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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2016
Museums establish specific contexts, framings, which distinguish them from viewing the world face-to-face. One striking aspect of exhibition in so-called participatory museums is that it echoes and transforms the limits of its own frame as a public space. I argue that it is a mistake to think of the meaning of an exhibit as either determined by the individual viewer's narrative or as determined by the conception as presented in the museum's ‘authoritative’ narrative. Instead I deploy the concept of a model of comparison to illuminate the philosophical significance of perspective in understanding the idea of objectivity in museum narratives.
1 I borrow the term ‘intentional-communicative artefact’ from Currie's, Gregory Narrative and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 6 Google Scholar.
2 See, for instance, Hein, Hilde, The Museum in Transition: A Philosophical Perspective (Smithsonian, 2000)Google Scholar and Hein, Hilde, Public Art: Thinking museums differently (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006)Google Scholar.
3 For a defence of the related, but importantly different, moderate actual intentionalist claim that the meaning of art is a function of the communicative intentions of its author, see Carroll, Noël, ‘Art, Intention, and Conversation’, in his Beyond Aesthetics (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), 157–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also see Carroll's, ‘Art Interpretation: The 2010 Richard Wollheim Memorial Lecture’, British Journal of Aesthetics 52/2 (2011), 117–135 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For criticism of Carroll's communication argument for moderate actual intentionalism, see Huddleston, Andrew, ‘The Conversation Argument for Actual Intentionalism’, British Journal of Aesthetics 52/3 (2012), 241–256 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Gaskell, Ivan, ‘Museums and Philosophy – Of Art, and Many Other Things, Part II’, Philosophy Compass 7/2 (2012), 90 Google Scholar. See also Carrier, David, Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Currie, Gregory, ‘Interpretation and Objectivity’, Mind 102/407 (1993), 413–428 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Currie, Gregory, Arts and Minds (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 132 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Stecker, Robert, ‘Moderate Actual Intentionalism Defended’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64/4 (2006), 429 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other prominent versions of moderate actual intentionalism in the contemporary debate over authorial intention include the works of Noël Carroll and Paisley Livingston. See, for example, Carroll, ‘Art, Intention, and Conversation’, op. cit. and ‘Art Interpretation: The 2010 Richard Wollheim Memorial Lecture’, op. cit. For Livingston's position, see, for example, his Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005)Google Scholar and Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film As Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar. Historically, Monroe Beardsley would be the defender of anti-intentionalism in the movement of New Criticism, with work on the “Intentional Fallacy” going back to the 1940s; in continental philosophy anti-intentionalism is found in the “death of the author” movement in post-structuralism associated with the works of Roland Barthes; and E.D. Hirsch put authorial intention back on the table with literary hermeneutics in 1967. While advancing his own arguments, in his 2012 BSA Richard Wollheim Memorial Lecture, Carroll argues (rightly in my view) that Wollheim's seminal work Painting as an Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987)Google ScholarPubMed is justly thought of as an authorial intentionalism (criticism as retrieval).
8 See Huddleston, ‘The Conversation Argument for Actual Intentionalism’, op. cit.
9 Robert Stecker sets up a related argument but draws a different conclusion. For further discussion of the idea of comprehensiveness, the idea of basing the claim for the objectivity of interpretation on what Gadamer (1975) calls the “fusion of horizons”, see Gregory Currie, ‘Interpretation and Objectivity’, op. cit. and McDowell, John, ‘Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World’, in Schaper, E. (ed), Pleasure, Preference and Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar. See also Moore, Adrian, Points of View (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
10 I borrow the terms ‘critical monism’ and ‘critical pluralism’ from Stecker's, Robert ‘Art Interpretation’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52/2 (1994), 193–206 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Readers familiar with this article will see some similarities between my approach and Stecker's moderate actual intentionalist argument for what he later calls the ‘unified view’. See Stecker, Robert, Artworks: Definition, Meaning, Value (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Stecker, Robert, ‘Interpretation’, in Gaut, B. and Lopes, D. (eds), The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2001), 239–251 Google Scholar; Stecker, Robert, ‘Moderate Actual Intentionalism Defended’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64/4 (2006), 429–438 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The main difference between us is the commitment to anti-reductionism about meaning in the novel argument about authorial intentions in museum narratives defended here.
