Walton Whatwhywherefore CopyAesthetics

8/22/2019 Walton Whatwhywherefore CopyAesthetics

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KENDALL WALTON

AestheticsWhat? Why? and Wherefore?

It is a very great honor to address my friends and

colleagues as president of the American Society

for Aesthetics, an organization that plays a unique

role in a field that is, at once, a major traditional

branch of philosophy and also central to disci-

plines often regarded as remote from philosophy,

as well as depending crucially on their contribu-

tions.

I will follow the lead of one of my distinguished

predecessors in this office, Peter Kivy, who used

the occasion of hisownpresidential addresstwelve

years ago to step back and reflect on the state of

the discipline and the nature of aesthetics.1

i. what is aesthetics?

Aesthetics is a strange field, in some ways a con-

fused one. Yet, among the issues it is charged with

treating are some of the most fascinating and pro-

found ones that philosophy has to offer.

I take aesthetics to be largely a branch of phi-

losophy, although with absolutely crucial links to

other disciplines. Philosophy as I understand it is

not the private preserve of professional philoso-

phers. Art historians, music theorists, and liter-

ary scholars frequently engage in philosophy, as

do psychologists, cognitive scientists, and linguists.

And many informal reflections outside of aca-

demic contexts are philosophical in character.

As an institutionally recognized branch of phi-

losophy, aesthetics is very young. At a mere two-

and-a-half centuries, in a family whose elders are

more like twenty-five, it does not qualify for a

midlife identity crisis. Its confusion is that of an

adolescent trying to find itself, wondering what to

do when it grows up, and, indeed, whether there

is a place for it in the adult world. Aesthetics is

not the baby of the clan; business ethics and the

philosophy of quantum physics are younger. But

these are clearly subcategories of traditional, well-

established areas of philosophyethics and phi-

losophy of scienceand they inherit much of their

identity and sense of purpose from their parents.

Aesthetics is not so fortunate. It is related in vari-

ous important ways to epistemology, metaphysics,

philosophy of mind, philosophy of language

indeed it overlaps all of thembut these older

relatives are at best aunts and uncles to aesthetics,

not parents. Aesthetics must figure out for itself

what exactly it is.

Two kinds of issues about the field need to be

addressed: What is distinctive about this branch

of philosophy, in contrast to others? And what isphilosophy? Under the first heading, we will ask

what aesthetics is the philosophy of, what domain

it is charged with investigating. The second issue

concerns what kind of investigation of that domain

aesthetics is to undertake, what it is to investigate

things philosophically.

i. In his Presidential Address for the central divi-

sion of the American Philosophical Association,

Allan Gibbard referred to the question of how to

live as the grand basic question of ethics.2 He

may have had in mind something like this: Most

of ethics, most of what now and over the ages is

thought of as belonging to that discipline,has some

more or less direct connection with how we are to

live our lives. Ethical philosophers do much more

than attempt to answer this question. They aim to

explain and clarify it, they argue about whether it

can be answered, and whether answers are objec-

tive or subjective, and they examine how peo-

ple do in fact go about trying to answer it. But it is

fair to say that ethics is loosely organized around

the question of how to live. This question fixes the

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65:2 Spring 2007


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148 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

identity of the field, marks its rough outlines, andgives it a structure. A philosopher can get her orhis bearings from anywhere within ethics by ascer-taining in which direction this question lies.

Specifying the subject matter of ethics by iden-tifying its GBQ has the advantage of locating itscenter, as well as its rough boundaries. In fact, oncewe specify the center, we might prefer thinking ofit as not having boundaries at all. We can regardvarious particular philosophical issues simply asmore or less in the province of ethics, as they re-late more or less directly to the GBQ.

Epistemology, another ancient branch of phi-losophy, is similarly organized around the ques-tion of what we know or what we can know. Thegrand basic question of metaphysics is something

like: What is there? Notice that all three of theseGBQs are ordinary, everyday questions, ones thatare likely to bother any reflective person with-out prompting from professional or self-styledphilosophers. Even a person who is not reflectiveenough ever to ask, How, in general, should onelive ones life? will certainly ask specifications ofthis question, What shall I do now? Ethics, epis-temology, and metaphysics grow naturally out ofeveryday concerns, out of the human condition.

What is the grand basic question of aesthetics?As a purported species of value theory along-side ethics, one might expect aesthetics to be or-ganized around a normative question correspond-ing to How to liveperhaps: What to like. Thisquestion has indeed exercised some aestheticians.The Standard of Taste that David Hume was af-ter can be understood as a way of deciding whatwe are to like. As Hume put it, such a standardwould afford a decision confirming one senti-ment, and condemning another.3 Some versionof this questionwhat to likemight come fairlyclose to qualifying as the GBQ of institutionalized

aesthetics in its very early days. But it certainlydoes not now. Although aestheticians continue todiscuss it and issues concerning aesthetic or artis-tic value, a glance at the pages of The Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism revealshow much elsethey have on their minds, how much of what theythink about has no particular connection to thesematters. It would be a serious distortion, now, tocharacterize aesthetics as a species of value theory.Ethics is at most a half-sibling of aesthetics.

If pushed to name a GBQ for their field, someaestheticians will cite What is art? This maybe the GBQ of the territory Arthur Danto has

marked out within the Aesthetics World. Danto,in his words, regard[s] the matter of furnishinganswers to . . . questions [such as what differenceit makes that Brillo boxes, etc. should be artworksand not mere real things] the central issue in thephilosophyof art.4 Butthisquestiondoesnotplaya role in the field as a whole comparable to that ofHow shall we live? in ethics.

What is art? is a troubled and seriously con-tested question, as we all know. Troubled ques-tions are music to philosophers ears, grist for theirmills. The What is art? industry certainly is hum-ming along. But the question is problematic inways that make it ill-suited to define the identity ofa major field of philosophy. It is not at all clear thatthese wordsWhat is art?express anything

like a single question, to which competing answersare given, or whether philosophers proposing an-swers are even engaged in the same debate. Intro-ductory textbooks and encyclopedia articles com-monly recount a rather bizarre historical sequenceof proposed answers (usually understanding thequestion to be asking for a definition of the wordart, although it does not have to be understoodthis way). The story goes somethinglikethiswithvariations, of course: The Greeks defined art interms ofmimesis (representation, imitation), it issaid. Then followed formalistdefinitions, and def-initions in terms of expression, and of communi-cation; after that came claims that what makes artart is its institutional status or its historical role,or its place in a symbol system with certain syn-tactic and semantic properties, or an interpretivetheory.5

The sheer variety of proposed definitionsshould give us pause. One cannot help wonder-ing whether there is any sense in which they areattempts to capture the same concept or clarifythe same cultural practices, or address the same

issue. The historical progression, as commonly re-counted, is hardly a dialectical one with each at-tempt taking what might be right about previousones and improving on them, or else explainingand accounting for why the previous ones mighthave seemed right and how they missed out. This isnot like the progression of definitions of knowl-edge, for instance. Each attempt to define artstarts anew, and comes up with something not justdifferent from previous definitions but seeminglyunrelated to them. (I am oversimplifying here.)Whatever the explanation for the curiously jaggedshape of this history, What is Art? will scarcely


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Walton AestheticsWhat? Why? and Wherefore? 149

serve as a stable center for a discipline. We shouldexpect a field recognizing this as its GBQ to berather confused.

