Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Franzén, Nils

Titel

Aesthetic Evaluation and First-Hand Experience

Ist Teil von

• Australasian journal of philosophy, 2018-10, Vol.96 (4), p.669-682

Ort / Verlag

Oxford: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Quelle

Taylor & Francis Journals Auto-Holdings Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Evaluative aesthetic discourse communicates that the speaker has had first-hand experience of what is talked about. If you call a book bewitching, it will be assumed that you have read the book. If you say that a building is beautiful, it will be assumed that you have had some visual experience with it. According to an influential view, this is because knowledge is a norm for assertion, and aesthetic knowledge requires first-hand experience. This paper criticizes this view and argues for an alternative view, according to which aesthetic discourse expresses affective states of mind, analogously to how assertions express beliefs. It is because these affective states require first-hand experience that aesthetic discourse communicates that such acquaintance is at hand. The paper furthermore argues that the lack of an experience requirement for aesthetic belief ascriptions constitutes a problem for the kind of expressivist who claims that evaluative belief states are covert non-cognitive states.