Alice Harberd

Murdoch (1970), Nussbaum (1990), and Simoniti (2023) say our capacity to apprehend aesthetic properties is morally helpful: they think it helps us resist stereotypes and other obstacles to seeing other people as they really are, and as individual subjects. I argue that this is not the full story: aesthetic properties can actually encourage us to use stereotypes, and irrationally influence which features we stereotypically associate with a group. The mere inclusion of aesthetic properties within stereotypes, alongside everyday aesthetic perception in the background of our interaction with others, can: 1. Make stereotypes come to mind more easily; 2. Make them appear more plausible; 3. Irrationally influence which features a stereotype most prominently associates with a group; 4. Make it easier to infer from someone having one feature ascribed in a stereotype to their having other characteristics the stereotype ascribes; 5. Make the influence of stereotypes on our thoughts relatively incorrigible.

I argue that aesthetic properties can negatively bias our epistemic evaluations: they can make us think that communications that are actually significant or profound are banal or unimportant. Then, I argue that this observation has implications for our understanding of the value of art. Many people think their favourite artworks are valuable qua art partly because of the insights they convey—a version of a view called aesthetic cognitivism. One objection to this view highlights the difficulty of giving examples of insights learnt from art—articulations of the supposed ‘insights’ often sound hopelessly banal. However, the potential for aesthetically induced epistemic underestimations undermines this objection. The aesthetic properties that articulations of insights from artworks tend to bear are likely to give a false impression of banality. So, attempts to articulate insights from artworks are not reliable evidence of the epistemic value of those works.