In any case, glancing again at recent issues ofThe Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, it isclearthatthis does not function as the GBQ of aes-thetics as it is currently practiced. Much of whatoccupies the attention of aestheticians has little ifanything to do with any question one might askby means of the words, What is art? Do readersof literary works empathize with characters? Howdo formal devices affect readers emotional re-sponses? What makes for realism in literature?In painting or film? Is linear perspective natu-ral or conventional? What are the mechanismswhereby documentary films alter ourbeliefs, when

they do? In what circumstances are photographsbetter sources of evidence than pictures of otherkinds? Was Plato right to be concerned about in-sidious moral effects of mimetic poetry? Do fic-tional characters exist? To what extent might amodern performance of baroque music on periodinstruments recreate the sounds or the experienceof an eighteenth-century performance? These areall immensely fascinating issues. But all can bepursued, and usually are, without worrying aboutwhether or why the works in question qualify asart.

One final contrast between the GBQ of ethicsand What is art?: I mentioned that How tolive? is a query that arises naturally, inevitably, inordinary human life. What is art? is not, exceptin rather limited circumstances. Artists, galleryowners, museum curators, critics, and the art pub-lic in 1960s and 1970s New York certainly couldnot avoid it, and it comes up in other contexts aswell, but it is irrelevant at best in most of most peo-ples thinking about the arts. Reflective film buffsor music lovers or theater junkies or art connois-

seurs may want to figure out why a joke is funny,why and in what way a short story or a musical per-formance moves them, what they might learn froma documentary and how. But they will surely findthe question of what counts as art much less press-ing than these, if it occurs to them at all, certainlyfar less pressing than most of us find the questionof how to live. Moreover, it is arguable that noone before the eighteenth century was able evento formulate this question and that it cannot beexpressed in some non-Western languages. Aes-thetics would not grow out of everyday concerns

in the way that ethics does if it were centered onthe question, What is Art?

The inescapable conclusion is that aestheticssimply does not have a grand basic question. Noquestion or cluster of related questions organizesour field in the way that How to live orga-nizes ethics. Georges Santayana implied as muchin 1904, when he remarked, in an article in thePhilosophical Review: [T]he word aesthetics isnothingbutaloosetermlatelyappliedinacademiccircles to everything that has to do with works ofart or with the sense of beauty. . . . the group ofactivities we can call aesthetic is a motley one, cre-ated by certain historic and literary accidents.6

This suggests that the identity of the field is fixedby marking its boundaries, rather than by identify-

ing its center. (Philosophy of science has a similarstructure, its domain being the sciences, broadlyconstrued, which it investigates philosophically. Ido not think philosophy of science has a grand ba-sic question. Notice that philosophers of scienceare not overly preoccupied with the question ofhow science is to be defined; they have lots ofother interesting things to think about.) The idea isthat the boundaries of aesthetics coincide with theboundaries of the arts and of beauty. Rather thanincluding absolutely everything having to do withart or beauty, however, we might focus on philo-sophical matters. And some will prefer to substi-tute the aesthetic for beauty, perhaps in order toinclude sublimity along with beauty.

So aestheticsis thephilosophyof art andbeauty,or the philosophy of art and the aesthetic. Thissounds comfortingly familiar. It recognizes thatwe are interested in all manner of issues hav-ing to do with paintings, music, theater, literature,film, and anything else that counts as art, not justwhat makes them art or what works of art havein commonas well as whatever might be philo-

sophically interesting about anything that is aes-thetic or beautiful.

This conception of the field, this specification ofits boundaries, is hostage to the vagaries of judg-ments about the extension of the terms art andaesthetic, vagaries that are certainly not limitedto fuzziness around the edges. Think of the severerestrictionsLeo Tolstoy and Clive Bell put on whatis to count as artvastly different restrictions inthe two casesjust a few years before the vastexpansion of the class, in the eyes of some artistsandcritics, to include MarcelDuchamps Fountain,


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John Cages 433, Andy Warhols Brillo Boxessome even regarding these as paradigmatic in-stances of art!

Moreover, aesthetics understood in the spiritof Santayana suffers something of a split person-ality. There is what is often called nonaestheticart (Dadaism, the 1960s avant-garde).7 And theaesthetic includes much outside the realm of artnot just natural beauty, but also aesthetic qualitiesin mathematical proofs, scientific theories, chessgames, even baseball games and military cam-paigns, and metaphors used in science or politicsas well as in poetry. The test for inclusion withinthe boundaries of the field of aesthetics appearsto be disjunctive: candidates must either involveworks of art in some way, or have something to do

with the aesthetic (or beauty).Aesthetics, then, seems hardly to be a unified

field of inquiry. What is wrong with not being uni-fied? Nothing, unless an illusion of unity or an un-founded presupposition that there must be suchdistorts the investigations occurring under thisname. Unfortunately, that sometimes happens.

ii. philosophy as theory construction

What is philosophy? Supposing that we know,more or less, what domain aesthetics is assignedto investigate, what kind of investigation is it toundertake?

Wittgenstein remarked, famously, that philos-ophy leaves everything as it is.8 This con-trastsdramaticallywith an observationhis teacher,Bertrand Russell, made in his Lectures on Logi-cal Atomism: The point of philosophy is to startwith something so simple as not to seem worthstating, and to end with something so paradoxicalthat no one will believe it.9 (I am sure Russell

meant that if the philosopher has done his or herjob well, the paradoxes he or she ends up withare ones we should believe, and will believe if wetake the arguments for them seriously.)

Wittgensteins claim would appear to fit somephilosophical projects fairly well; others seemmore in line with Russells. I regard most of myown work as, in this respect, more Wittgensteinianin spirit than Russellian, that is, as mostly leavingthings as they are. I do not exclude what I havewritten about Charles and the Green Slime, ormy contention that photographs are transparent.Judging from the incredulous stares these claims

have enjoyed, I expect that some of you will dis-agree, attributing to me paradoxes that Russellmight approve. How things are and what it is toleave them that way is not an obvious or straight-forward matter, nor is it clear what should countas paradoxical. In any case, I would like to makethe aesthetics world safe for Russellian modes ofphilosophizing as well as Wittgensteinianones. Weneed both. And we need to know when one or theother is appropriate, when it is reasonable to in-sist on leaving things as they are, and when weshould welcome paradoxical-seeming conclusions.

I am especially interested in two related ques-tions about the philosophical enterprise. First,whetherandinwhatsensephilosophyisanaprioridiscipline, as it is often said to be, in contrast to the

empirical sciences. We philosophers, aestheticiansincluded,dospendmuchofourliveslollingaroundin armchairs. Many have urged us to pay attentionto empirical psychology and cognitive science, aswell as less formal empirical observations. Therehas not been enough discussion, especially amongaestheticians, of howand why we should, however.Does philosophy aspire to be an empirical scienceitself, or to contribute to scientific investigations?Is it just science under a different name? If there issomething distinctive about the philosophical en-terprise, as opposed to empirical ones, what is it?And how, then, might the empirical sciences berelevant to it?

