Epistemology of Aesthetics: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Goodman and After

 

Alessandro Arbo

The Epistemological Presuppositions of Hearing Something as a Work

Being able to hear something as a musical work means someway being able to understand it. The aim of this paper is to enlighten the epistemological presuppositions involved in this kind of understanding. It shows that its specificity is determined by the action of knowledge in relationship to the production of the artifact. In what are usually called the aesthetic properties of a work, it is useful to distinguish between artistic features and expressive qualities. By asking someone to try to hear a piece of music “as a work”, we invite that person to identify a re-identifiable entity in the sounds being heard (a type, a constructive record or an exemplary performance), and to apply the criteria which allow the choice of aesthetic properties with an artistic value among those supervenient upon the physical and phenomenal base.

 

Julia Beauquel

Ways of Making, Seeing and Thinking: Questions on Art, Criticism and Philosophy

Some contemporary artists still use sophisticated techniques as a means towards beauty whereas others, since Marcel Duchamp, produce works that essentially exemplify ideas without manifesting any sort of artistic skills or aesthetic virtues. Art critics may continue to describe faithfully the works of art they intend to render accessible to observers or rather, in line with Oscar Wilde’s approach, reduce art works to mere starting points for their writings, that are artworks themselves. And whether you are an analytical aesthetician or a philosopher of art in the continental tradition, you may conceive language, thought and art in incommensurable ways, analyzing the nature and functioning of art or commenting on Kant and Hegel.  Given these facts, we will raise some questions about art, criticism and philosophy in relation to knowledge; what do the artist, the critic and the philosopher of art know or have to know with respect to their own practice? Are we definitely wrong to expect artists to remain aesthetically virtuous? Is it forever absurd to consider that an art critic’s task is to apprehend, describe and evaluate artworks appropriately and relevantly? Should we once and for all accept as equally legitimate any type of philosophy, and even reconcile them?

 

Sandrine Darsel

Ce que l’art conceptuel dit

L’art conceptuel donne une formidable occasion de penser le champ de la connaissance et plus particulièrement, le privilège récurrent accordé à la connaissance théorique, propositionnelle (savoir que) sur la connaissance pratique, le savoir-faire (savoir comment). En effet, il s’agira de contester le présupposé intellectualiste de la démarche de l’art conceptuel : si la valeur de l’art repose sur sa valeur cognitive ce n’est pas à l’aune du critère du savoir théorique qu’il importe de l’analyser. Ainsi, la valeur cognitive des œuvres d’art tient moins à leur contenu propositionnel qu’à ce qu’elles exigent pour être activées (dans leur fonctionnement symbolique esthétique) : un art du discernement qui suppose l’exercice de dispositions et capacités – perception aspectuelle, émotions, imagination, raisonnement –, de vertus intellectuelles riches en significations.

What conceptual art says

Conceptual art gives us a great opportunity to think about the field of knowledge, and more specifically, about the recurring priviledge of the theoretical knowledge (knowing that) on practical knowledge (knowing how). In fact, I want to challenge the intellectualist assumption that informs the approach of conceptual art : the criterion that is to apply to cognitive value of art is not the propositional content of the artistic statement but the extension of audience intelligence. It is logically necessary to activate the works of art (their aesthetic symbolic functioning). So, the degree of cognitive value of art depends of the mobilization of dispositions and skills (aspectual perception, emotions, imagination, inference), that is intellectual virtues :  knowing how to discern this work of art.

 

Alexandre Declos

Fact, Fiction and Virtual Wolrds

This presentation will explore, from the standpoint of Goodman’s philosophy of art, some of the aesthetical and epistemological issues raised by video games. A first step will be to show that video games can be seen as referential devices, functioning within multimodal symbol systems. I will then argue that this novel sort of medium raises interesting challenges regarding a number of topics extensively discussed by Goodman, such as the identity of artworks or the cognitive value of fictions. My last claim will be that Goodman’s aesthetics could accommodate the essentially interactive nature of video games, at the condition of laying the groundwork for a  symbolic encoding of actions.

 

Catherine Z. Elgin

Understanding Understanding Art

If the arts function cognitively, aesthetics is the branch of epistemology that focuses on whatever is distinctive about the ways they do so.  Drawing on the work of Nelson Goodman, I will look at three such ways: (1) the epistemic functions of the symptoms of the aesthetic -- density, repleteness, and exemplification; (2) the contributions of emotion to cognition in the arts; (3) the role of aesthetic values in the understandings we glean through encounters with works of art.

 

Hervé Gaff

Toward a philosophy of architecture : a few ends to begin with

The aesthetics of architecture, despite some noticed works, is still a field to build. Its lack of material would be sufficient to explain its relative confidentiality, but such a claim is actually missing its main flaw. Indeed, most of the works are for various reasons hardly convincing to the participants involved in the practice of architecture, namely the architects. If we want to achieve a proper philosophy of architecture which could satisfy both philosophers and architects, we need to investigate the ways philosophers seek to attain knowledge of architecture. This, to put it in goodmanian terms, in order to attain a better understanding of architectural objects and practices through philosophy. We hope this will contribute to overcome obstacles to this understanding and to identify some considerations which could be used to construct an acceptable frame for a strong and relevant philosophy of architecture.

 

Vincent Granata

The Expression of Melancholy in the Blues: Epistemological Considerations

Among both scholars and musicians, the blues has often been described as a musical genre in which the expression of melancholy was a constitutive characteristic. Many are those who

talk and write about the blues using emotional terms. In this presentation, we will discuss this claim through musical and philosophical arguments. First, what allows us to hear and understand this music as expressive? The renewed interest in the matter since Malcolm Budd’s Music and the Emotions in 1985 has given birth to several accounts of musical expression. Which is the most satisfying one in the specific case of the blues? Then, we will focus on a performance of bluesman Jimmy “Duck” Holmes from Bentonia, Mississippi recorded during a fieldwork in 2016. We will ground our musical analysis on the idea that emotional properties are supervening on harmonic, melodic and rhythmic features, but also response-dependant to a certain category of listener.

