RESPONSE‐DEPENDENCE ABOUT AESTHETIC VALUE

The dominant view about the nature of aesthetic value holds it to be response‐dependent. We believe that the dominance of this view owes largely to some combination of the following prevalent beliefs:

• 1 The belief that challenges brought against response‐dependent accounts in other areas of philosophy are less challenging when applied to response‐dependent accounts of aesthetic value.
• 2 The belief that aesthetic value is instrumental and that response‐dependence about aesthetic value alone accommodates this purported fact.
• 3 The belief that response‐dependence about aesthetic value alone accommodates the widely acknowledged anthropocentricity of aesthetic value.
• 4 The belief that response‐dependence about aesthetic value alone accommodates aesthetic normativity.

We argue that each of these beliefs is false, and that the dominance of response‐dependent accounts of aesthetic value is therefore largely without foundation.     

Can Coherence Generate Warrant Ex Nihilo? Probability and the Logic of Concurring Witnesses

Most foundationalists allow that relations of coherence among antecedently justified beliefs can enhance their overall level of justification or warrant. In light of this, some coherentists ask the following question: if coherence can elevate the epistemic status of a set of beliefs, what prevents it from generating warrant entirely on its own? Why do we need the foundationalist’s basic beliefs? I address that question here, drawing lessons from an instructive series of attempts to reconstruct within the probability calculus the classical problem of independent witnesses who corroborate each other’s testimony. Starred section headings indicate sections omitted here, but available on the author’s USC website.     

Taste and Acquaintance

The analogy between gustatory taste and critical or aesthetic taste plays a recurring role in the history of aesthetics. Our interest in this article is in a particular way in which gustatory judgments are frequently thought to be analogous to critical judgments. It appears obvious to many that to know how a particular object tastes we must have tasted it for ourselves; the proof of the pudding, we are all told, is in the eating. And it has seemed just as obvious to many philosophers that aesthetic judgment requires first‐person experience. In this article we argue that, despite its initial appeal, the claim that gustatory and critical judgments are analogous in this way is mistaken. The two sorts of judgments are, as a matter of fact, similar in their epistemology, but earlier theorists have got things entirely backward—neither gustatory judgment nor aesthetic judgment requires first‐hand acquaintance with their objects. Our particular focus in this article is on arguing that first‐person experience is not required to know how an item of food or drink tastes. In fact, there are a wide variety of ways in which we can acquire this knowledge.