The second question about philosophy that in-terests me now is what role intuitions, or intu-itive judgments, what are sometimes misleadinglycalled pretheoretical intuitions, do or shouldhave in philosophical investigations. We will haveto think about what intuitions are, and how theymight be related to their close or distant cousins:common sense, what wethe person in thestreetordinarily say, and introspective reports.

Intuitions deserve respect. But what kind ofrespect? It is often assumed that philosophicalclaims that conflict with intuitions bear a specialburden of proof, that counterintuitiveness or un-intuitiveness inevitably counts against a theory,even if it is not necessarily fatal. Some philoso-phers speak of plain truths (or what plainlyor clearly is or is not the case), which there-fore are not to be questioned, yet not infrequentlythese seem anything but plain to others.10 Some goto great lengths to make their philosophical con-clusions accord with what they consider to be or-dinary intuitionstaking very seriously the idea


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that philosophy leaves everything as it is. Yet theyoften need to convince other philosophers thatthese are our intuitions! To the extent that this iscontroversial, we have to be wary of appeals to in-tuition in support of philosophical conclusions.

Do empirical scientists have a similar obliga-tion to respect intuition? Is it desirable as far aspossible that scientists results accord with intu-ition? Certainly, intuition or common sense doesand ought to play a role in the generation of hy-potheses to be tested, but when it comes to con-clusions, should scientists not follow the evidencewherever it leads? If philosophers are required totake intuitions more seriously than this, to treatthem as more authoritative than scientists do, weneed to ask again why and howphilosophers ought

to pay attention to science.Analytic philosophers have commonly char-

acterized their endeavor as conceptual analysis.I count myself among those who prefer to un-derstand philosophy as mainly a matter of the-ory construction. What philosophers do, on thisconception, is pretty much what scientists do af-ter the data are in: organizing the data in a per-spicuous manner, devising conceptual structures,constructing theories, to clarify and explain thedata.11 I think that this conception of philosophyapplies better than the conceptual analysis one tomuch historical philosophy, from Plato throughKant, to the system building typical of somephilosophers in the continental tradition, and, in-deed, to much philosophizing by those who claimto be engaged in conceptual analysis. Not every-thing philosophers do is happily regarded as the-ory construction, however. Normative and appliedethics are not; I take theories to be purported ac-counts ofhow things are, not ofhow things shouldbe. The same goes for normative aesthetics, Ishould think,although theline between normative

aesthetics and (shall we call it?) meta-aestheticsis even fuzzier than that between normative andmeta-ethics.

I should say right off that I understand the-ory as a count noun, not a mass noun. Theory isnot a kind of glop that one spreads over a subjectmatterprobably obscuring itin a process somecall theorizing the subject matter. My interest is inparticular theories, designed to explain and helpus understand a body of data.

I will say as little as I possibly can about whattheories are, hoping to avoid unnecessary entan-glements. Let us just observe that: (1) theories are

to be distinguished from the data on which theyare based and that they are supposed to explain,and are subject to confirmation or disconfirmationby the data. (What counts as data for a given the-ory may be, however, facts understood in termsof lower-level theories.) (2) Data underdeterminetheory, that is, different theories may accommo-date the same data. So choosing among compet-ing theories is not always a matter of discoveringevidence that supports one and conflicts with an-other; choices must be made on the basis of sim-plicity or elegance or perspicuousness or explana-tory powerwhatever exactly these amount to. Iwill not try to say what they do amount to, ex-cept to observe that (3) theories involve, or con-sist partly in, a taxonomy, a representation of sim-

ilarities and differences among items described bythe data. Understanding things consists, in part atleast, of noticing, appreciating, similarities and dif-ferences. A changein ones theoryusually involvesrecognizing or emphasizing new similarities anddifferences. These three observations are boringlyobvious, I hope, and too vague to be controversial.

Theory construction is not the exclusiveprovince of scientists, philosophers, and other spe-cialists. We all do it all the time. The conceptualschemes embedded in natural languages amountto theories,folk theories, which have evolved overcenturies or millennia and continue to change, un-dergoing revision as humans struggle to under-stand their world, and as their world changes. Ifphilosophy is theory construction and theory con-struction is such a widespreadactivity, is there any-thing special or distinctive about the philosophicalenterprise? Do philosophers construct theories ofa special kind, philosophical ones, differing fun-damentally from scientific theories and the vari-ous folk theories? I dont think so. Nor do I thinkphilosophers are concerned with a special subject

matter, about which they construct theories. Ad-herents of the conceptual analysis view of philos-ophy might say that philosophers are especiallyor uniquely interested in our concepts. But whyshould the investigation of our concepts not be a

job for empirical psychology?What is (somewhat) distinctive about philos-

ophy is the role philosophers play in the con-struction of theories. They specialize in devisingtheories, or choosing among alternative theories,after the data are in, as I mentioned. Given abody of data already available, they reflect on howbest to organize or interpret it. They also propose


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hypotheses when the evidence available is insuffi-cient or when it is unclear what evidence would berelevant; they suggest theories that might or mightnot turn out to be right. The data philosophers or-ganize include, or should include, results of scien-tific experimentation and observation. Like hye-nas feeding on carrion, philosophers appropriatedata collected by others. But they traditionallyhave concentrated on devising theories to explainmuch that is common knowledge, everyday factsof which all of us are aware (or think we are), al-though we may need to be reminded of them, orwhat is or seems to be open to introspection. (Ifyou are concerned that this does not give philoso-phers a very substantial or significant role, thinkof Kants first Critique.)

Hume took it to be obvious to everyone thatthere is a great variety of Taste, and evidentupon reflection that there is even more varietythan there seems to be, when you subtract merelyverbal agreement.12 Hume expected his readers toagree, without leaving their armchairs, that Mil-ton is better than Ogilby.13 Clive Bell purportedto direct our attention to a kind of experience hethought sensitive people are or can be awareof, which he took as data for his (rather minimal)theory construction.14

Some empirical facts that can serve as data fortheory construction are perfectly obvious but onlywhen someone points them out. One example: inlow light conditions, when it is nearly dark, we seein black and white, or rather in shades of gray; wesee shapes and contrasts of illumination, but nothues. This fact of experience, obvious once we no-tice it, might help us to understand the experienceof black-and-white pictures: photographs, draw-ings, prints. One might have expected that black-and-white photographs inevitably depict things aspoorly illuminated. This is certainly not so. But

it does seem to me that black-and-white pictures,in contrast to full-color ones, tend not to depictbrightly illuminated scenes very vividly.

What seems to be common knowledge, every-day facts about which philosophers spin theo-ries, are sometimes just mistakes. What are takenas data in one philosophical discussion may, inanother, be part of a controversial theory with vi-able competitors, or worse. And common knowl-edge, plain truths, often evaporate embarrass-ingly when they are empirically tested. When anaesthetician declares, from an armchair, that ev-ery language has a word for beauty, or a cog-

nate of the English word beauty, we should besuspicious.15

Nevertheless, there is a body of very ordinaryknowledge, gleaned from everyones everyday ex-perience of the world, which seems pretty secure,and that constitutes a large part of the data thatphilosophers theories are designed to illuminate.I sometimes mention the experience of scratchingon a blackboard when I want to disabuse people oftheideathattaste,orwhatpeoplelike,isaradicallyconventional matter, that our likes and dislikes areall learned responses. It seems obvious to mefamous last wordsthat cringing at the sound ofscratching on a blackboard is about as hardwiredas any response is. How doI know? Well, I amcon-vinced, and I am convinced that others will agree.

