a putatively anti-definitional ‘cluster’ theory of art. In the first part of this paper, I argue that Gaut's version of the cluster account is flawed. The key notion of ‘counting toward the application of a concept’ is formulated in such a way that a range of apparently irrelevant properties will count as criterial for the concept of art. Moreover, there does not appear to be any quick fix to this problem. I then turn to an exploration of the relationship between the cluster theory and the possibility of defining art. Gaut has claimed that the truth of the cluster account would provide an independent basis for rejecting the possibility of an adequate definition of art. I argue that this is not the case. But while the truth of the cluster account is consistent with definition, I also argue that it would not entail the definability of art in any ordinary sense.

This dissertation explores the notion of relevance as it appears in debates within the philosophy of art. ;Chapter one begins by exploring the extent to which notions of relevance inform many of the central debates within the philosophy of art. I distinguish some contexts in which questions about relevance arise and show that there are at least two importantly distinct notions of relevance that get referred to in the literature---a metaphysical notion and an epistemological notion. Chapter two addresses a recent challenge posed by Mary Mothersill to the applicability of the concept of relevance in the aesthetic domain. I argue that Mothersill presents no good reasons to think relevance fails to apply in the artistic domain. Chapter three explores and criticizes the main candidate theories of aesthetic relevance. I argue that causal-psychological theories of aesthetic relevance suffer from two flaws: they fail to capture the normative aspect of relevance; and they unreasonably restrict the effects relevant information must have on audiences. The natural successor to psychological theories of aesthetic relevance---an ideal observer account---does a better job of capturing the normativity of relevance but suffers from the difficulty of determining what counts as an ideal observer in the artistic realm. Chapter four is devoted to exploring and criticizing the widespread view that artistic value is a form of instrumental value determined solely by the valuable experiences works of art can provide. I show that the arguments that purport to establish that the non-experiential effects of art are irrelevant to artistic value and evaluation are fatally flawed. The fifth and final chapter focuses on the connection between artistic value and relevance. I argue that both essentialist and anti-essentialist theories of artistic value fail to deal satisfactorily with the issue of relevance. I then argue for a pragmatic and relativist conception of relevance. This leads to a pragmatic and relativist conception of artistic evaluation.