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Beauty and testimony

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Robert Hopkins
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Extract

Kant claims that the judgement of taste, the judgement that some particular is beautiful, exhibits two ‘peculiarities’. First:

[t]he judgement of taste determines its object in respect of delight (as a thing of beauty) with a claim to the agreement of every one, just as if it were objective.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 47 , September 2000 , pp. 209 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2000

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References

1 Kant, , Critique of JudgementGoogle Scholar, trans J. C. Meredith (hereafter CJ) section 32.

2 CJ, section 33.

3 ibid.

4 CJ, sections 1 and 3. For careful discussion of these complex issues, see Schaper, Eva, Studies in Kant's Aesthetics, (Edinburgh University Press, 1979)Google Scholar, chapter 2.

5 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, e.g., A105–6.

6 CJ, sections 21, 35–8; Introduction, section VII.

7 This is convincingly argued in Wright, C., Truth and Objectivity (Harvard University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

8 It does not, of course, require a subject matter independent of our collective responses, including judgements. Or rather, not every form of objectivity requires this.

9 See the discussions below of ‘interest’ (section 3) and dependent beauty (section 7).

10 CJ, section 34. See also Mothersill, Mary, Beauty Restored (Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

11 CJ, section 15.

12 CJ, section 1.

13 CJ, section 18.

14 CJ. section 2.

15 This reading is defended in Guyer, P., Kant and the Claims of Taste, 2nd edition, (Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 88–97Google Scholar.

16 Mothersill, , Beauty Restored, p. 160Google Scholar. Mothersill's book is the source of the phrase ‘implicate an avowal’, and of the proposal offered in this paragraph. See esp. pp. 85, 159–60.

17 Kant certainly thinks the judgement of taste has content, since otherwise he can hardly consider it to be warranted. For a plausible reconstruction of his view on what that content is, see Savile, A., Aesthetic Reconstructions: The Seminal Writings of Lessing, Kant and Schiller (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987Google Scholar), chapter 5.

18 Let us set aside Kant's idea (above, section 3) that quite generally aesthetic matters are not capable of being ‘known’. My claims are plausible independently of Kant's rather theory-laden views on the topic.

19 This point, and a similar example, can be found in Coady, C. A. J., Testimony (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

20 This need not be to reintroduce the issue of expertise. We might merely consider cases in which T and H are in various ways alike.

21 The accounts which follow are not the only ones available. But they exemplify the two poles between which any account must position itself. Since they are also the most plausible accounts I know, I will not complicate matters by discussing alternatives.

22 Hume, Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, chapter IX.

23 Burge, Tyler, ‘Content Preservation’, Philosophical Review, 1993, pp. 457–88Google Scholar.

24 For defence of this assumption, see Burge, ‘Content Preservation’, Coady, Testimony, Schmitt, F., ‘Justification, Sociality and Autonomy’, Synthese, 73 (1) (1987), 43–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Owens, D., Reason Without Freedom, draft 1998Google Scholar.

25 Burge, , ‘Content Preservation’, p. 468Google Scholar.

26 David Owens drew my attention to this.

27 We might construe expertise in aesthetic matters along the lines here proposed. On this view, the expert is one whose aesthetic credentials are sufficiently well established for his testimony to provide strong evidence for a Humean inference to the truth of his claims. If there are ‘experts’ in beauty, whose testimony has special force, the proposal offers a plausible way to accommodate that.

28 Can the modest objectivist framework we are working within here allow for the notion of truth? I see no reason why not, for at least some such notion is not of much metaphysical import (see Wright, Truth and Objectivity). Even if that claim is wrong, other notions could readily be substituted here — at the limit, just that of succeeding (or failing) in legitamately making a demand of all.

29 CJ, section 16.

30 ibid.

31 What then is the role of those a posteriori beliefs? H's answering the questions about T satisfactorily is a necessary condition, once they have arisen, for his reasonably letting his belief conform to T's. Provided that condition is met, his warrant lies, as on the unmodified Burge model, in whatever T's warrant consists in. Compare: in special circumstances, I may have to decide whether to trust my memory; but, if I do reasonably decide to do so, my warrant for the remembered belief stems from the entitlement memory brings, not from any justification my deliberations might offer.

32 One reason why Burge does not consider this possibility is that he is in part exploring whether one can learn matters a priori from testimony. In ‘Content Preservation’ the matter in question is that testified to (see esp. note 4; cf. ‘Interlocution, Perception and Memory’ Philosophical Studies, 86, 1997, 21–47)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Elsewhere it is the existence of other minds — see ‘Reason and the First Person’, in Wright, C., Smith, B. and Macdonald, C. (eds), Knowing Our Own Minds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 243–70Google Scholar, esp. 262ff.

33 For the former, see A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic; for at least an analogue, in ethics, of the latter, see J. L. Mackie, Ethics, Inventing Right & Wrong.

34 Sophisticated variants of these subjectivist views will attempt to account for a good deal of the appearance of assertion and warrant in our talk of beauty, (see Blackburn, S.Spreading the Word (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984)Google Scholar, chapter 6 and Essays in Quasi-Realism (Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. These variants will face a version of the problem above. They need to explain how it can be that evidential testimony about beauty seems to be possible, when transmission testimony does not.

35 Wright, Truth and Objectivity, pp. 92–3. Cf. chapter 4.

36 ibid., pp. 148, 175.

37 Thanks are due to members of the Birmingham Philosophy graduate seminar, to Anthony O'Hear, David Owens, Tom Pink, and Anthony Savile. My greatest debt is to Barrie Falk, who brought the third critique alive for me. This paper is dedicated to his memory.