Maybe I shouldnt be.Something of an a priorior quasi-a priori

characterofthephilosophicalenterpriseisnowev-ident. Rather than running experiments or doingsurveys or recording observations, philosopherstypically reflect on what all or most of us alreadyknow. This they do in armchairs. Armchairs arefine, also, for collecting data by reminding our-selves of what we already know, and for reading upon the data scientistsand other researchers gather.The theories philosophers construct are empiricalin the sense that they are based on and aim to ex-plain empirical data, but constructing them oncethe data are in requires no additional empirical in-vestigation. Deciding which of several competingtheories best explains a given body of data, or abody of possible or hypothetical datadecidingthis on the basis of simplicity or elegance or per-spicuousness or explanatory powerwould seemto be about as a priori a task as there is. And sois judging how well a particular theory explains abody of data.

iii. folk theories

Folk theories embedded in our language are alsoattempts to understand facts, organize data, thatare common knowledge. Since we philosophersare in this business as well, we should pay at-tention. Folk theories are likely to have evolvedbecause they have some merit, and most haveserved well for many purposes. This is one reasonphilosophers should respect intuitions (com-mon sense, what we ordinarily say), for theseare no doubt reflections of folk theories.


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Concepts of art are part of an evolving folk the-ory that takes a wide variety of activities, interests,experiences, and objects as data. It is generallyaccepted that the modern concept of art tookshape in the eighteenth century in Europe.16 Thatwas not the beginning of art, of course. The an-cients created and appreciated art, and so did anddo people in various non-Western cultures who ar-guably lack our concept. The concept is not partof a social or institutional framework required forthe production and appreciation of art, not all artanyway, but a tool for making sense of the arts andtheir institutional settings;it is part of a folk theoryfor understanding them.

Some will regard the jelling of the concept ineighteenth-century Europe as a significant con-

ceptual breakthrough, an improvement in ourfolk theories. We are better able to understandthe nature and functions of painting, poetry,music, and architecture, one might supposeGreek monuments, Gothic cathedrals, Japanesehaiku, Javanese shadow puppet theater, Chinesescroll painting, Yoruban sculpture, the creationsof Proust, Picasso, and Beethovenwe are betterable to understand them now that we comprehendthem all to be instances of art. The classificationitself, simply seeing all these things as similar oras serving similar ends, may appear to constitutea significant advance in understanding. Recogniz-ing this similarity does not, of course, prevent usfrom recognizingenormous differencesamongthespecies of the genus.

Aestheticians may seek to clarify and deepenthe understanding provided by our folk theory byspelling out what the various works of art havein common, what it is that qualifies them as artin the modern sense, by offering a definition ofart that captures this folk concept. This is concep-tual analysis, I take it, the project of clarifying and

articulating concepts that constitute folk theories.(Some recent research suggests that our ordinaryconcepts, those that make up folk theories, may bein prototype form, rather than the form of neces-sary and sufficient conditions.17 If this is right, thennecessary and sufficient condition definitions of-fered by the conceptual analyst will be a kind oftranslation of the folk concepts. Such translationsmay have certain advantages, akin to those of in-formation in digital as opposed to analogue form.)

The philosopher who aims to construct the besttheory or theories possible for understanding andexplaining a body of data is well advised to be-

gin with conceptual analysis, to look carefully atthe candidate theories folk wisdom provides. Theyare not gospel, but they merit the kind of respectwe accord testimony from a source that has somecredibility.

Credible testimony can be wrong, and all theo-ries are subject to revision. Conceptual analysisreveals plausible candidate theories worthy ofconsideration, but it also puts us in a positionto evaluate them, to think about how they mightbe improved, even to consider wholesale replace-ments.

Who are we to second-guess centuries or mil-lennia of conceptual development, some will ask.New evidence may demand new or revised the-ories, to be sure. But insofar as we philosophers

are working with the same data available to thefolk, with what is common knowledge, should wenot limit ourselves to clarifying and articulatingfolk theories, and then just accept them? Is it notpresumptuous to imagine that we can do better?This is one way of defending Wittgensteinspleatoleave things as they are and to avoid Russellianparadox mongering.

One answer is that what counts as a good the-ory, or a theory that is better than others, oftendepends on ones purposes. A theory serving culi-nary purposes and a biological theory will classifyplantsand parts of plantsdifferently. The purposesof philosophers and those of the folk might not co-incide, so folk-wise theories may not be best froma philosophers point of view. What matters to thefolk is, probably, the effectiveness of theories inguiding action. Philosophers are likely to be moreinterested in achieving understanding for its ownsake. The folk concept of fiction (as opposed tononfiction) serves a practical purpose, insofar aspeople largely agree on its application. It enablesus to find books in libraries and bookstores and

catalogues. But it does not do well at all in helpingus to understand the nature of the books it classi-fies; it is a mess. It embodies confusions betweennotions of truth and falsity, intended or aimed foror purported truth and falsity, assertion, informa-tiveness, intended informativeness, inducement toimagine, or prescriptions to imagine, and so on.18

A second answer to the challenge that it is pre-sumptuous for philosophers to try to improve onfolk theories concerns the manner in which folktheories develop.

Biological evolution works bit by bit, re-peatedly making local modifications in existing


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structures to accommodate new conditions orneeds or circumstances. (This does not mean thatthe pace of evolution is always slow.) It does notstart from scratch, designing from the ground upthe ideally efficient and economical and successfulsolution to a given set of problems and interests.The results, after many millennia of trial and error,are incredibly successful, but they are never ide-ally efficient. Organisms are burdened with vesti-gial organs and processes (for example, the humanappendix) and awkward designs, which waste en-ergy or resources, and sometimes break down andcause problems.

The development of folk theories proceeds bybit-by-bit modifications as well, to accommodatenew or newly noticed data, additions to our stock

of common knowledge or newly noticed relationsamong thedata, and newpurposes; perhaps alsototake advantage of increased brain power or leisurefor reflection or new conceptual tools such as lan-guage or theprinting press. The theories that resultare remarkably effective, especially in guiding ac-tion in the real world, but they, too, are unlikelyto be ideally elegant or economical. Philosophersare in a position, sometimes, to construct theoriesmore nearly from thegroundup, andcan eliminatevestigial gears and pulleysand other awkwardness.So philosophers may have good reason to reviseor replace folk theories, even without introducingnew data.

Efficiency, economy, and simplicity are ofteninstrumentally valuable in biological organisms.They minimize what might go wrong (althoughredundancies are sometimes desirable at the ex-pense of economy). Fixes or backup systems canevolve to repair damage or compensate for insuf-ficiencies, but these are also subject to failure, andmay require more energy or strength or size orbrain capacity. The same is true of folk theories,

insofar as their function is to guide action and tohelp the folk survive. But efficiency, economy, andsimplicity are intrinsic values of theories insofaras they serve, not primarily to guide action, butto foster understanding. And it is understanding, Iassume (whatever that is), that the philosophicalaesthetician is mainly interested in.

