What Is Wrong with Aesthetic Empiricism? An Experimental Study - Archive ouverte HAL
Article Dans Une Revue Review of Philosophy and Psychology Année : 2024

What Is Wrong with Aesthetic Empiricism? An Experimental Study

Résumé

According to Aesthetic Empiricism, only the features of artworks accessible by sensory perception can be aesthetically relevant. In other words, aesthetic properties supervene on perceptual properties. Although commonly accepted in early analytic aesthetics, Aesthetic Empiricism has been the target of a number of thought experiments popularized by Gombrich, Walton, and Levinson, purporting to show that perceptually indiscernible artworks may differ aesthetically. In particular, this literature exploits three kinds of differences among perceptually indiscernible artworks that may account for aesthetic differences: relative to categories of art, historical provenance, or means of production. Like in all philosophical thought experiments, the reliability of the elicited intuitions remains an empirical question that we address here with the methods of experimental philosophy. Throughout three studies, we show that most people do not believe that non-perceptual properties can modulate our evaluation of an artwork’s beauty. However, intuitions were much more divided when considering expressive aesthetic properties (such as intensity), and even clearly reversed when considering artistic properties (such as originality or technical achievement). Overall, our studies show that the central intuitions elicited by the classical indiscernibility arguments strongly depend on the class of manipulated properties (expressive aesthetic properties vs formal aesthetic properties; aesthetic properties vs artistic properties) and are thus more suited to refute artistic empiricism than aesthetic empiricism, narrowly construed.
Fichier sous embargo
Fichier sous embargo
0 0 11
Année Mois Jours
Avant la publication
mercredi 1 janvier 2025
Fichier sous embargo
mercredi 1 janvier 2025
Connectez-vous pour demander l'accès au fichier

Dates et versions

hal-04631340 , version 1 (02-07-2024)

Identifiants

Citer

Clément Canonne, Pierre Saint-Germier. What Is Wrong with Aesthetic Empiricism? An Experimental Study. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2024, ⟨10.1007/s13164-024-00744-x⟩. ⟨hal-04631340⟩
110 Consultations
7 Téléchargements

Altmetric

Partager

More