Toward an Epistemology of Art (original) (raw)
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Epistemologies of Aesthetics, 2015
The idea of 'art as research' and 'research as art' have risen over the past two decades as important critical focuses for the philosophy of media, aesthetics, and art. Of particular interest is how the methodologies of art and science might be merged to create better conceptual understanding of art-based research. The book deconstructs and displaces the terminology that typically accompanies the question of the relationship between art and scientific truth. Identifying artistic practices as modes of thought that do no make use of language in a way that can easily be translated into scientific discourse, the text advocates for a genuine aesthetic mode of thought beyond 'linguistic turn', a way of thinking that cannot be substituted by any other disciplinary system.
Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism
In this paper I discuss a position I term 'belief pessimism concerning aesthetic testimony' (BP). According to BP (i) judgements of aesthetic value are beliefs and (ii) aesthetic judgements are subject to some additional norm not active with respect to judgements concerning more mundane matters which (inter alia) prevents such judgements from legitimately being formed on the basis of testimony. In this paper I argue that we should reject BP -along with parallel positions which have been proposed in other areas such as judgements of moral value -since it faces a number of pressing objections relating to the nature of belief. Firstly, it proposes a fundamental difference between aesthetic beliefs and beliefs of other kinds without properly motivating this distinction. Secondly, and more fundamentally, BP is in tension with any plausible account of the nature of belief. I conclude, then, that we should reject at least one of (i) or (ii). My own view is that we should accept (i) and reject (ii) but I do not attempt to establish either part of this claim here.
The meanings and contents of aesthetic statements
The aim of this essay is not to enter directly into the discussion of the best semantic and/or epistemological account of faultless disagreements about taste, but to discuss the meaning, content and use of utterances of the form “X is beautiful” when X denotes a particular work of art. To do that, I draw, on the one hand, from aesthetics and the philosophy of art, broadly adopting Peter Kivy’s aesthetic realism about aesthetic properties as well as his distinction between the analysis, the interpretation, and the evaluation of artworks as presented in his recent work De Gustibus (2015). And, on the other hand, I also consider McNally and Stojanovic’s (forthcoming) groundbreaking work on aesthetic adjectives and, in particular, on the term “beautiful” (see also Liao, McNally, and Meshin [2016] and Sundell [2016]).
1978
This essay is to be understood as a preliminary attempt to apply a deductive epistemology to art. The locus classicus for this study is Karl Popper's 'Logik der Forschung' (translated as 'The Logic of Scientific Discovery', 1959).The reader unacquainted with this philosophy may well consider my account to be just so much verbiage. I can only hope that I have succeeded in bringing certain ideas to his [sic] attention, to further the spirit of criticism. I certainly do not pretend to have presented a closed case. (Essay written in 1978 when I was an undergraduate in Peterhouse, Cambridge, as an entry to Sir Geoffrey Ellis's Essay Prize. The prize was not awarded, but I received an 'honourable mention'. At this time Peterhouse was an all-male college and the teaching of the history of art was very conservative, as were college politics in general. I was being deliberately provocative.)
Aesthetic Properties, History and Perception
British Journal of Aesthetics, 2018
If artworks and their aesthetic properties stand in constitutive relationships to historical context and circumstances, so that some understanding of relevant facts is involved in responding to a work, what becomes of the intuitive view that we see artworks and at least some of their aesthetic properties? This question is raised by arguments in both aesthetics and art history for the historical nature of works of art. The paper argues that the answer needs to take philosophy of perception into account. The principal development that has shaped philosophy of perception in the last thirty years-explaining perceptual experience in terms of contents that represent that such-and-such is the case-is directly relevant to key arguments for the historical nature of art because contents can represent complex kinds and properties. Conceptual realism is especially well-suited for explaining perception of artworks and aesthetic properties because it emphasizes that forms of understandingin the sense of capacities, abilities and techniques-are involved in perceptual engagement with individual objects and instances of properties. To make this case, the paper examines influential arguments for the historical nature of art and aesthetic properties by
Revista de Investigaciones Universidad del Quindío, 2022
Scientists and neuroscientists have recently conducted scientific and neurological research to discover what is behind the beauty and power of artwork in conveying its meaning to its audience. Philosophers have studied black boxes for years and researchers have delved into them lately. In this regard, the present study was conducted to investigate the impact of beauty when facing familiar and unfamiliar works of art. Aesthetics is one of the most important and controversial factors in the history of art and its influence cannot be ignored. Various methodologies of the mind process in the presence of art and aesthetics were discussed for this purpose. The present article has tried to follow up on the origin of beauty in the perceiver by looking at a beautiful phenomenon and by adopting three biological, cognitive, and psychological perspectives and achieve a relatively comprehensive view of beauty and its place in the process of human perception. Based on this, aesthetic pleasure is not only limited to the sense of sight and the external appearance of the city, but it is the result of the effect of all design purposes on the human senses.
The history of the Western civilisation can be seen as a continuum of epistemological battles and alliances between two modes of grasping and describing the world. According to these conflicting views, the world has been grasped either through particular or universal explanations. These two views have formed a dualistic scholarly context which has directed philosophers, artists, and scientists to discuss whether the world and its diverse phenomena can be perceived and explained through the universal laws of mathematics and science or rather as culture-bound narrations and symbols; whether the world is best represented using the language of mathematical formulas and equations or that of the arts. The conflicting views of perceiving and explaining the world can be determined as two epistemes between which various issues, such as the nature of knowledge and the notions of reality, truth, and beauty, are intertwined and in which they are differently comprehended. Despite their differences, the epistemes share a common conceptual realm; some of the terms, words, and concepts are used in both. This common realm stems from the vocabulary of aesthetics. Mathematicians and scientists often refer to the aesthetic qualities of geometry, mathematical formulas, and scientific theories using the terms and expressions artists and art critics employ when they evaluate artistic objects and visuality. The concept of beauty is discussed in both epistemes but in a different sense. Based on a literature review, the chapter discusses how the notions of reality, truth, and beauty are intertwined in these two epistemes; how the notions are argued for and justified.