Nelson Goodman is notorious for trashing folktheories and replacing them with his own. In thepreface to Languages of Arthe writes: the readermust be prepared to find his convictions and hiscommon sensethat repository of ancient erroroften outraged by what he finds here.19 Many

find outrageous Goodmans insistence that a sin-gle wrong note disqualifies a musical performanceas a performance of a given musical work. Intu-itions are affronted if we suppose that he is at-tempting to articulate the folk concept. Yes, it isplainly false that a performance cannot contain asingle wrong note, given the folk concept of per-formance. But Goodman does not claim other-wise. He contends that the ordinary, folk conceptof musical performance is incoherenthe may beright, although he did not do any serious concep-tual analysisand he replaces it with another one.What is wrong with this? He could have madehis proposal seem innocuous simply by introduc-ing new terminology, a technical notion of letter-perfect performance, on which it is analytic that

a letter-perfect performance cannot tolerate a sin-gle wrong note,and substituted this new notion forthe folk one.20 I do not buy Goodmans proposaleven so, for reasons I will mention shortly.

Much has been said about the viability of thefolk concept or concepts of art. I am inclined toregard its developmentnot so much perhaps itsinitial appearance in the eighteenth century as theform or forms it has taken since thenless as aconceptual breakthrough in our understanding ofpaintings, sculpture, music, and architecture, thanas a puzzling turn in the evolution of our folk theo-riesthat calls for historical or sociological explana-tion. I will not defend this claim now, but it cannotbe ruled out without a hearing.21

i. So much for the casea pretty obvious onefor not being easily satisfied leaving things as theyare, for regarding folk theories and folk conceptswith a skeptical eye, and being prepared to acceptsomething that seems paradoxical at first. This isnot the whole story.

Folk theories and folk concepts are sometimes

objects of philosophers investigations, part of thedata on which philosophers theories are based.This is so when philosophers examine culturalpractices and institutions and the thoughts andactivities of the folk who participate in them,for in participating the folk deploy their theoriesand concepts. Aesthetics investigates the experi-ences and attitudes and activities of human be-ings and their cultural institutions, not just paintedcanvases, sounds emanating from sound-makingdevices, and inscriptions of words on the pagesof books. So part of the job of aestheticians isto get a clear picture of the actual folk theories


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and concepts that our experiences and attitudesand activities involve. This is conceptual analysismore or less for its own sake, not just to uncovercandidate theories for consideration and evalua-tion in competition with other theories.

There need be no presumption that the folk the-ories we examine are any good, or that intuitive orcommon-sense judgments reflecting them are trueor plausible or illuminating. But we need to getthem right, however confused or awkward or inel-egant or burdened by vestigialities they may be. Ifwe are to understand the thoughts and actions ofthe folk, we must characterize accurately the the-ories and concepts with which they are working,all warts included.

We have distinguished two very different roles

that intuitive or common-sense judgments reflec-tive of folk theories and concepts may have inthe philosophical enterprise. They will be treatedas hypotheses, candidates for acceptance by thephilosopher but subject to rejection or modifica-tion, when thephilosopher is interested in explain-ing the same body of data that the folk theory aimsto explain. When what the philosopher is inter-ested in understanding includes the folk and theirtheories and concepts, the fact that the folk havesuch and such intuitions constitutes data itself thatthe philosophers theory must accommodate.22

Some think it is acceptable or desirable forphilosophers to clean up ordinary (folk) conceptsaround the edges, to refine them in certain ways,removing confusions or messiness, while resistingany large modifications or replacements. This at-titude does not make much sense. If our project isone of investigating folk concepts, we should notbe cleaning them up; doing so amounts to falsify-ing the data with which we are working (although,like rounding off statistical data, the falsificationdoes not always matter much). If, on the other

hand, our project is to understand what a folk the-ory aims to understand, to find the best theory wecan, possibly in competition with it, we must notdecide in advance to rule out major revisions of itor replacement of it with another.

There is plenty of room for confusion betweenthese two ways of treating intuitive and common-sense judgments and the folk theories they re-flect, and there has been a lot of confusion inthe literatureespecially, it seems to me, in philo-sophical work billed as conceptual analysis. Aprinciple of charity may play a role in investiga-tions of folk concepts. Other things being equal,

we may prefer to attribute to the folk a better the-ory rather than a worse one. If so, we will needto think about what would be the best theory, ofwhatever the folk theory is a theory of, in order todecide what the folk theory is. But this does notentail any obligation to accept the folk theory.

Let us return to Goodmans outrageous pro-posal about musical performances. I have argued(very approximately) that the experience of mu-sic involves hearing sounds not just as sounds, butas a rendition of a given piece.23 Something likethe folk notion of a musical work, whatever itsinadequacies, informs listeners auditory experi-ences. Wrong notes sound like wrong notes, notlike correct notes in a different piece. In hearingthem as wrong, we have to be hearing the per-

formance as a performance of one piece ratherthan anotherand this, of course, in the folk senseof performance of, not Goodmans. To under-stand listeners experiences, then, we need to takeinto account the folk notion of musical perfor-mances. The problem with Goodmans theory isthat it completely abandons this folk notion, andthe concept with which he replaces it does nothingto illuminate listeners experiences.

ii. Conceptual analysisinvestigating our folktheories and conceptsis a matter of construct-ing theories about them, theories about our folktheories. This is true whether our interest is in thefolk theories themselvesand their role in the folkslives, or in the folk theories as candidates for eval-uation.

No one supposes that folk theories and con-cepts, ones own theories and concepts, arestraightforwardly open to introspection. The usualprocedure is to ask ourselves what we would sayin various actual or hypothetical circumstances,and piece together from the answers definitions,

which supposedly correspond to ourfolk concepts.Even if we get it rightabout what we wouldsay whenextracting the appropriate definitionsis anything but mechanical or simple. It is heavy-duty theory construction involving inferences tothe best explanation from a big variety of data.We construct a theory about what our own folkconcepts and folk theories are. We must decidewhen to regard a word as having different sensesin its various applications, hence presumably cor-responding to more than oneconcept,forinstance.We must decide when we folk use words in a non-serious or nonliteral manner, or in pretense or


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with tongue in cheekwhen we are applying apredicate to something that does not really fallunder the corresponding concept. None of thiscan be simply read off from what we would saywhen.