 

Mikael M. Karlsson 

Artful Perception and Aesthetic Judgment

 

Derek Matravers

Misleading Narratives

On the occasions in which philosophers have concerned themselves with learning from narratives, they have focussed on whether or not we can learn from fiction. Recent work in the philosophy of fiction by Stacie Friend and myself has raised a more general question: under what conditions can we acquire empirical knowledge from any narrative, whether fiction or non-fiction. This talk is, in part, a response to Friend’s paper ‘Believing in Stories’ (In Greg Currie, Matthew Kieran, Aaron Meskin & Jon Robson (eds.), Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind. Oxford University Press. pp. 227-248 (2014)). I shall examine Friend’s proposals and suggest that further insight might be gained by looking at how fictions and non-fictions fit into background conventions of testimony. In doing this, I hope to throw further light on how fictions and non-fictions can mislead.

 

Jacques Morizot

Aesthetics and the fact of naturalization

Lots of debates about naturalization have today a harsh tone and aesthetics seems to have little to expect from most of them. My impression is that maybe the real stakes do not lie there. Before being a theory consisting in programs and epistemological scenarios, naturalization is a commonplace fact that leaves or could leave its mark in every place where the naturalist frame makes sense. That is the distance between naturalization viewed from above and naturalization viewed from below. In the limited scope of this paper, I borrow some insights from two contrasting cases, Burke and Sibley, who point towards two extremes: an enthusiastic support (in advance) without substantial content, and a subtle conceptualization that remains unconcerned with the benefit of deep foundations

 

Roger Pouivet

From Virtue Epistemology to Virtue Aesthetics

My project here is (not less than) a reconception of philosophical aesthetics. It sets out to establish a relationship between epistemology, aesthetics and the virtue theory, in the frame of a metaphysical anthropology basically inspired by Thomas Aquinas. This will take the form of “virtue aesthetics”, understood on the model of a “virtue epistemology”. But very different theories share this designation of “virtue epistemology”. Here virtue aesthetics puts the accent on the virtues as realizations of the nature of our human nature; and so, it supposes also a certain metaphysical anthropology, not shared by other conceptions. It is a break with some modern conceptions, roughly since the Eighteenth century, in particular the aesthetics inherited from Kant, and also those based on Phenomenology or Cognitive science.

 

Carole Talon-Hugon

Qu’est-ce qu’un paradigme artistique ?

Appréhender un objet comme une œuvre d'art suppose, sans qu'on en soit ordinairement conscient, une certaine idée de ce qu'est l'art. De manière générale, on ne perçoit qu'en mettant de l'ordre dans l'amas hétéroclite de nos sensations et en les catégorisant grâce à des concepts. Cela vaut a fortiori pour les objets culturels. L’appréhension d'une chose comme une "œuvre d'art" suppose non seulement la mise en jeu de la catégorie mentale générale d'art et de sous-catégories classificatoires (genres, sous-genres, mouvements, périodes, etc), mais aussi des croyances concernant les finalités, les usages et les valeurs de ces objets, des façons de penser leurs producteurs et ceux auxquels ils sont destinés ainsi que les lieux et les institutions où ils se font et où ils s'exposent. Si bien que ce que nous avons nommé en première approximation une "idée de l'art" est bien plutôt une nébuleuse de concepts, de valeurs et d’usages, liés entre eux de manière souterraine mais étroite ; en un mot, il s’agit d’un paradigme. Ainsi, dans l'idée moderne d'art qui se constitue au cours du xviiie siècle, la catégorie nouvelle de beaux-arts est-elle étroitement solidaire de l'invention du goût comme sens du beau, du désintéressement comme attitude appropriée face aux œuvres, des Salons et de la toute nouvelle critique d’art. Ces paradigmes évoluent tantôt lentement, tantôt brutalement, de manière partielle ou globale, discrète ou fracassante, et parfois coexistent de manière polémique. L’approche de l’art par paradigme permet que la théorie se fasse historique et l’histoire théorique. Il s’agira ici de s’interroger sur la spécificité, la pertinence et les difficultés de cette approche.

 

Elizabeth Schellenkens Dammann 

Aesthetic Value and Epistemic Value in Art

 

Guillaume Schuppert

From "Engaging with Fiction" to "Understanding Fictionality"

Despite being a prominent figure of the analytic tradition, Goodman’s epistemological aesthetics has been overshadowed by psychological approaches. Regarding the experience of fiction, Walton’s Mimesis has been paving the way for analysis in terms of imaginative engagement, leaving aside the core idea of symbolic understanding. In this paper, I hope to provide reasons not only to value Goodman’s analysis, but also to convince that make-believe theories must endorse some of its insights. Typically, they assume that, with respect to a fictional work W, p is fictional if and only if W prescribes its reader propositional imaginings of p. To begin with, I consider the limits of make-believe accounts. I argue that two issues are at stake: the aesthetical problem of fictionality (for a giving W, on what basis p is fictionally true?) and the epistemological problem of fictionality (why the mandated or actual psychological attitude should be imagination?). Then, I defend that an account of fictional truth requires a semiotic of fiction, which in turn should give another perspective on the cognitive side of the prescriptions to make-believe. Eventually, I put forward a rough conception of the experience of fiction, which is an attempt to be faithful in spirit both to Goodman and Walton. Appreciation of fiction is a twofold phenomena, that should be consider both at a semiotical level and at a psychological level.