11 See, for example, Fish, Stanley, Doing What Comes Naturally (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Levinson, Sanford, ‘Law as Literature’, in Levinson, S. (ed), Interpreting Law and Literature (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.
12 Baxandall, Michael, ‘Exhibiting Intention: Some Preconditions of the Visual Display of Culturally Purposeful Objects’, in Karp, Ivan and Lavine, Steven (eds), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museums Display (Smithsonian Institution, 1991), 33 Google Scholar. See also Svetlana Alpers, ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’, in the same volume, 25–32.
13 Hilde Hein, Public Art: Thinking museums differently, op. cit., 7.
14 Ibid., 76.
15 Neufeld, Jonathan, ‘Review of Hilde Hein, Public Art: Thinking Museums Differently ’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66/1 (2008), 102–105 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 See Hein, Public Art, op. cit., 111 ff.
17 For a helpful overview, see Ivan Gaskell, ‘Museums and Philosophy – Of Art, and Many Other Things’, Parts I & II, op. cit., Part I, 74–84; Part II, 85–102.
18 Hein, Public Art, op. cit., footnote 16, 113. Emphasis mine.
19 For criticism in the analogous case of collaborative film-making, see Gaut, Berys, ‘Film Authorship and Collaboration’, in Smith, Murray and Allen, Richard (eds), Film Theory and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 149–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gaut, Berys, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Ch. 3.
20 Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman, op. cit., 73–74. For further discussion of this topic see Livingston, Art and Intention, op. cit., Ch. 3.
21 Currie, ‘Interpretation and Objectivity’, op. cit., 418.
22 Here I endorse McDowell's “perceptual” model of the epistemology of language: ‘the outward aspect of linguistic behaviour is essentially content involving, so that the mind's role in speech is, as it were, on the surface – part of what one presents to others [in one's words], not something that is at best a hypothesis for them’. McDowell, John, ‘In Defence of Modesty’, in McDowell, John, Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 100 Google Scholar In suggesting that recovery of semantic content is not a matter of interpretation I also maintain John McDowell's endorsement of Wittgenstein's publicity constraint on meaning. But I cannot argue for either of these claims here.
23 Sibley, Frank, ‘Aesthetic Concepts’, in Benson, John, Redfern, Betty and Cox, Jeremy Roxbee (eds), Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics by Frank Sibley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I discuss Sibley's position in ‘Why Sibley is Not a Generalist Overall’, British Journal of Aesthetics 50/1 (2010)Google Scholar.
24 See Sibley, ‘Aesthetic Concepts’, op. cit.
25 Wilson, Kent W., ‘Confession of a Weak Anti-Intentionalist: Exposing Myself’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55/3 (1997), 311 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 Huddleston, ‘The Conversation Argument for Actual Intentionalism’, op. cit., 242.
27 For detailed discussion of this topic in Wittgenstein, the conception, the picture, of meaning-content as an underlying hidden ingredient, see Garry Hagberg's contribution to this volume.
28 See Bergqvist, Anna, ‘Semantic Particularism and Linguistic Competence’, Logique et Analyse 52/208 (2009), 343–361 Google Scholar. This position is also defended in Anna Bergqvist, Understanding Moral Situations: An Essay in Particularist Epistemology, PhD Thesis, University of Reading, 2009.
29 Travis, Charles, ‘Taking Thought’, Mind 109/435 (2000), 553 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 Travis's overt suspicion of ‘a speaker's belief, intentions, and so on’ has its own discursive context that forms part a long-standing critique of Grice's theory of meaning and communication. The Gricean view has also been criticized by John McDowell in his ‘Meaning, Communication, and Knowledge’, in John McDowell, Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, op. cit., 29–50.
31 Particular sentences may be open to interpretation, in as much as it may not always be clear what belief or thought the speaker aims to communicate/cause his audience to have; but the lexical literal meaning of the sentence used is fixed by what speakers standardly intend their audience to believe, as per above.