Frank Sibley argues that, although commonsense hasitthatthe Mona Lisa isapaintingthatour existing notion of works of visual art like theMona Lisa is such that they are paintings, physicalobjectsour practices indicate equally stronglythat the Mona Lisa is an appearance type. Eitherour inherited (folk) concept of visual artworks isconfused, he claims, or we actually have two ofthem.24 What he means by common sense is thereceived theory about our folk concept of works ofvisual art (a folk theory about a folk theory). This

common-sense theory is mistaken, Sibley thinks,and needs to be replaced by a better one, a bet-ter theory about the nature of our folk conceptof works of visual art. And this better theory hasit that the folk concept is seriously confused. Wemay or may not agree with Sibley about this par-ticular case, but we must agree that [c]ertainlythe common-sense view even about common con-cepts is often nave, superficial, and wide of themark.25

I cannotresist mentioning oneother example.Isthe folk concept ofseeing such that when I lookat a photograph of a person I am seeing the per-son? When Salmon Rushdie, speaking of the filmThe Wizard of Oz, remarked: I found myself star-ing at an old color photograph of the Scarecrow,the Tin Man and Dorothy, posing in a forest set,surrounded by autumn leaves; and realized that Iwas not looking at the [movie] stars at all, but attheirstuntdoubles, theirstand-ins.26 Didhemeanthis literally, that he really was seeing the stuntdoubles via the photograph, or was he speakingin pretense, with tongue in cheek? The answer is

anything but obvious. And do not look to Rushdiefor an authoritative introspective report. Neitherthe difference between literal and nonliteral usesof language, nor that between single and multiplesenses of words, is straightforwardly open to in-trospection. For one thing, the ordinary speakerneed have no concept of these distinctions, even ifhe or she is perfectly fluent in the language. Thenotion of literalness and that of different senses ofwords belong to fairly technical theories about ourlanguage, theories one need not master in order touse the languageany more than one must havea concept of art in order to make and appreciate

art. Moreover, the theories to which these notionsbelong are subject to revision.27

Those who think it is counterintuitive that wesee through photographs presumably mean thatgiven the ordinary, folk notion ofsee, this is notso. They are on spongy ground even on this point.And my transparency claim is not a claim aboutthe folk notion of seeing.

iv. aesthetics and theory construction

In his presidential address, Peter Kivy recom-mended a moratorium on theorizing in the grandmanner. He proposed focusing on differencesrather than similarities, and advised aestheticians

to acquire knowledge of and expertise in partic-ular arts. [P]rogress in the philosophy of art inthe immediate future is to be made not by the-orizing in the grand manner, he said, but bycareful and imaginative philosophical scrutiny ofthe individual arts and their individual problems.We can no longer hover above our subject matterlike Gods from machines, bestowing theory upona practice in sublime and sometimes even boastfulignorance of what takes place in the dirt and messof the workshop.28

Something is out of kilter here. Certainly, weaestheticians should mix it up with the dirt andmess of the workshop, pay close attention to theparticular arts, indeed to particular works of artand particular experiences of them, as well as cre-ative activities like telling stories and playing theoboe. All this is exactly what we are seeking tounderstand. And yes, we should be sensitive todifferences, differences among the arts and alsodifferences between instances of a given art. Butwhy must we choose between attending to partic-ulars and developing grand theories? Why would

we want to choose, or even to move one of themtemporarily to a back burner? Theories are sup-posed to illuminate particulars, to explain and helpus understand the data on which they are based.That is what theories are for, what good ones do.Moreover, the illumination good theories achieve,grand ones included, consists in bringing out dif-ferences no less than similarities. If we want to in-vestigate particulars, we had betterbe constructingtheories about them.

Kivy is concerned specifically with just one sortof grand theory. He quarrel[s] with the task . . .of stating what it is to be art.29 I quarrel with


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it also. Discussions of what art is do, too often,hover far above and out of sight of the fascinatingparticulars of what goes on in concert halls, jazzclubs, museums, and the spaces of street theaterperformances and public sculpture. But it is notso much the distance ofWhat is art? from theseparticulars as its direction from them that inhibitsthe view. The grandeurof the theorizing is not theproblem. In fact, the bigger the theory, the moregrand it is, other things being equal, the better itwill explain the particulars on which it is based.The trouble is with this theory, or theories of thiskindtheories focusing on what it is to be artnot with grand theorizing as such. Aestheticianshave, much of the time, been talking up the wrongtheory. As long as we think of our field as aesthet-

ics, it will be easy to suppose that the only spaceour theories have to expand in is that of some pre-conceived realm of art and/or the aesthetic, andthat a sufficiently grand theory will be one thattells us what art or the aesthetic is and asserts gen-eralizations about this realm. Once we realize thattheories can expand in different directions, we willnot have to assume that the only alternative to thiskind of grand theorizing is simply to stare hard atthe particulars, or to devise small-scale theoriesconcerning particular arts.

Grand theories do point to similarities.Grandeur consists in including lots of things un-der a single umbrella, highlighting what is in com-mon among a wide array of instances. But not-ing similarities is often the key to understandingdifferences. And some differences are not appar-ent except against the background of similarities.Once we recognize the effect of gravity on bothfalling apples and circling planets, we can explaintheir very different motions by noting the oper-ation of centrifugal force in one case but not theother.Sometimes we canunderstand what appears

to be a qualitative difference as a difference of de-gree, along one or more dimensions. The varioushues are not just different from one another, butare arranged along a spectrum. Timbres, tone col-ors, amount to differences in the relative strengthof various overtones. Some qualitative differencesare not reducible to, butresults of, quantitative dif-ferences. The different viscositiesof ice, steam,andliquid water are due to differences in the degreeof kinetic energy of their molecules.

What is unsatisfying is to end up with just alot of unexplained differencessui generis partic-ulars, or narrow kinds of things regarded as sui

generisabout which we can say only that each isas it is. (Think of the peculiar experience thatClive Bell thought works of art provoke in sensi-tive observers, or the experience ofseeing in ifwedo no more than point to it.) One does not explainanything by declaring that it is just different; thatis simply declaring defeat. We cannot be certainthat there always will be more to say than this, andwe should be ever wary of artificially forcing unco-operative data into a larger theoretical structure.But surprising similarities that help make sense ofdifferences, grander theories than we expect, arenot infrequently to be discovered.

As so often happens, we can learn from fictionalcharacters. Consider Ireneo Funes, who resides inJorge Luis Borgess story Funes the Memorias.

After being thrown by a horse and paralyzed, Fu-nes had an incredible capacity to perceive and re-member details. The present was almost intoler-able in its richness and sharpness, as were his mostdistant and trivial memories. Lying on his backon his cot in the shadows, [he] could imagine everycrevice and every molding in the sharply definedhouses surrounding him. But, Borgess narratorobserves:

He was . . . almost incapable of ideas of a general, Pla-

tonic sort. Notonlywas it difficultfor himto comprehend

that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike in-

dividuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that

the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should

have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen

from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own

hands, surprised him every time he saw them. . . . He

was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform, in-

stantaneous and almost intolerably precise world.

I suspect . . . that he was not very capable of thought. To

think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstrac-

tions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only

details, almost immediate in their presence.. . .

Ireneo

Funes died in 1889, of congestion of the lungs. 30

i. Let us look at some of the specific differencesthat Kivy highlights. He distinguishes (absolute)music sharply from the contentful arts, such aspainting and literature. [T]heorizing about abso-lute music in the grand manner, with a view toproviding it a place in Kristellers Modern Sys-tem of the Arts, is a futile enterprise, he says.Absolute music is what it is; and what it is is verydifferent, in crucial respects, from the visual andliterary arts.31


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He does connect music with decorative vi-sual designs, however, as Eduard Hanslick didalso, characterizing music as an art of puresonic design.32 I think there is something to thiscomparison, but it is not easy to say what. Kivythinks both are nonrepresentational; there is noaboutness about either of them. But this nega-tive observation does not do much to account forthe similarity, even if it is right. There is also noaboutness about most rocks and trees and mugs ofbeer; at least I expect that Kivy would agree. Mu-sic and visual designs are very different, also. Oneespecially striking difference is evident in the factthat people tap their feet to music, and sometimesdance to it,but notto decorative visual designs, noteven to moving ones, screen savers, for instance.33

But hugely important and enormously salient dif-ferences can coexist with equally important andsalient similarities.

Apparently, Kivy recognizes a similarity be-tween the visual and the literary arts, both beingcontentful. But he emphasizes differences in-stead. [T]he experience of reading a novel is sodifferent from that of seeing a representationalpainting, or attending a dramatic representation,that it is in a deep way false and misleading to putboth kinds of thing in the same category, [and] callit representation.34

What we call the category is not the issue, ofcourse. Kivy uses the term representation morenarrowly than some do, corresponding approx-imately to what I call depictive representation.What is at issue is whether it is theoretically il-luminating to recognize a broad category includ-ing novels and stories as well as representationalpaintings and theatrical performances, with vari-ous species and subspecies. Again, that paintingsand novels, or our experiences of them, are hugelydifferent does not mean that they are not also

hugely and importantly similar.As you may know, I recognize a very broad cate-

gory ofrepresentations, comprising novels andrepresentational paintings and theatrical perfor-mances and much else besides (though not every-thing Kivy would describe as contentful). All rep-resentations, in my sense, involve, in a certain way,an imaginative activity that I call make-believe;all possess the function of serving as props ingames of make-believe. Intuitively, we can thinkof them as establishing fictional worlds. I do notfor a minute deny or ignore or deemphasize thedifferences among the members of this large class.

Much to the contrary, recognizing the commonal-ity highlights many differences, big and small, andprovides vast resources for understanding them.We can now distinguish between different kindsof make-believe, different varieties of imaginingsand imaginative experiences (de re, de dicto, dese, differences of vivacity, explicitness, deliberate-ness), different purposes for which we imagine orengage in make-believe, different (real) objectsimagined about, different rules or conventions orinducements to imagine this or that. Paintings aredistinguished from novels primarily by the factthat they and other pictures are props in visualgames of make-believe.

It turned out, much to my surprise, that muchmusic counts as representational in my sense.

Rather than hanging on for dear life to the sup-posed plain truth that (absolute) music does notbelong with painting and literature, we ought toacknowledge what commonalities there are, andthen look to understand the differences. Musicqualifies because (very roughly) of therichlyimag-inative nature of musical experienceswhen, forinstance, we hear one musical idea or event grow-ing out of another, or interrupting or interferingwith another, or one preparing the way for an-other. Listening to a cantabile passage on the pi-ano or violin, we are likely to imagine (implic-itly) hearing a human voice. Certainly, there aredifferencesmore fundamental differences thanthose between experiences of literary works andvisual depictions. They are, to a large extent, dif-ferences in the kinds of imaginings in which appre-ciators engage and how they are involved in theiroverall experiences, differences that would not beapparent if we just declare music to be what it is,without recognizing the similarities.35

My motivation in recognizing the broad cat-egory of representations is not to validate an

eighteenth-century folk conception ofart, definedin terms of mimesis, or a twentieth-century one,or to shoehorn music in with the other arts. I donot claim that make-believe or fiction is involvedin all the arts, and certainly not that it is alwaysor ever what is most important. Make-believe,in various forms, occurs just as importantly andextensively outside the arts as inside. I and oth-ers have made various suggestions about whereit is to be found. Some of them are controversialbut many are not. Make-believe (or a close rel-ative) has been positively identified or stronglysuspected in scientific and philosophical thought


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experiments, in metaphor, irony, and quotation, inempathic experiences and simulation as a meansof understanding other people, and in counterfac-tual reasoning, not to mention childrens games.One example that has not been much discussed issports. It will not come as much of a surprise thatan element of make-believe is to be found in therealm of sports. What is especially interesting andilluminating, it seems to me, are differences: thedifferences between, for instance, the experiencesof sports fans and those of theatergoers, once cer-tain similarities are noted. But this is a topic foranother occasion.36

There is nothing especially artistic or aestheticabout make-believe or fiction or representation,as such. If representation in my broad sense were

to shoehorn music into the class of fine arts, itwould shoehorn in a lot more as well. John Cagewould be delighted, but many of us would not.There is no reason why the investigation of fictionshould be a job especially for aesthetics. The the-ory I propose is not a grand theory of art, but atheory that straddles most any way of construingthe art/nonart boundary.

v. conclusion

You may or may not be disposed favorably towardmy theory ofrepresentation, either as a whole or inany of its details. My main interest here is method-ological. The methodological morals of my obser-vations can be summed up as advice that we nottake the folk concept of art too seriously in our en-deavor to make sense of stories, paintings, music,architecture, sculpture, and so forth, and the rolesthey play in our lives. This advice has three parts.

1. First, we should not take this folk concept or

any particular refinement of it automaticallyas a pillar of a theory we expect to endorse.We should treat the folk theory it belongs toas just one candidate to be considered amongothers.

2. We must recognize that people in various cul-tures have and use one or another concept ofart, that it is an element in some folk theo-ries (although we must take care not to at-tribute concepts of art to folk who do notpossess them). The philosophical theories weconstruct will have to accommodate this fact,insofar as we are interested in understanding

these cultures and their folk theories or thecomplicated historical development of con-cepts of art. So we need to represent as ac-curately as possible the character of the folkconcepts. It may be helpful to think ourselvesintothestateofmindofonewhoacceptsafolktheory, to regard the theory from the inside,and we may find ourselves speaking with thevulgar. It may be helpful to empathize withthe folk, in order to understand them. But thisdoes not require us to endorse the folk theory.Any endorsement must be based on the the-orys merits. Empathizing with thefolk shouldnot be at all difficult, since the philosophersand the folk are often the very same people. Itis my own folk theory with which I shall em-

pathize. But the ease with which I empathizecan encourage unwitting, inappropriate en-dorsement, or make it seem, even to myself,that I endorse something on which I intend toreserve judgment.

3. My final methodological recommendationlooks back to our earlier observations aboutthe peculiarities of the subject matter of thediscipline of aesthetics, the domain it is as-signed to investigate. We should not allow theconcept of art, or the fact that we bill our-selves as philosophers of art, to determinethe scope of our investigation. We should notallow it either to restrict artificially the datawe take into account in constructing a the-ory, or to trick us into including data that donot belong. We must not suppose that the tra-ditional boundaries of the field of aesthetics,defined partly by the folk notion of art, willdemarcate a body of data on which we can fo-cus productively, a body of data we can expecta single theory to explain. Such suppositionsare dangerous, and the apparent arbitrariness

of the boundaries, as well as the absence ofa grand basic question, should make us espe-cially wary.