32 For discussion and defence of broadly Gricean theories of speakers' intentions in connection to the issue of objectivity in semantic discourse, see Barber, A., ‘Truth-Conditions and their Recognition’, in Barber, A. (ed), The Epistemology of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 367–395 Google Scholar.
33 Of course, I can want to impart information about the beliefs that I have in speaking with others. For example, if I wake up one morning finding myself believing that green men from planet Chaos are hiding under the bed I would do well if I tried to impart the information that I have such beliefs to a medical doctor. Still, this does not seem to resemble the standard case of everyday linguistic exchanges between speaker-hearers of a shared natural language.
34 For discussion of this point in relation to authorial intentionalism about art interpretation, see, for example, Wilson, ‘Confessions of a Weak Anti-Intentionalist’, op. cit.
35 I owe this example to Barber's discussion of anti-lying in connection to Gricean intention-based theories of meaning. See Barber, ‘Truth-Conditions and their Recognition’, op. cit., 376.
36 Goldie, Peter, The Mess Inside (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 153–154 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
37 See Garry Hagberg, ‘Word and Object: Museums and the Matter of Meaning’ in this volume.
38 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, Revised 4th edition, edited by Hacker, P. M. S. and Schulte, Joachim, translated by Anscombe, G. E. M., Hacker, P. M. S., and Schulte, Joachim (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)Google Scholar, §122 and §133.
39 See Read, Rupert and Hutchinson, Phil, ‘Toward a Perspicuous Presentation of “Perspicuous Presentation”’, Philosophical Investigations 31/2 (2008), 141–160 Google Scholar, see especially 151.
40 Currie, ‘Interpretation and Objectivity’, op. cit. See also Baker, Gordon, Wittgenstein's Method: Neglected Aspects (London: Blackwell, 2006)Google Scholar, especially chapters 12 and 13.
41 Moore, Points of View, op. cit., 89.
42 Ibid.
43 See Frank Sibley, ‘General Criteria and Reasons in Aesthetics’, in Benson, Redfern and Roxbee Cox (eds), Approach to Aesthetics, op. cit., 116. Sibley first introduced the notion of a ‘perceptual proof’ in his seminal article, ‘Aesthetic Concepts’, op. cit.
44 Scriven, Mark, Primary Philosophy (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966)Google Scholar. Quoted in Sibley, ‘General Criteria and Reasons in Aesthetics’, op. cit., 115.
45 Frank Sibley, ‘Aesthetic and Nonaesthetic’, in Benson, Redfern and Roxbee Cox (eds), Approach to Aesthetics, op. cit., 38.
46 This paragraph was inspired by recent unpublished work on Wittgenstein and contextualism by Jason Bridges and by Avner Baz's work on aspect seeing. See, for example, Baz, Avner, ‘What's the Point of Seeing Aspects?’, Philosophical Investigations 23/2 (2000), 97–122 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Baz, Avner, ‘Aspects Perception and Philosophical Difficulty’, in Kuusela, Oskari and McGinn, Marie (eds), Handbook on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 697–713 Google Scholar.
47 de Gaynesford, Maximilian, ‘The Bishop, the Chambermaid, the Wife and the Ass: What Difference Does it Make if Something is Mine?’, in Cottingham, J., Stratton-Lake, P. and Feltham, B. (eds), Partiality and Impartiality: Morality, Special Obligations and the Wider World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 91 Google Scholar.
48 Thomas, Alan, ‘Reasonable Partiality and the Personal Point of View’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 8 (2005), 32 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
49 Dancy, Jonathan, Moral Reasons (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 168 Google Scholar.
50 I am grateful to Philip Mallaband, Víctor Durà-Vilà and Gary Kemp for their comments and suggestions. I have also benefited from discussions of an earlier draft of this paper at the Philosophy and Museums conference in Glasgow in 2013 and at the Ethics, Museums and Archaeology conference at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in 2014. Special thanks are owed to Ivan Gaskell, Garry Hagberg, Graham Oddie, Robert Cowan and Elisabeth Schellekens. This paper is dedicated to the memory of Dagmar Bergqvist.