My advice is to start from the ground up, withcareful attention to works of art that interest usand to whatever else turns out, on examination,to bear significant similarities to any of them, andlet our theories develop as they will. We should gofor grandeur when we can, when the data we comeup with and theoretical considerations support it.But the shape our theory or theories take in theend, as well as their size, what they end up being


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theories of, must not be decided in advance.Choices of subject matter are not theoreticallyneutral; they amount to guesses about whatshaped theory will be viable, guesses that may ormay not turn out to be right. The scope of an in-vestigation must not be dictated by the boundariesof our, or anyones, folk concept of art (or anyfolk concept of the aesthetic), or by the traditionalshape or size of an academic discipline.

If the theory we come up with does not exactlycount as a theory of aesthetics, or a theory thatfits comfortably within the discipline of aesthet-ics, fine. What matters is whether it successfullyilluminates Gothic cathedrals or Romantic poetryor medieval plainsong or Javanese shadow puppettheater or film documentaries or Chinese scroll

painting or Monets Water Lillies or Tolstoys Warand Peace or poetry slams or jazz improvisationor political campaigns or baseball games or magicshows or circus acts or sales demonstrationswhat matters is whether it successfully illuminatessome combination of these and/or anything elsewe might be interested inthe more of them thebetter.

Its that darn concept of art that has made it sohard to understand artand lots of other thingsas well.37

KENDALL WALTON

University of Michigan

Department of Philosophy

Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109

internet: [email protected]

1. Peter Kivy, Differences, The Journal of Aestheticsand Art Criticism 51 (1993): 123132.

2. Allan Gibbard, The Reasons of a Living Being,Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical

Association 76 (2002): 49-60,see p.54. The grand basic ques-tion will hereafter be GBQ.

3. David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste, in EssaysMoral, Political and Literary, rev. ed., ed. Eugene F. Miller(Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1986), p. 229.

4. Arthur Danto, Moving Pictures, Quarterly Reviewof Film Studies 2 (1979): 1-24, see p. 7.

5. See, for example, Annette Barnes, Definition ofArt, in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 1 (Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1998), pp. 511513. Also Kivy, Differences,p. 126.

6. George Santayana, What Is Aesthetics? Encyclo-pedia of Aesthetics (1904). Reprinted in Obiter Scripta: Lec-tures, Essays and Reviews, ed. Justus Buchler and BenjaminSchwartz (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1936), p. 32.

7. Timothy Binkley, Piece: Contra Aesthetics, TheJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35 (1977): 265277.

8. Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actualuseof language; it canin the endonlydescribeit. . . .It leaveseverything as it is. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical In-vestigations, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 124.

9. Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atom-ism, in Logic and Knowledge, ed. Robert Charles Marsh(London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1956), p. 193.

10. A couple of random examples: Nelson Goodman,Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (In-dianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1968), p. 245;Kivy, Differences,p. 127.

11. Data gathering and theory construction are notsharply separate in practice, of course, nor does the firstalways precede the second. A budding theory makes predic-tions, indicating where to look for further data.

12. The great variety of Taste, as well as of opinion,which prevails in the world, is too obvious not to have fallenunder every ones observation. Hume, Of the Standard ofTaste, p. 226.

13. Hume, Of the Standard of Taste, pp. 226227, 230231.

14. Clive Bell,Art(New York: Putnam,Capricorn, [1914]1958).

15. Beauty is a distinctive and a timeless concept. Theterm itself has cognates in every language, and in every lan-guage it plays a role in pretheoretical informal talk. MaryMothersill, Beauty and the Critics Judgment: RemappingAesthetics, in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, ed. PeterKivy (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), p. 157.

16. Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Modern System of theArts, in his Renaissance Thought and the Arts (PrincetonUniversity Press, 1990).

17. Compare William Ramsey, Prototypes and Concep-tual Analysis, in Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of

Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, ed. MichaelDePaul and William Ramsey (Lanham: Rowman & Little-field, 1998), pp. 161178; Stephen Laurence and Eric Mar-golis, Concepts and Cognitive Science, in Concepts: CoreReadings, ed. Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence (MITPress, 1999), pp. 181; Eleanor Rosch and Carolyn B. Mervis,Family Resemblances: Studies in the Internal Structure ofCategories, in Rethinking Intuition, pp. 1744.

18. Compare Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe:On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (HarvardUniversity Press, 1990), ch. 2.

19. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approachto a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1968),p. xii.

20. In redefining performance of, rather than coininga new term Goodman is following the usual procedurewhereby the folk mark changes in their theories. Think ofthe change that occurred when people realized that thereare mental diseases as well as physical ones.

21. See my review of George Dickies Art and the Aes-thetic: An Institutional Analysis, in Philosophical Review 86(1977): 97101; and my review of the Encyclopedia of Aes-thetics, Is What Is Art? Really the Question? Times Lit-erary Supplement, September 29, 2000: 89.

22. Compare Alison Gopnick and Eric Schwitzgebelsdiscussion of intuitions as hypotheses and intuitions asevidence. Whose Concepts Are They, Anyway?: TheRoleof Philosophical Intuition in Empirical Psychology, in Re-thinking Intuition, pp. 7881.


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23. Kendall Walton, The Presentation and Portrayal ofSound Patterns, in Human Agency: Language, Duty, andValue, ed. Jonathan Dancy, J. M. E. Moravcsik, and C. C. W.Taylor (Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 237257.

24. Frank Sibley, Why the Mona Lisa May Not be aPainting, in Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on

Aesthetics, ed. John Benson, Betty Redfern, and JeremyRoxbee Cox (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 256272.

25. Sibley, Why the Mona Lisa May Not be a Painting, p. 256.

26. Salmon Rushdie, Wizardof Oz (London:BritishFilmInstitute, 1992), p. 45.

27. For similar reasons I find Peter Van Inwagens mainobjection to my theory concerning the ontological status offictional entitiesthat it just doesnt seem to be true thatspeakers who utter certain sentences apparently referring tofictional characters are engaged in any sort of pretenseto be hardly an objection at all. Van Inwagen, Existence,Ontological Commitment, and Fictional Entities, in TheOxford Handbook of Metaphysics, ed. Michael J. Loux andDean W. Zimmerman (Oxford University Press, 2003), p.137.

28. Peter Kivy, Differences, pp. 128, 131.

29. Peter Kivy, Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Dif-ferences (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 1. See alsoKivy, Differences, p. 128.

30. In Jorge Luis Borges, Funes the Memorias, inLabyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Don-ald A. Yates and James E. Irby; trans. James E Irby (NewYork: New Directions, 1964), pp. 65, 66.

31. Kivy, Differences, p. 128.32. Peter Kivy, Is Music an Art? The Journal of Phi-

losophy 88 (1991): 544-554, see p. 553.33. Compare my What Is Abstract About the Art of

Music? The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46(1988): 351364.

34. Kivy, Differences, p. 131.35. Compare my What Is Abstract about theArt of Mu-

sic? and my Listening with Imagination: Is Music Repre-sentational? The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52(1994): 4761.

36. See my Its Only a Game!: Sports as Fiction, inInOther Shoes (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

37. This is a revised version of my 2004 Presidential Ad-dress forthe AmericanSociety forAesthetics. Specialthanksto Jamie Tappenden and Jessica Wilson.

Walton Whatwhywherefore CopyAesthetics

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